Posted on 12/27/2011 9:38:23 AM PST by Salvation
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The name given by certain Scholastic philosophers to the revival of medieval Scholasticism since the beginning of the twentieth century. These Catholic thinkers wished to revive among the public and for the people's use the teachings of the great Scholastics of the past, bringing their theories up to date and putting them in touch with modern scientific research. They do not aim to revive unchanged systems of medieval Scholasticism but rather to harmonize modern science with the fundamental doctrines and principles of this school of thought especially as related to the physical world. The movement was begun in Italy and Germany even before 1879, when Pope Leo XIII's encyclical Aeterni Patris gave the movement a major impetus by his approbation. Since then it has become developed, especially in Catholic circles.
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That's not really the problem. Scholasticism was greatly informed by the Metaphysics of Aristotle and by others of his works. For the most part this worked very well.
But Aristotle's physics were not the best and his biology was sometimes, um, fanciful would be a nice way of saying it.
So even though Thomas's teacher, Albertus Magnus, was very keen on the importance of observation, the real and important distinction between the empirical sciences/the philosophy of science/other sorts of philosophy was not clearly or usefully delineated.
Among the interesting results and consequences is Aquinas's rejection of the Immaculate Conception which was based on his faulty understanding of embryology. In general he thought that the semen (remember, not much of a notion of cellular critters like gametes) provided the "form" -- that which made a human a human, while the woman provided the "matter" -- that which has informed, you might say and thus became human. So he would have argued against abortion because it was perverse, but not because the conceptus was human right away. We understand now that a human zygote is human from the instant of fertilization.
(These days embryology from a moral point of view is corrupted by the metaphysics of the left.)
SO, because the conceptus was not really human, neither sin nor moral innocence really applied, therefore Mary could not have been immaculately conceived. The "Immaculateness" would have had to wait for 40 days or so.
So of course, science doesn't explain faith, but it can help refine it and its expression.
For the sake of rigor: everything I said about Aquinas, Mary, and embryology I did NOT learn from primary sources but from various teachers. I'm just passing on info more than vouching for it.
They build on sand, their edifices change with every tide.
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