by S. Adam Seagrave
To view practical agreements between Aristotelian-Thomist foundationalists and contemporary anti-foundationalist liberals as “progress” is to fiddle while Rome burns.
I’ve recently argued here at Public Discourse that contemporary Aristotelian-Thomists—and this could be broadened to include related groups such as religious conservatives—should come to the difficult simultaneous realization that
(1) their approach to understanding and evaluating the world is profoundly at odds with that characteristic of the modern intellectual context, and that
(2) this modern intellectual context has yielded important insightsregarding the dignity of the human individual that should be integrated into contemporary elaborations of broadly pre-modern approaches.
My argument elicited a thoughtful response by Robert Miller, who seems to agree with both of these points but to disagree that matters are “as bleak as they seem” for Aristotelian-Thomists in my depiction of the modern intellectual situation.
My argument elicited a thoughtful response by Robert Miller, who seems to agree with both of these points but to disagree that matters are “as bleak as they seem” for Aristotelian-Thomists in my depiction of the modern intellectual situation.
According to Miller, the fact that the fundamental approach of Aristotelian-Thomists is opposed to that of contemporary liberals is not particularly important, since our philosophical disagreements tend to be irrelevant to our opinions on practical issues of public policy.
Miller’s claim raises an extremely significant and far-reaching question: do deep philosophical ideas really have consequences for ordinary politics? I contend that they do, and that we can see this most clearly if we attend to the distinction between foundationalist and anti-foundationalist philosophical approaches, a distinction Miller problematically overlooks.
- Foundationalism vs. Anti-Foundationalism
- Philosophy and Public Discourse
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