I know St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein) combined phenomenology with Thomism. This is essentially what Pope John Paul II did as well.
St. Teresa had been a student of Edmund Husserl, one of the foremost phenomonologists. What his brand of phenomonology is concerned with is the nature of experience and consciousness.
I hope that helps!
Sure, it does.
I think it’s important to underline that philosophy is a sort of very complex and developed organism, such as the human body. All the parts and the organs are necessary or useful in order to enjoy a good health.
So, we have several branches in philosophy: metaphysics, anthropology, philosophy of the knowledge, ethics, etc. etc. Every part is important.
Moreover every branch could be enlightened by different approaches.
Phenomenology for instance, as Edith Stein rounded off, correcting the idealistic deviation of the late Husserl, is an excellent method of describing how consciousness meets the reality, the objects, the things, which would exist even though we wouldn’t be here observing them, but that have - each of them - a nature we can approach.
But Edith Stein well knew that phenomenology hasn’t a metaphysics, so properly, and ingeniously, tried to intertwine phenomenology with thomistic metaphysics.
I think it would be amazing, for all of us, reading or reading again,
Fides et ratio. It would be an essential step in order to answer the question: is philosophy useful to believers and how to “handle” it?
