Folia Theologica 12. (2001)
Tibor Rászlai: Aquinas ont the Infallibilty of the Intellect
134 T. RASZLAI V. If my strong reading is correct, then, although Aquinas may have thought that scientists of his time only imperfectly understood the respective essences of, for example, earth, air, fire and water, he nevertheless believed they should be confident that these classifications corresponded to real essences. So understood, Aquinas's veracity doctrine is at odds with the subsequent development of the natural, essential kind, air and earth certainly do not. Indeed, significant progress was made in the essential kind was eventually rejected and people came to understand it as any number of amalgams of elements that are gaseous at ordinary temperatures. And such progress would only have been possible after the rejection of Aquinas's doctrine of the FOI's veracity. It may appear, then, that the result of my arguments in this paper have been to make Aquinas more distant from contemporary epistemological views and less interesting to contemporary philosophy. This would be so if figures in the history of philosophy interested us only to the extent that their views could be shown to be quite similar to our own best thoughts on a given matter - and, no doubt, many do have this attitude toward the history of philosophy. I believe, however, that it is the differences between ourselves and past philosophers which are as illuminating as the similarities, and that great philosophers of the past - of which Aquinas is certainly one - become really interesting when their philosophical distance from ourselves is recognized and acknowledged. I have argued in this paper for the recognition of one very important difference.
