Psychology from a Neo-Thomist Perspective: The Louvain-Madrid Connection (original) (raw)

Thomistic Psychology in the Works of Fr. Angel de Blas, OP

Philippiniana Sacra, 2022

The celebration of the 500 th anniversary of Christianity in the Philippines is also an opportunity for the University of Santo Tomas (Manila) to look into her own history, and on how that history intersects with the larger history of Christianity in the Philippines. Being one of the oldest Christian institutions in the Philippines, the University has been home to several thinkers who have, in their own way, contributed to the growth of Christianity in the country. This paper takes a historical look at the contribution of one Thomasian, Fr. Angel de Blas, OP, who wrote and taught in the University of Santo Tomas from the early to the middle part of the 20 th Century. He thrived at a time when new developments were emerging in the academic landscape of the Philippines, particularly in the area of philosophy and psychology. At that time, psychology was slowly emerging as a distinct discipline in the human sciences, and the philosophical temperament in the country was also slowly embracing traditions other than scholasticism and Thomism. The paper will attempt to articulate Fr. Angel de Blas, OP's contribution during this time of the transition. It also hopes to show that this Dominican has demonstrated a way of dialoguing Catholic philosophy and life with the developments of the sciences.

Thought Piece on the Revival of Thomism

Philosophy of Thomism, 2023

The revival of Thomism is a controversial issue. Those who love knowledge, on the one hand, will argue for its revival (Rickaby, 1908; Weisheipl, 1968). This is particularly true for Christians, theologians, and students of religion. On the other hand, those who do not believe in God, or atheists, including philosophers who argue against metaphysics or the existence of God, are happy for Thomism’s demise (Brosnan, 1924; Houdmann, 2023a). Yet, a third group of thinkers might be interested in the revival of Thomism to pursue philosophical ideals and know the world (Houdmann, 2023b).

Cognitive psychology in the Middle Ages

Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 1998

On the Edge of the Cliff is a collection of eleven essays by the French cultural historian, Roger Chartier, originally published in 1986-1994 and now reprinted with a new introduction. The book discusses a number of writers relevant to cultural history: the unconventional historians Philippe Ariès, Michel de Certeau, Michel Foucault, Louis Marin, and Hayden White; the sociologist Norbert Elias; the bibliographer D. F. McKenzie. Additionally, in two chapters Chartier focuses on the French Revolution, taking issue with the approaches of two historians, Robert Darnton and Keith Michael Baker. The last third of the book, although interesting, is only loosely connected to the first two-thirds, and so I shall leave these chapters aside: three of them are explications and appreciations of Elias's sociology of culture, while the final chapter offers an appreciation of Ariès, the historian of private life. The theme that unites the rest of the book is simple and programmatic. In brief, Chartier attacks what he sees as the confusion, by historians, of "discursive practices" with "nondiscursive practices." His title derives from an image suggested by the late Michel de Certeau. According to de Certeau, when the historian turns from offering a discourse about discourse to offering a discourse about practices, "the theoretical operation suddenly finds itself at the limits of its normal terrain, like a car at the edge of a cliff. Beyond, nothing but the sea" (quoted by Chartier, p. 70). Too frequently, according to Chartier, the car tumbles over the edge. Chartier contends that this is what has happened in the much-bruited "linguistic turn" in recent historiography, a turn that he sees as promoting "the dangerous reduction of the social world to a purely discursive construction and to pure language games" (p. 4). One consequence is the linguistic relativism that Chartier finds, and criticizes, in Hayden White. Chartier is a well-informed historian equipped with a clear mind. He has a talent for rapid and incisive summary and a gift for zeroing in on weak points in any argument. Much of what he says in On the Edge of the Cliff is informative and well justified. The claim that one ought to distinguish between discourse (or "discursive practice") and nondiscursive practice seems justified under many circumstances, although it is surely more difficult than Chartier thinks to establish the boundaries between the two. Many of Chartier's specific descriptions and analyses hit the mark or at least come close to it. For example, in the chapter "Discourses and Practices: On the Origins of the French Revolution," he punctures Robert Darnton's claim that "we know for certain" that late eighteenth-century clandestine books communicated sedition to the French (quoted on p. 75). As Chartier points out, sedition might equally have been present beforehand, a precondition for the reception of such books. Yet Chartier is perhaps a trifle ungenerous in failing to point out how massively Darnton has contributed to the study of various forms of eighteenth-century practice, from mesmerism to the book trade. Similarly, Chartier's criticisms of Baker catch out some weaknesses in Baker's all-too-linguistic treatment of the Revolution, but hardly amount to a worked-out alternative. But while as a general matter Chartier is right to insist on the distinction between discursive practice and nondiscursive practice (or between discourse tout court and practice tout court), in avoiding linguistic reductionism he risks a reduction of discourse to practice. In Chartier's conceptual model, "discourse" appears only as "discursive practice," and "discursive practice" invariably has nondiscursive practice as its telos. It is as if there is an unacknowledged and unjustified materialism here, with the "ideal" realm of language to be taken seriously only insofar as it serves the "material" realm of practice. In any case, whether intentionally or not, the model excludes textual and philosophical concerns from the ambit of legitimate historical research. To the extent that such concerns are not merely ideological, they are a matter of symbolic or semantic contents that are not reducible to the world of practical interest-although they obviously emerge within that world and have close relations to it. For Chartier, an investigation of artistic or literary works focusing on how such works arise from "a negotiation between a creator or a class of creators and the institutions and practices of society" has a place within the historical discipline (p. 20; Chartier here quotes the "new historicist" literary scholar Stephen Greenblatt). But given what we might call Chartier's "pragmatic reductionism," an investigation of artistic, literary, or philosophical works focusing on matters peculiar to those domains would not have a place within the historical discipline. It seems clear that in his wish to maintain history's claim to "remain among the social sciences" (p. 19), Chartier promotes a would-be unified program for the pursuit of historical knowledge. Chartier does not want history to be "an untrammeled literary activity open to chance and worthy only of curiosity;" he wants to preserve the status of history as a form of scientific knowledge (pp. 27, 19). But even as he rejects any attempt to base the claim of history to scientificity on the "one model" of physical science, his wish to give "new foundations" to "the critical realism of historical knowledge" amounts to a not fully acknowledged attempt to promote "one model" for historical understanding (p. 27). A generation ago adherents of the Annales school of historiography, out of which Chartier comes, pretty much acknowledged that the Annales dream of writing a unified "total history" was unrealizable. But remnants of that totalizing dream persist-not at the substantive level, but at the levels of conception, program, and method. It is akin to the old positivist dream of unified science. Notwithstanding his residual adherence to such a view, one can learn a good deal from Chartier. But it seems to me that one could learn even more from a combination of the disciplined Chartier with the more undisciplined and even anarchic insights of some of the writers whom he discusses in this book.

The Late Antique History of Psychology

This paper situates the first centuries of Christian monasticism, especially in the Eastern monastic tradition, in the context of the history of psychology. There is a large body of literature suggesting that the cultural and religious transformations of late antiquity gave rise to an increased interest in interiority, along with a new notion of the self. I would like to focus on the culmination of this development within the early monastic movement and examine it from the perspective of the history of psychology.