Occasionally I meet ordinary people who have read everything published in some esoteric physics field, say,  String Theory or Cosmology, and who rattle off to me the latest findings of 11 dimensional space and then sigh and say, "You're so lucky you are a physicist. How does it feel to know the mind of God?"

Alas, the mind of God is as murky to me as it is to you, all I get out of interminable physics conferences is the Ego of Men. If only we were so noble as to unpretentiously search for Truth. In a later post I will deconstruct an egregious example of such self-importance in science published yesterday, but today I want to begin with my own dream, my own fantasy profession.

I wish I were a philosopher.

Over at First Things, philosophy prof Edward Oakes and I face off over the stone wall separating our disciplines, admiring each other's pasture:
It is a surprising and inexplicable thing that computers get faster every year, cars get better gas mileage, and one can put more songs on an iPod than ever before. It is neither law nor chance, more like design actually, though not by our merit.

For lest we think our age is unique, I would point out that there have been multiple times in the history of men, when science seemed destined for ever more distant conquests, only to shrivel like an orchid in the desert. In fact, I was reading the prophet Isaiah to my children last night, and this is what he had to say in the 7th century BC about that acme of civilization in the 6th century BC, that inventor of clocks and sexagesimals (hours and minutes), timekeeper of the luminaries, geometer of the heavens, predictor of the eclipses, Babylon the Great.

47:10You felt secure in your wickedness,
   you said, "No one sees me";
your wisdom and your knowledge led you astray, and you said in your heart,
    "I am, and there is no one besides me."
But evil shall come upon you,
   which you will not know how to charm away;
disaster shall fall upon you,
   for which you will not be able to atone;
 and ruin shall come upon you suddenly,
   of which you know nothing.
You are wearied with your many counsels;
   let them stand forth and save you,
those who divide the heavens,
   who gaze at the stars,
who at the new moons make known
   what shall come upon you.
Behold, they are like stubble;
   the fire consumes them;
they cannot deliver themselves
   from the power of the flame.

For centuries after the fall of Babylon the ability to predict eclipses (during new moons) was lost. And who knows what other wisdom was lost as well? Isaiah makes references to charms and spells, but who knows what they were exactly, the point is, they are gone. And so, like philosophy, science makes progress for a while and then is lost, leaving only legends of magic and enchantments passed down the centuries, until perhaps the Romans rediscover them and then lose them to the Vandals, followed by the alchemists of Baghdad destroyed by the Golden Horde when they are rediscovered by the French Academy but lost with their heads in the bloody Revolution, unless escaped  to Britain or the States... So Edward, don't be embarrassed, all knowledge seems to be found and lost and rediscovered again, as much in science as in philosophy. If scientists talk about the "endless frontier" of progress, it is only because they have neither studied the past nor believed their Bible.

However, I would also try to answer one of your questions as to why some philosophers seem to become part of the canon, and others don't, why some think that Aquinas was the zenith and some the nadir of philosophy. My claim is that philosophy, like science and theology, partakes of the holy when it includes itself. Now philosophy that merely includes the philosopher is no more helpful than Bishop Berkeley's solipsism. To be interesting, philosophy should include more than our own navel, it should include and interact with ding-an-sich, with the world out there. And philosophy that not only includes itself but science and revelation is a marvel indeed. Thomists accomplished this, materialists didn't.

Now two-out-of-three ain't bad, but it ain't so good either. That's Hegel's dialectic, back and forth on a see-saw until the nausea drives one into Post-Modernism. But three is as rock solid as the US Marines, and far more interesting. Three is the eternal, unending communication of the Trinity, forever unpredictable, forever unchanging. Descartes manages to capture two aspects of the Trinity, while using the third. No one takes what he says seriously, but marvels at how he said it. So are we all, all imperfect reflections of the holy Trinity, unseriously promoting ourselves, yet by gifts divine beyond comprehension. We make paste jewelry from the Crown jewels, and think it is our workmanship that gives it brilliance.

