Acceptable epistomological theories for Catholics

[McatholicN]

Catholics only, please. Thanks!

Epistomology, if I have the definition right, is how you know something to be true. Would holding a Descarte-esque epistomological stance be acceptable belief for a Catholic. The only way we can know something is through logical conclusion based on assumptive/observable facts (I have two hands, x=y, therefore y=x, etc.); That these obvious, base truths are the only way in which we have access to knowing truth.

 

[Acapiteadcalcem]

Catholics only, please. Thanks!

Epistomology, if I have the definition right, is how you know something to be true. Would holding a Descarte-esque epistomological stance be acceptable belief for a Catholic. The only way we can know something is through logical conclusion based on assumptive/observable facts (I have two hands, x=y, therefore y=x, etc.); That these obvious, base truths are the only way in which we have access to knowing truth.

Interesting question. First of all, there is no particular ‘Catholic’ epistemological stance. The Church is open to all legitimate efforts to know the truth.

That said, the Cartesian methodology (that is, from Descartes) is very problematic. While we want to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, one can’t escape the reality that Descartes’ has introduced a number of confusions into philosophy. For example, his methodology of universal doubt has had the effect of isolating the subject from reality. There is, in contemporary philosophy, lots of concern about the ‘subject-object’ divide largely initiated by Descartes. It greatly influenced (dare we say ‘poisoned’?) Enlightenment thinking, and has been passed on to our own day.

Descartes also gave us a dualistic view of the person, in which we are ‘part soul and part body’. This dualistic view, while held by many Christians even today, was condemned by the Church at the Council of Vienne in 1312.

Even the very notion of ‘epistemology’ is a rather modern discipline, full of its own problems and challenges (the term was coined in 1856 by Scottish philosopher, James Ferrier). It would take to long to go into all of that here.

A number of Catholic philosophers have found phenomenology to be a useful tool to help grasp reality (St Edith Stein, Robert Sokolowski, Pope John Paul II to name just a few), and have used this in conjunction with Thomism for a more complete view of reality.

 

[PJM]

=McatholicN;8462948]Catholics only, please. Thanks!

Epistomology, if I have the definition right, is how you know something to be true. Would holding a Descarte-esque epistomological stance be acceptable belief for a Catholic. The only way we can know something is through logical conclusion based on assumptive/observable facts (I have two hands, x=y, therefore y=x, etc.); That these obvious, base truths are the only way in which we have access to knowing truth.

***From Father Hardon’s Catholic Dictionary:

EPISTEMOLOGY. A theory of knowledge. A branch of scholastic philosophy that studies the principles underlying the acquisition of knowledge, the methods of logical reasoning, and the critical evaluation of truth, certitude, and right thinking. (Etym. Greek episteme, knowledge + logia, science, knowledge.)

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NO; such a position ignores the FACT that God knows more and knows BETTER than we can. Somethings are not to be understood in this life; yet are to accepted through Faith and trust in God. The Trinity and the Eucharist come to mind as do some of the Marian Doctrines.

God Bless,
Pat

 

[McatholicN]

NO; such a position ignores the FACT that God knows more and knows BETTER than we can. Somethings are not to be understood in this life; yet are to accepted through Faith and trust in God. The Trinity and the Eucharist come to mind as do some of the Marian Doctrines.

Of course, God knows more and better than we can. But is this the only way that we can know anything by reason (that everything we know by reason is either self-evident fact or self-evident facts applied to the laws of logic).

Isn’t it also true that God can be known by reason alone? And how exactly would faith play into epistomology?

Thanks!

 

[fakename]

exlaodicea.wordpress.com/2007/09/12/retraction/

This link shows that the 24 Theses of Aquinas are good and safe norms for understanding the faith. So clearly the philosophy of St. Thomas is the “Church’s philosophy” (they never said the theses were true, just that they were safe guides so the Church doesn’t actually have a philosophy but it does favor certain ones).

