Two of the greatest impacts on the history of philosophy are St. Thomas Aquinas, the father of Thomism, and Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology. We see two ways of doing philosophy: A philosophy concerned with the nature of Being and a philosophy concerned with the nature of consciousness and this union births Phenomenological Thomism (sometimes called Existential Thomism). It is through a marriage of the classical Aristotelian-Thomist tradition and the modern phenomenological-existential tradition that we find an objective ethical and metaphysical dogma; One needs both objective fact and subjective experience to understand reality. The project undertaken by Edith Stein, the Lublin School of Thomism, and to some extent Dietrich von Hildebrand all sought to fulfill this. A version of personalism, another movement in philosophy and theology, could be considered the brainchild of this marriage, and John Paul II called this "Thomistic Personalism," which I identify closely with. Inspired by the ethical personalism of Max Scheler, John Paul II saw the union between these two as essential for the development of a concrete Christian ethics. Personally, I think it is unwise to try to base everything in phenomenology or humanistic existentialism (Kierkegaard, Berdyaev, and Buber are a different topic). There needs to be some presupposing objectivity. On the contrary, it is unwise to boil everything down to the nature of Being. There needs to be room for lived experience. Phenomenology and existentialism provide adequate methods of analysis of Thomistic metaphysics. The traditions of Phenomenological Thomism and Thomistic Personalism provide a healthy balance between subjective experience and transcendental truth. — Dermot Griffin
Phenomenology insists there are objects in the world that are not me/ Itis just that when one thinks in the phenomenlogical attitude and out of the naturalistic one, the world becomes a very different place. — Astrophel
It certainly does. How would you interpret the meaning of transcendence as Husserl uses it to refer to such entities as spatial objects? For instance, when he says that a real object like a ball is transcendent to the various perspectives of it that we actually see? Does he mean the ball is external to the constituting ego, or that we constitute its transcendence via an idealizing gesture immanent to the ego? — Joshs
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