This late stuff has got to stop.

In reading the excerpts, I thought at first (though not for very long) that perhaps the Philosopher was just a general term for Philosopher, but rereading, Aquinas is being more specific than that. He's definitely talking about Aristotle. The fact that he calls him "THE Philosopher" (capitalized and everything) indicates one-and-onliness.

As I'm starting to write this, I'm realizing that everything we discussed yesterday in class is coming together. For whatever reason, I don't make connections very well when I'm thinking about or discussing it but when I really start putting words down, things click. For that reason, I want to apologize for not having written this pre class and my subsequent muteness during class discussion.

Anyway.

We know that Augustine was fiercely Platonic and now we see that Aquinas is, again, chiefly Aristotelian although not as loyally as Augustine was Platonic (his bio states that, despite his Aristotelian views, his critical thinking skills did not escape those ideas of Aristotle that he disagreed with). Though Aristotle was Plato's student, they greatly differed in their philosophies mostly in that Plato was about rational thought and logic and Aristotle was about empirical evidence and observing. In that same way, Augustine differs from Aquinas. Aquinas uses the same exact Aristotelian physics to prove the existence of God where Augustine might have just said "Well, we know he exists because we have faith. If you have scientific evidence to back me up, great, but know that you're a sinner for the pleasurable acquisition of said evidence and you're going to hell."

The effect this had on the church is somewhat unclear to me. It seems that at least getting away from Platonic hypotheses and philosophies and onto Aristotelian ones would be better than what they were doing, but Koestler asserts on page 111 that, while the tone of Aristotelian physics and philosophies (empirical) was a step in the right direction, scientists and "schoolmen" of the time took it too far to start believing what Aristotle had actually written and said and "for the next three hundred years this rubbish came to be regarded as gospel truth."

I'm having another moment. I think my thesis is going to be on this very subject, specifically the argument that Aristotle wrote regarding motion. I'm not sure how broad I want to take it, but I definitely want to mention that these very physics were used by Robert Chisholm in the 60's as support for the existence of immanent vs. transient causation regarding free will. In the very same argument, Chisholm quotes Aquinas as well and his idea of God as the "Prime Mover".

So onto bibliographies!