[heraclius1729]

Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction by Edward Fesser

I stumbled across this completely by accident while doing research for a history of science class I was designing years ago. It took... a while... to stop saying "but why does this matter!" every two seconds while reading it, but eventually I was able to open my mind to metaphysics as a discipline and get it into my head exactly what he was talking about, and why it was useful. After that, it was smooth sailing. I owe a lot to this book.

[wduquette]

Feser's very good at explaining Thomistic/Aristotelian metaphysics clearly. His _Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide_ is a good introduction.

The point of Thomistic/Aristotelian metaphysics it not that it's useful for building things; it isn't, which is why the early moderns mostly abandoned it. But physics and the quantitative/mechanistic view of the world that it fosters is an abstraction from reality--an extremely useful and productive one, granted, but still an abstraction. It leaves things out that Thomistic metaphysics retains; and while Aristotelian science has been left in the dust, his metaphysics still has important things to say.

Modern philosophy embraced the mechanistic view of the world with Descartes, leading to a number of philosophical problems (the mind-body problem, the problem of other minds, how to account for qualia and consciousness, and so forth) that are amply accounted for in the older philosophy.

[jesuslop]

Leibniz wrote "I have often said: 'Aurum latere in stercore illo scholastico barbarico'; {there is gold hidden in all that barbaric scholastic crap} and I wish that some skillful man could be found, versed in this Irish and Spanish philosophy, who would have the inclination and ability to extract what is good from it. I am sure his work would be rewarded with many beautiful and important truths".

I'm not pasting the walltext full quote, but there's also in it mention of Perennis quaedam philosophia. The first one? Don't have the book in digital, for the full quote in Spanish, Google sent me here: http://dx.doi.org/10.12795/Vico.2020.i34.03.

[1] New Essays on Human Understanding, 1704