Thomism

Can someone who is not a scholar by profession lead an intellectual life? The book that answered that question best in the twentieth century is short, practical, and almost austere: The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Its Conditions, Its Methods, published in 1921 by the Dominican friar Antonin Sertillanges. More than a hundred years later it is still read — entirely outside any religious context — as the finest manual of the ethics and discipline of study ever written. This article surveys its central theses, following the very structure announced in its subtitle: the spirit, the conditions, and the methods of intellectual work. ...

Mário Ferreira dos Santos (1907–1968) is, in sheer scale of output, the largest systematic philosophical project ever attempted in Brazil. His Encyclopaedia of Philosophical and Social Sciences, planned in more than fifty volumes, is an undertaking without parallel in Brazilian intellectual history — and rare even in the international context of the 20th century, in which academic philosophy progressively abandoned systematic form. Whatever limitations one may identify in the work — and they exist —, Mário Ferreira’s project deserves serious academic examination: for its scope, its theoretical ambition and the singular position it occupies between Thomist scholasticism, Pythagoreanism, phenomenology and the German dialectical tradition. This article presents the life, the work and the central doctrine — Concrete Philosophy — with critical rigour and without hagiography. ...

This is the fifth and final article on Joseph Maréchal’s Le point de départ de la métaphysique (The Starting Point of Metaphysics). We have traced the full arc of Maréchal’s historical project: from the ancient Greek tradition and Scholasticism (Cahier I), through the rationalist-empiricist conflict (Cahier II), into the depths of Kant’s critical philosophy (Cahier III), and through the analysis of post-Kantian idealism from Fichte through Schelling to Hegel (Cahier IV). In this fifth article, we arrive at Cahier V — Le thomisme devant la philosophie critique — the heart of the work, published in 1926 — where Maréchal undertakes a systematic comparison of Thomism with critical philosophy and presents his own original philosophical argument: that intellectual dynamism toward Absolute Being is a transcendental condition of the very possibility of knowledge, and that a genuine metaphysics of being is therefore not merely defensible but philosophically necessary. ...

This is the fourth of five articles on Joseph Maréchal’s Le point de départ de la métaphysique. In the preceding articles, we traced the classical tradition of knowledge from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas (Cahier I), the conflict between Rationalism and Empiricism culminating in Hume’s scepticism (Cahier II), and the detailed analysis of Kant’s critical philosophy — the Transcendental Aesthetic, Analytic, and Dialectic (Cahier III). Now, in Cahier IV — entitled Le système idéaliste chez Kant et les postkantiens and published posthumously in 1947, three years after Maréchal’s death — we examine how post-Kantian idealism developed the transcendental turn inaugurated by Kant, carrying it to consequences that Kant himself had neither foreseen nor authorized. ...

This is the third of five articles on Joseph Maréchal’s Le point de départ de la métaphysique. In the first two articles, we followed Maréchal’s historical survey from the ancient Greek tradition through medieval Scholasticism (Cahier I) and then through the modern conflict between rationalism and empiricism (Cahier II). That survey ended with Hume’s devastating skepticism — the revelation that neither the rationalist appeal to innate ideas nor the empiricist appeal to sense experience could ground the objective necessity that genuine knowledge requires. In this third article, we turn to Cahier III, which Maréchal devotes entirely to Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason — the most ambitious attempt in modern philosophy to answer Hume’s challenge, and the text that casts the longest shadow over Maréchal’s entire project. ...

This is the second of five articles on Joseph Maréchal’s Le point de départ de la métaphysique (The Starting Point of Metaphysics). In the first article, we followed Maréchal’s reading of the classical tradition from the pre-Socratics through Thomas Aquinas, showing how ancient and medieval thought largely assumed a direct cognitive contact with being without needing to systematically justify that assumption. In this second article, we turn to Cahier II, in which Maréchal examines the great modern debate between rationalism and empiricism — and shows how both traditions, despite opposing each other on almost every point, ultimately leave the problem of objectivity unresolved and prepare the ground for Kant’s revolutionary critique. ...

This is the first of five articles dedicated to Joseph Maréchal’s monumental work Le point de départ de la métaphysique (The Starting Point of Metaphysics), published in five notebooks (cahiers) between 1922 and 1947. Each article follows one cahier, tracing Maréchal’s ambitious project: to demonstrate, through a rigorous historical and critical method, that a genuine metaphysics of being is not only possible after Kant but is in fact demanded by the very structure of human knowledge. This first article covers Cahier I, which examines the classical tradition from ancient Greece through the end of medieval Scholasticism. ...

Alasdair MacIntyre Alasdair MacIntyre (1929–2025) was a Scottish-American moral philosopher, the author of one of the most influential works of twentieth-century moral philosophy, After Virtue (1981). His intellectual career was marked by a long pilgrimage: he set out from Marxism in his youth, passed through several positions, and ultimately converted to Catholicism and to Aristotelian Thomism in his maturity. He died in May 2025. MacIntyre diagnosed modern moral language as being in a state of grave disorder — composed of decontextualised fragments of traditions that have been lost — and argued that the “Enlightenment project” of providing an autonomous rational justification for morality had failed, clearing the way for emotivism. His proposal was the recovery of a virtue ethics of Aristotelian-Thomist roots, anchored in communal life and in traditions of enquiry. ...

Antonin Sertillanges Antonin-Dalmace Sertillanges (1863–1948) — born Antonin-Gilbert — was a French Dominican friar, moral philosopher, and one of the most influential popularisers of Thomism in the early twentieth century. Born in Clermont-Ferrand, he entered the Order of Preachers in 1883 and was ordained a priest in 1888. He became professor of moral philosophy at the Institut Catholique de Paris and, in 1893, was among the founders of the Revue Thomiste, a journal that would become central to the renewal of studies on Thomas Aquinas. In 1918 he was elected to the Académie des sciences morales et politiques. Although he produced a substantial body of Thomist exegesis, his name reached a wide readership chiefly through a small book of 1921, La Vie intellectuelle (The Intellectual Life), which became an enduring classic on the discipline, the ethics, and the method of the work of the mind. ...

Joseph Maréchal was a Belgian Jesuit philosopher and psychologist, founder of Transcendental Thomism — a movement that undertook a synthesis between Thomistic metaphysics and Kant’s critical philosophy. His work marks a decisive moment in the renewal of Scholasticism in the 20th century and exerted profound influence on figures such as Karl Rahner and Bernard Lonergan. Key Concepts The Starting Point of Metaphysics (Le Point de départ de la Métaphysique, 5 notebooks, 1922–1947): His principal work. Maréchal traces the history of epistemology — from Greek philosophy through Kantianism — to ground Thomistic metaphysics in the face of Kantian critique. Notebook V (“Thomism Confronting Critical Philosophy”) is the most discussed. ...

Thomas Aquinas Born around 1225 in Roccasecca, near Aquino, in southern Italy, Thomas belonged to the high nobility, which firmly opposed his entry into the mendicant order of the Dominicans — even confining him for about a year. He studied under Albert the Great in Paris and Cologne and became a master of theology at the University of Paris. Despite the nickname “the dumb ox,” he proved to be the greatest genius of Scholasticism. After an intense experience in 1273, he ceased writing, saying that all he had produced seemed to him like “straw”; he died the following year, on his way to the Council of Lyon. Canonized in 1323, he is “the Angelic Doctor,” and Thomism remains the official reference of Catholic philosophy. ...