'Too many Thomisms?' Alasdair MacIntyre

Alasdair MacIntyre introduces the 'third way' in his Gifford lectures Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: not encylopeadia or genealogy, but Thomism... The sample text is the Aeterni Patris of 1879, an encyclical of Pope Leo XIII.

How does this 'Thomism' differ? Well, it recognises that philosophy is a virtue-guided craft, in which the business of being a teacher and an apprentice is integral:

...there emerges a conception of rational teaching authority internal to the practice of the craft of moral enquiry, as indeed such conceptions emerge in such other crafts as furniture making and fishing, where, just as in moral enquiry, they partially define the relationship of master-craftsman to apprentice. p. 63

Partly what is interesting and helpful about this version of Thomism is that it ignores questions of epistemology which are ultimately so, well, boring...

Of course, as Thomism was received in Catholic teaching following the encyclical, this was not the case. So, in Jacques Maritain and others there is a much more epistemologically driven version of Thomism, one that doesn't reckon with Thomas's own dependence on divine revelation. As MacIntyre writes:

What Maritain wished to affirm was a modern version of Aquinas's thesis that every human being has within him or herself a natural knowledge of divien law and hence of what every human being owes to every other human being. The plain prephilosophical person is always a person of sufficient moral capacities. But what Maritain failed to reckon with adequately was the fact that in many cultures and notably in that of modernity plain persons are misled into giving moral expression to those capacities thourgh assent to false philosophical theories. So it has been since the 18th century with assent to a conception of rights alien to and absent from Aquinas' thought. For on Aquinas' view the rights which are normative for human relationships are derived from and warranted only by divine law, apprehended by those without the resources afforded by God's self-revelation as the natural law. Law is primary, rights are secondary. But for Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment modernity, human rights provide a standard prior to all law. p. 76

I find this fascinating, as I have heard Thomists crowing about the emergence of human rights as if this was proof of the obviousness of their reading of Thomism. Evidently, not.