Late Twentieth-Century Reception of Aquinas in Analytical Philosophy

Abstract

Within two decades of Bertrand Russell writing, ‘There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas’ (Russell 1945), interest in Thomas’s ideas had begun to develop among philosophers in the ‘analytic’ or ‘analytical’ tradition of which Russell had been one of the founders. The causes of this were several, but prominent were first, a reaction against a strong reductive and scientistic strand in that tradition, viz. ‘logical positivism’; second, the interest taken in Aquinas by Peter Geach following his conversion to Roman Catholicism; and third, the activities of British Dominicans in translating Aquinas’s Summae, and in organizing meetings between lay philosophers and priests and other religious to discuss themes from Aquinas and issues in contemporary secular philosophy. From this beginning, and advanced by the work of Anthony Kenny, interest developed in Britain, Australia, and the United States, and then beyond the Anglophone world.