Here's Edward Oakes again, on the advantage of a Thomistic (what I would call a Trinitarian) approach:
Which is to say, to be culturally relevant, one must use the tools most comfortable to that culture. Let's see how Oakes uses this Thomistic principle in practice. Here he is quoting from Adler's "St Thomas and the Gentiles",

Modern gnosticism results from the efforts of thinkers to answer purely theological questions by merely natural means. The theodicy of Spinoza, the knowledge of the Absolute in Hegel, the discussion of the order of the universe in time and space by Whitehead, are examples of philosophy exceeding its domain. Though lacking faith, these philosophers do not seem able to regain the position of natural reason in Greek antiquity. Christianity has somehow been too much for them. When we learn that Hegel’s formative influences were theology and the classics, we can see the root of all his confusions. In a paradoxical sense, then, all modern philosophers are Christian, even when they are skeptical, as Hume, or agnostic, as Kant. Christianity has made problems for them which they cannot solve without faith, but which they will not refrain from discussing in rational terms.

Related to that error is another one that took a while to make itself felt: After having hubristically usurped theology with, say, Hegel’s speculative idealism, philosophy now despairs—with delicious irony—that it can know anything independent of the sciences (with the postmoderns providing an extra fillip of irony by claiming the sciences don’t know anything either).
     This is why Adler wrote St. Thomas and the Gentiles, to show contemporary Thomists that they have a new set of “gentiles” to fight. But unlike Thomas’ address to the Muslims of Spain, the task is more difficult now:

 “For by the very fact that our adversaries deny that philosophy is knowledge in the sense we claim, we are necessarily precluded from using philosophical arguments of any sort to show the distinction, the independence, and the harmony of philosophy and science. . . . Strange as it may seem, the task of the philosopher contra positivists appears to be much more difficult than that of a Christian theologian addressing Moors on questions of faith.”

Notice how Adler has been talking of the classic duality between revelation and reason, and then brings in the more modern problem of science: Philosophy has lost its epistemic foundation, and isn't sure that it can know anything to be true without science empirically determining it. Adler is closing in on the third leg of the Trinity, but thinks it more difficult than reasoning with jihadists. Why? Because scientists (or their philosophical incarnation as positivists) regard neither rationalism nor revelation as either canonical or necessary. Oakes amplifies the point and says the Post-Moderns have become the Moors among us. (And you thought the GWOT was overseas!)  What is a thinking man to do?

He quotes another Thomist, Etienne Gilson in his William James lectures at Harvard,

“For us, as for them, the great thing is not to achieve a system of the world as if being could be deduced from thought, but to relate reality, as we know it, to the permanent principles in whose light all the changing problems of science, of ethics and of art have to be solved.”

Hidden in Gilson's comments is the Trinitarian idea that philosophy is a system that includes observation of reality (science), tied together with revelation (permanent principles). Rather than call it Trinitarian, these philosophers call it Thomism. Here is Jacques Maritain explaining what it is:

Matchless in its coherence, closely knit in all its parts as it is, Thomism is nevertheless not what we call a “system.” . . . The word “system” evokes the idea of a mechanical connection or of a more or less spatial assemblage of component parts, and consequently a choice which, if not arbitrary, is at least personal, as it is in all artificial constructions. . . . One is not a Thomist because one has chosen it in the emporium of systems as one among several others, as one may tentatively choose a pair of shoes at a bootmaker’s until one sees another brand more suited to one’s feet. On those lines, it would be more stimulating to fabricate one’s own system, made to one’s own measure. One is a Thomist because one has abandoned the attempt to find philosophical truth in a system fabricated by one individual, that individual who is called Ego, and because one intends to seek for the truth—albeit by oneself and by one’s own reason—learning from every form of human thought, so that nothing that is may be neglected.

I think Maritain is trying to get to Gilson's conclusion, that "every form of human thought" includes science and revelation, though I wonder a bit about lumping revelation in with human thought.

So just as Aquinas did a marvellous job combining the science of his day with philosophy and theology, the same Trinitarian work must be done for our day. Although the science of Aquinas' day was not wrong, neither was it complete, just as our science today is incomplete. In fact, one of Einstein's more famous papers was entitled, "Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete?" (The answer is No.) But this should not stop us from developing a "system" of Trinitarian philosophy, just as it should not stop us from developing Trinitarian science. Whether this is still "Thomism" or not, I can't say, but I think St Thomas would have approved.

So, in the words of the immortal Reagan, "Mr. Edward T Oakes SJ, tear down that wall".