So is Thomism(/forms of Neo-Thomism) the be-all-and-end-all of philosophical enquiry then? If an argument is based on unexamined prior positions how can it be considered sound? (I suppose there is a problem of infinite regress here/some form of ‘Russell’s teapot’ or something! :) Thomas Aquinas was/is an extremely influential and interesting thinker (especially for his time!), but I find that sadly I don’t necessarily see proof of/share his revelatory faith in the existence of a traditional Catholic God. When I try and boil down various arguments into comment form I cannot definitively argue against those ideas because, for all I know, they may be true, at least on some level... The problem is rather that, as I understand him at least, I see that equally they may not be true and that they derive in part from hefty presuppositions about the existence of god, denial of possible kinds of physical/metaphysical infinite regression (not sure I’m using that term entirely correctly, but what the hey…) /infinite universes/multiverses/even voidist/illusory universes, various other theisms (pantheism, panpsychism or ‘idealism’ for example), atheism and probably a lot more -isms that I can’t think of right now or am just not aware of… If your argument is that philosophy based on formal logic is devalued somehow because it is merely relative/can only express relations between ‘things’ and not ‘things’ in themselves, well, what’s to say that the universe isn’t entirely informationally constituted/‘mathematical’ and therefore able to be defined solely relationally in some form? (not putting that very well - but along the lines of:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Mathematical_Universe ). I don’t immediately see how ordinary language is any more potentially categorical than formal logic in such a context - though the power and beauty of words/mathematics is undeniable in a human context, is it not potentially dangerous arrogance to think that we currently/could ever hope to understand God/universal meaning on any definitive, ethically actionable or universally communicable level? Doesn’t the unchallenged adoption of such concretized beliefs invite inevitable abuse and corruption when flawed humans distort them and undesirable actions arise from calcified dogmatism/extremism/literal interpretations?
Here’s some Kant, for
good measure:
“Thinking for one's self is to seek the chief touchstone of truth in one's self (id est, in one's own reason); and the maxim, to think for one's self at all times is Enlightening. Thereto belongs not just so much, as those may imagine who take knowledge, to be enlightening; as it is rather a negative principle in the use of one's cognoscitive faculty, and he, who is very rich in knowledge, is often the least enlightened in the use of it. To exercise one's own reason, means nothing more, than, relatively to every thing which one is to suppose, to question one's self.”
— from ‘What it Means to Orient One's Self in Thinking’ ((& Monty Python’s Philosophical Football Match:
https://vimeo.com/84600758 )