So I would learn scholasticism if I were you. But there are differences between the scholastic view of knowledge and the cartesian. Firstly, the scholastics are true believers in the certainty of the validity of the external senses and they held that the existence of the external world was axiomatic and non-demonstrable.
Secondly, they believed that one saw the world through forms or universals in several ways 1) you could only understand a thing by knowing its essence and this latter was perceived by a mental image after reflecting on many sense experiences. 2) The human soul is a form, so in the sense that one understands nothing but by the soul, one understands everything “through a form”. From this it also followed that our minds don’t see things as they are but rather as they are in the soul. For instance, the soul would represent physical objects in a more lucid degree than they really subsisted in, while it would do the opposite to spiritual things.Descartes would probably attribute our knowledge of external things to our knowledge of God, and from this certainty he held that all things were known apriori and that the world as it existed in the mind was a perfect copy of how it really did subsist, since that knowledge was based on a true and certain intuition of God. For scholastics only some things were apriori and mostly they were relatively apriori.

I hope that is a good start.

 

[McatholicN]

exlaodicea.wordpress.com/2007/09/12/retraction/

This link shows that the 24 Theses of Aquinas are good and safe norms for understanding the faith. So clearly the philosophy of St. Thomas is the “Church’s philosophy” (they never said the theses were true, just that they were safe guides so the Church doesn’t actually have a philosophy but it does favor certain ones).

So I would learn scholasticism if I were you. But there are differences between the scholastic view of knowledge and the cartesian. Firstly, the scholastics are true believers in the certainty of the validity of the external senses and they held that the existence of the external world was axiomatic and non-demonstrable.
Secondly, they believed that one saw the world through forms or universals in several ways 1) you could only understand a thing by knowing its essence and this latter was perceived by a mental image after reflecting on many sense experiences. 2) The human soul is a form, so in the sense that one understands nothing but by the soul, one understands everything “through a form”. From this it also followed that our minds don’t see things as they are but rather as they are in the soul. For instance, the soul would represent physical objects in a more lucid degree than they really subsisted in, while it would do the opposite to spiritual things.Descartes would probably attribute our knowledge of external things to our knowledge of God, and from this certainty he held that all things were known apriori and that the world as it existed in the mind was a perfect copy of how it really did subsist, since that knowledge was based on a true and certain intuition of God. For scholastics only some things were apriori and mostly they were relatively apriori.

I hope that is a good start.

Are we bound to believe the 24 theses or not? It doesn’t seem that what I was saying earlier conflicts with the theses that I read, though I could barely understand them. I was saying that we, in the spectrum of reason, acquire knowledge by applying the laws of logic to self-evident truths (axioms, are they called?). It seems that that’s what I read in the Catholic Encyclopedia, too.

Would the philosophy of Descartes (or what I’ve been talking about, too) be unacceptable? I’m a bit confused by your post. I think I was getting at something different than you. Correct me if I’m wrong.

 

[James_Miller]

It is spelled epistemology…

 

[fakename]

"Are we bound to believe the 24 theses or not? It doesn’t seem that what I was saying earlier conflicts with the theses that I read, though I could barely understand them. I was saying that we, in the spectrum of reason, acquire knowledge by applying the laws of logic to self-evident truths (axioms, are they called?). It seems that that’s what I read in the Catholic Encyclopedia, too.

Would the philosophy of Descartes (or what I’ve been talking about, too) be unacceptable? I’m a bit confused by your post. I think I was getting at something different than you. Correct me if I’m wrong."

I think the link made a convincing argument that we should believe the 24 theses, not understand them perhaps, but we should believe that they are the most useful premises of philosophizing. So that’s why I believe them, again, I think the linked argument concludes to what I just wrote.

As for applying the laws of logic to axioms, then yes that is something that Descartes and rationalism and Catholicism has in common. But there are a ton of things that Descartes said that conflicts with Catholic teaching and so must be wrong. For instance, the apriori deduction of God’s existence (even though the true deduction is made a posteriori). Also, the idea that the soul is only a principle of thought but not of physical life, also makes it difficult for a Cartesian to understand why the soul should be one with the body. And again, his whole epistemology basically rests on gathering all information about the world from a knowledge of God. But this is plainly against the true doctrine that says that sense experiences as such, are a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for knowledge and one cannot hold this if one doesn’t believe in the validity of sense experiences as such (as Cartesians seemed to do). For Descartes, the mind infers the world’s essence from the essence of God, while for Scholastics, the mind understands the world by playing-around with the experiences of sense and from thence comes the universal ideas including our ideas of God.

As for understanding the theses: they’re actually pretty simple as far as aristotle goes so PM me and I would be happy to explain a little, or you could ask anyone that knows about aristotle. I know that these forum members seem to be at least acquainted with his doctrines.