Table Of ContentOn Aquinas
On Aquinas
HERBERT MCCABE OP
Edited and Introduced
by Brian Davies OP
continuum
Published by Burns & Oates
A Continuum imprint
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Copyright © The Estate of Herbert McCabe OP, 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical,
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system, without prior permission from the publishers.
First published 2008
Reprinted 2010
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
EISBN 9780860124610
Typeset by BooksEns Ltd.
Contents
Foreword by Anthony Kenny vii
Introduction by Brian Davies OP x
1 Aquinas Himself 1
2 Living Things 7
3 Things and Facts 17
4 Sensation, Language, and Individuals 29
5 Change, Language, Reasons, and Action 41
6 Narratives and Living Together 51
7 Meaning, Understanding, and Making Decisions 59
8 Emotions and Inclinations 71
9 Action, Deliberation, and Decision 79
10 Deliberative Reasoning 87
11 Prudentia 101
12 Interior Senses I 115
13 Interior Senses II 129
14 Moral Virtues I 143
15 Moral Virtues II 157
Index 173
Foreword
Herbert McCabe was one of the most talented English-
speaking phildsophers of the twentieth century. Had he chosen
to pursue a conventional academic career as a philosopher -
something that his friends find hard to imagine - he would
quickly have risen to the top of the profession. But instead he
lived the life of a Dominican friar, and so his philosophical
insights were not widely shared outside the circle of his
religious brethren. It is very good that now, after his death,
they are being made available to a wider public.
The lectures presented in this volume were delivered as an
introduction to the thought of St Thomas Aquinas. But they
present a highly personal interpretation of the Saint, and
contain many original and unexpected developments of his
ideas.
In the English speaking world it is possible to identify four
schools among contemporary admirers of Aquinas.
First, there are the conservatives who continue to work in
the neo-scholastic tradition of Gilson and Maritain, albeit in a
chastened and less triumphalist form. A doughty exponent of
this school of thought is Ralph Mclnerny, who has sought to
make Thomism accessible in many works.
Second, there are the transcendental Thomists who combine
close and sympathetic appreciation of the writings of St
Thomas with a respect for the importance of the critical
insights of Immanuel Kant. Prominent leaders of this line of
Foreword
thought were the Jesuits Joseph Marechal and Peter Hoenen,
and at the present time the school is represented above all by
followers of the late Bernard Lonergan S J.
Third, there are those who follow an agenda drawn from
post-modernism, among whom are the members of the
theological movement that styles itself "Radical Orthodoxy."
John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock are vociferous
proponents of this tendency, which has gained influence in
the Church of England.
Finally, there are several philosophers in the analytic
tradition, who seek to interpret Aquinas in the light of recent
currents of thought in philosophy of language and philosophy
of mind. Many of these have been heavily influenced by
Wittgenstein, who like Aquinas stands at the opposite pole of
philosophy from the Cartesian tradition which sees epistemol-
ogy as the basic philosophical discipline and private conscious-
ness as the fundamental datum of epistemology. There is by
now an impressive corpus of works of this so-called analytical
Thomism. Some of the leading practitioners are Catholics,
such as Peter Geach and John Finnis; but there have been
other influential writers of this school who - like Norman
Kretzmann — have never been Catholics or — like Alasdair
Mclntyre — have held varying religious allegiance.
Herbert McCabe was often identified as a member of this
school - an analytical Thomist. But he hated being called a
Thomist of any kind, and his own spoken and written
presentations of the Saint's teaching always bore a highly
personal mark. He was indeed an admirer of Wittgenstein, and
he sought to graft the insights of the twentieth-century thinker
on to those of the thirteenth-century thinker not out of a desire
to appear up to date - he showed no inclination to endorse any
of the trendy intellectual fashions of the age — but because he
recognized a genuine affinity between the two masters.
Undoubtedly, Aquinas and Wittgenstein shared a convic-
tion that it is through an unconstrained attention to the
operation of language that we achieve philosophical under-
vm
Foreword
standing. But McCabe's Aquinas is, as he admits, in a sense
more linguistic than the historical Aquinas was. Whereas
Aquinas himself undoubtedly believed that every thought we
have can, in principle, be expressed in language, he did not,
McCabe says, fully grasp that human thought just is the
capacity to use language. "We analyse understanding and
thinking in terms of human communication, whereas Aquinas
analyses communication in terms of understanding and
thinking".
The present book concentrates on Aquinas' philosophical
anthropology — on the nature of animal and hssuman life, on the
relation between the senses and the intellect, and on the virtues
that are essential to human flourishing. While McCabe makes
copious use of the Aristotelian metaphysical structures that
Aquinas employs, he writes in an admirably informal manner
far removed from the style of the crabbed textbooks of
seminary Thomism. He is more generous than Aquinas was in
providing concrete examples to illustrate conceptual points,
and his examples are always fresh and vivid, and are
commonly convincing. They are also often surprising, as when
he lists Brunei, Dictionary Murray, Lenin, and Bob Geldof as
examples of the virtue of magnanimitas.
Though the book will appeal especially to those who are
already aware of the abiding value of Aquinas' insights, it
could serve very well as a general introduction to the
philosophy of human nature. The book is not a treatise about
Aquinas, it is an exercise in philosophy with Aquinas.
IX
Description:The revival of interest in Aquinas has run simultaneously with the rise of interest in Aristotle, on whose philosophy Aquinas based his own. On Aquinas is a masterly work of exposition written with breathtaking clarity. By the use of simple modern analogy Mccabe brings Aquinas`s thought to life and
