Way Toward Wisdom, The: An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics

by Benedict M. Ashley O.P.

Once thought to be the task of metaphysics, the synthesis of knowledge has been discounted by many philosophers today. Benedict Ashley, a leading Thomistic scholar, argues that it remains a valid and intellectually fruitful pursuit by situating metaphysics as an endeavor that must cross disciplinary and cultural boundaries. Working from a realist Thomistic epistemology, Ashley asserts that we must begin our search for wisdom in the natural sciences; only then, he believes, can we ensure that our claims about immaterial and invisible things are rooted in reliable experience of the material. Any attempt to share wisdom, he insists, must derive from a context that is both interdisciplinary and intercultural. Ashley offers an ambitious analysis and synthesis of major historical contributions to the unification of knowledge, including non-Western traditions. Beginning with the question " Nonsense or Wisdom?" Ashley moves from a critical examination of the foundations of modern science to quantum physics and the Big Bang; from Aristotle's theory of being and change, through Aquinas's five ways, to a critical analysis of modern and postmodern thought. Ashley is able to interweave the approaches of the great philosophers by demonstrating their contributions to philosophical thought in a concrete, specific manner. In the process, he accounts for a contemporary culture overwhelmed by the fragmentation of data and thirsting for an utterly transcendent yet personal God. The capstone of a remarkable career, The Way Toward Wisdom will be welcomed by students in philosophy and theology.

Genres: Philosophy

640 pages, Hardcover

First published July 31, 2006

Reviews

[Alex Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his book, The Way Toward Wisdom: An Interdisciplinary and Intercultural Introduction to Metaphysics, Dr. Benedict M. Ashley, O.P., advocates for a postmodern revival of metaphysics as the only mediating discipline that can facilitate dialogue between material and spiritual worldviews and among specialized academic disciplines. He first notes the pressing need for such a recovery by giving historical and typological accounts of the philosophical and religious origins of today's worldwide secular culture, which tends to reduce all knowledge to modern science and brackets questions of spiritual realities to the level of irrational thinking. Our present day Secular Humanism, he argues, does not provide the foundational principles that are found in a predecessor discipline to metaphysics concerned with the study of mobile bodies. Such a study would provide clear, consistent concepts about causality, time, and place that are necessary for the modern sciences to attain a fuller understanding of its own findings. They would also open the way towards rediscovering the spiritual dimension of human persons and their place in a community of both material and purely spiritual creatures that are all ordered towards their ultimate fulfillment in a truly existing God.

Such a project, Ashley reasons, would establish the principles of a science concerned with the study of contingently existing beings and the nature of the cause(s) responsible for their contingent being, the study known as metaphysics. This would be done by using analogies taken from our common experiences of the world around us and reasoning from those very same effects to establish some likeness to be found in the spiritual causes that caused them. This is one way Ashley helps his readers to understand the nature of God and the internal logical consistency in the Christian dogma of the Triune God. He also spends a great part of his book showing the ways in which metaphysics provides orderliness and unification among the various special disciplines (e.g. ancient/modern mathematics, physics/chemistry, logic, ethical sciences--including politics, economics/business, literature and the arts, traditional and revisionist historical studies, etc.). It is this type of intellectual unity that would help curious students entering the university system for the first time to "make sense of it all" or "get it all together."

Ashley's book helps one to contextualize his or her studies in Aristotelian-Thomist primary texts within the milieu of a postmodern, secular society. In other words; his book introduces new, creative, and attentive means that ensure that every one of us who are engaged in the Great Conversation understands the objectively empirical origins of the language we use.

Throughout his book, Ashley made copious references to Dr. John Deely, a Philosophy professor at Saint Vincent College in La Trobe, Pennsylvania, and promulgator of the study of semiotics, or of 'signs.' Deely's main contention, in the words of Ashley, is that because we first understand something to exist before we come to a more reasoned understanding of its nature and because the relational nature of signs transcends the foundational subjects in which they cohere, and are thus 'suprasubjective,' realists and idealists can engage, at the very least, in effective dialogue with one another, each in his/her own contentious but perhaps difficult and confused understanding of the tangled 'semiotic web' of relations between the mind-independent and mind-dependent objects found in this initial understanding of Being. Interestingly, Ashley and Aquinas extend the meaning of this 'suprasubjective,' relational understanding of purely intellectual relations in order to defend the internal, logical consistency of the notion of three 'Persons' in one divine substance. They claim that because the very of nature of these relations transcends their subject-hosts, they do not complexify or divide their internal unities. Hence, there is no logical conflict in arguing that three purely intellectual, 'subsistent relations' are truly, undividedly, and really identical with its divine essence, 'Three Persons in One God.'

I highly recommend this book to any intellectually-minded, curious philosophy student who wishes to get their feet wet in the Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective of philosophy. This book is for a student who wants to understand how everything in the world around us--and in us--all fit together in a way that is logically consistent and truly satisfying to our most natural desire for truth.

This is also a great book for its footnotes, which references other authors and their books for deeper study.

[Alan · Rating 5 out of 5]

After having grounded myself—such as with William A. Wallace, O.P.'s The Modeling of Nature: Philosophy of Science and Philosophy of Nature in Synthesis —in the River Forest / Aristotelean-Thomism epistemology that all intellectual knowledge comes through the senses, this book, my first on Metascience (more ambiguously called "metaphysics"), was a natural continuation and excellent introduction. Only via natural science can one come to understand Metascience. Metascience is becoming more necessary today for the unification of knowledge in our interdisciplinary, multicultural world where knowledge has undergone much fragmentation.

A natural continuation of this book is John Deely's excellent Four Ages Of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey Of Philosophy From Ancient Times To The Turn Of The Twenty First Century , by far the best, latest book on the history of philosophy. Ashley frequently cites it in his book.

Vide the first chapter, this excerpt, John Deely's review, and L. Purcell's review or "The River Forest School and the Philosophy of Nature Today" by Benedict Ashley, O.P.