Christian Epistemology: Receptive or Projective?
Christian Epistemology: Receptive or Projective?

Summary/Abstract: In a previous issue of LOGOS, I defended Aquinas from Heidegger’s ontotheology critique of metaphysics. I argued that the presencing of things in human consciousness outstrips Dasein’s productive comportment. From this residual realism Aquinas employs his analogical notion of being to think the First Cause in a genuinely transcendent manner. In the present article I defend Aquinas’s sense realism from the turn to the subject that is characteristic of modern philosophy. I also offer this defense as an example of what some Popes have called Christian Philosophy. In a past issue of LOGOS I spoke of Aquinas’s immediate sense realism as an antidote to Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein as projective of Being in the light of which things stand forth as beings. The ontotheologian is naively unaware of this role of Dasein as the ontotheologian traces beings back to an all too human First Cause. In this article I want to discuss in a critical way Aquinas’s epistemology of immediate sense realism that is basic to his different understanding of the Being of beings.

• Details
• Contents