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Is Aquinas a Foundationalist?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

A. N. Williams
A. N. Williams*
Affiliation:
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge CB2 1RH
*
Email: anw25@cam.ac.uk
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Abstract

This essay surveys a range of claims that Aquinas is a foundationalist, along with the rarer position that he is not. It suggests the arguments for holding he is a foundationalist are fundamentally flawed, and that he cannot be considered to hold a foundationalist epistemology, although for reasons more radical than those hitherto suggested. It examines the account of scientia and sacred doctrine in Summa theologiae I.1, with particular attention to its account of metaphor. Sacred doctrine, often taken to be based on scripture, is in fact based on God's self-knowledge, which is mediated by scripture. Aquinas acknowledges that scripture is riddled with figurative language and that metaphor is necessary to sacred doctrine. He emphasises the propensity for human reasoning to go astray, and in virtue of its processes of inference, to be incapable to representing the simplicity of divine knowledge with complete accuracy. Both with respect to its structures of argumentation and the figurative base from which it argues, Aquinas’ account of sacred doctrine is remote from foundationalist accounts of knowledge. Aquinas’ account of sacred doctrine, the most sure of all scientiae, emphasises its fragility and provisionality; its purpose is not to provide certitude, but to provoke reflection.

Keywords

Aquinasfoundationalismscientiametaphorsacred doctrine
Type
Original Articles
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 91 , Issue 1031 , January 2010 , pp. 20 - 45
Copyright
Copyright © The author 2009. Journal compilation © The Dominican Council.

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