Abstract

Through Leo XIII’s Aeterni Patris, Thomism became the staple Catholic response against the threats of modernity. Two things immediately ensued as a result of this papal intervention: the revival of Thomistic philosophy, and with this revival, the transformation of the same as a polemical tool. While it serves well the Catholic Church’s campaign for orthodoxy, it is arguable however whether such polemical shift has philosophical merit, or if it has, whether it is compatible with the tradition of doing philosophy championed by Thomas Aquinas himself. This tension within Thomism, I believe, warrants the necessity of Catholic philosophy represented by Thomism to be rethought. The goal of such rethinking, it should be emphasized, is not to undermine the gains of Thomism’s revival but to locate more precisely the critical potential of Aquinas’ philosophy against modernity’s philosophic claims. In this paper, I will adopt Alasdair MacIntyre’s hermeneutics of the aforementioned problematic, and towards the end, I will indicate the possibility of an alternative mode of reviving Thomism. First, I will rehearse the basic claims of modernity. In the ensuing part, I will show the hermeneutic conflicts that render it impossible to tell the story of modernity in a single narrative. This is followed by an account of Kant’s attempt to resolve the crisis of modernity by reinstating reason in its primacy. By employing MacIntyre’s tradition-constituted rationality, I will then show the divide between Kant’s and Aquinas’ philosophy and how the oversight of such divergence led modern Thomists to misconceive the possibility of compromise between the two. Towards the end, I will narrate the complicity, albeit the inadvertent nature, of the Kantian project with the revival of Thomism, thus posing the necessity of selfcritique on the part Catholic philosophy.