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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 September 2024
There are many unresolved questions about the relations of the natural sciences to Aristotelean-Thomist philosophy, and the accurate placing of science on the map of intellectual activities is one of the most important objectives of our time. The prestige of science is still so high that the relative neglect of it by Thomists is unfortunate, and a positive approach is of great value. The American Dominicans have therefore done wisely as well as boldly in setting up a permanent institution where scientists and philosophers can meet and collaborate, with a permanent staff most of whom have been trained in one of the natural sciences as well as in the Thomist tradition. This institution is called the Albertus Magnus Lyceum for Natural Science and is situated in a suburb of Chicago. Its leaders hope that, by bringing men engaged in specialized research into contact with a homogeneous intellectual tradition, they will be able to help scientists towards a synthesis that they feel to be necessary for the health of science itself as well as for modem culture generally. Clearly this venture could be of the greatest importance.
The present volume is a report of an ambitious five-week meeting held in 1952, at which a varied group of experts in philosophy, logic and the natural sciences considered the relations between modem science and the Aristotelean tradition. Physics, chemistry, biology and psychology were allotted a week each, and the final week was devoted to an attempt at synthesis.
1 Science in Synthesis. By W. H. Kane, o.p., J. D. Corcoran, o.p., B. M. Ashley, o.p., and R. J. Nogar, o.p. (Dominican College of St Thomas Aquinas, River Forest, Ill.; $3.50.)
2 The difficulty is given welcome stress by H. van Laer in his Philosophico‐Scientific Problème (Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1953).
3 A. C. Crombie, Robert Grosseteste and the Origins of Experimental Science (Oxford, 1953).
4 Randall, J. H., ‘The Development of Scientific Method in the School of Padua’, Journal of the History of Ideas, I (1940), p. 177.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5 See quotations in Crombie, A. C., Galileo's ‘Dialogues concerning the two principal systems of the World’, Dominican Studies, III (April-June 1950), pp. 105‐138.Google Scholar
6 This incidentally was the view of that great Greek scholar, the late Professor Cornford; cf. his essay on ‘Greek natural philosophy and modern science’, in The Unwritten Philosophy (Cambridge, 1950).
7 This distinction is very clearly made, and applied to Aristotle's work, in a remarkable hook by A. van Melsen, Philosophy of Nature (Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1953).
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