When I was a child, I often saw the Light of Heaven. It is like silent lightning from the blue sky, a pure benediction with absolute conviction that everything is forever safe and sublime. It passes quickly, leaving you with the desperate hope that it will happen again.
Russell's dislike of Christianity is apparent in parts of this chapter, but I think he's still being factually accurate. However, if you want to balance things out, maybe try reading Coplestone on St. Thomas. By the way, the defense of the indivisibility of marriage due to the father's superior reason and strength to punish children was NOT written by Aquinas, but was added by later writers (the "supplementum").
The title of this video should be 'Betrand Russell's Assessment of St. Thomas Aquinas'. Russell criticises St. Thomas for moulding philosophy around pre-arranged answers, namely the dogma of the Catholic Church. He relegates St Thomas to being a minor thinker because of this- he asks questions he already knows the answers to. I thought this was a fairly standard technique in teaching. I think Russell is also being unsympathetic towards the creative process of writing, as if by having a plot outline, the whole work is relegated to the minors. How many of the greatest novels and plays must be in that minor section. Are we not allowed to have a clue before we start? Russell, like contemporary liberal skepticism, cannot respect a thinker who is ultimately not his or her own master. Modernism rejects the past, and post-modernism rejects all creeds. Christian apologists are not in fashion.
Russell is wrong to suggest that there can be such a state in which we can presume nothing and create a working account of knowledge without some sort of axiom or first principle. Descartes's inquiry into such matters is a mere formality. The point of assuming nothing proved quite to the contrary to the effect that there were things that one couldn't stop believing or knowing. Even when for the sake of the argument we treat all propositions as provisional, the cogito remains. The knower cannot stop being the knower. Even when we attempt to discount all knowledge we are aware of the fact that we are acting as such. Our awareness of this process and our part in it constitutes knowledge of our own activities. Knowledge isn't created ex-nihilo. Subsequently, philosophers are not and cannot come to the knowledge of true things by pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. That is simply incoherent.
yes, Bertrand Russell was an atheist hence naturally biased about thinkers like Aquinas, the defender of faith. I don't consider Russell a genius...he's a mathematician but not a philosopher
Robert Galletta St Thomas agreed with Aristotle's teaching of the golden mean being a virtue, its polar extremes being vices. St Thomas added to Aristotle's intellectual and moral virtues- theological virtues of faith, hope and love. These theological virtues unlike the others are not acquired but supernaturally infused into a soul directly by God. This St Thomas understood from divine revelation. There are also natural virtues of faith, hope and love, but Aristotle alluded to these. This is just one example of how St Thomas accepted and taught truths of Aristotle and added to them, new understandings brought by Christ. St Thomas said he turned Aristotle's water into wine.
Stay far away from Bertrand Russell, unless its for his writings on logic and mathematics! Russell will always be remembered.... (as a footnote in history) for being a brief teacher to Ludwig Wittgenstein. Honestly, Wittgenstein did all the work himself.
