Abstract

This article compares the thought of two pioneers of the neoscholastic movement, both Jesuits and living contemporarily in Rome, Matteo Liberatore, from Italy, and Josepf Kleutgen, from Germany, both interested primarily in epistemological questions, but with quite different outcomes. After an overview of their similar biographies, the article stresses their academic differences. Liberatore desires to refute four modern types of philosophy, especially that of Rosmini, and develops a strictly Thomistic theory of knowledge. He considers first of all the content of knowledge, the 'ideas', and explains their abstraction in a quite Lockian manner. Kleutgen, by contrast, seeks to demonstrate to his contemporaries, that scholastic philosophers had already developed a theory of knowledge that both resembled and, in fact, compared favorably to modern theories. Considering first of all the act of knowledge he shows how the 'species' is abstracted from the given by virtue of the reflective power of the human mind . The difference between these two «neoscholastic philosophies» is probably due to the different cultural context in which their authors grew up