Kenny on Aquinas on Being

Abstract

Throughout the course of his career, Anthony Kenny has remained in dialogue with Thomas Aquinas. In his introduction to Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays (1969) - a book intended to make the medieval Dominican intelligible to philosophers brought up in the analytic tradition - he argued that although superseded in regard to the philosophy of nature and logic, Aquinas’s work in metaphysics, philosophical theology, philosophy of mind and moral philosophy entitles him to rank with the greatest of philosophers, in fact as ‘one of the dozen greatest of the western world’ (p.l).Just over ten years later he presented a similar assessment. In logic, linguistics and scientific methodology Aquinas’s contribution is slight, he says, and his ‘most rewarding work’ is to be found in metaphysics, ethics and the philosophy of mind (Aquinas, 1980, p.30). The compliment is not as straightforward as it might seem, since Kenny goes on immediately to add that Aquinas’s ‘theory of Being involves philosophical confusions which not even the most sympathetic treatment can eradicate’ (pp.30-31). Not only confusion, though, since the chapter devoted to ‘Being’ concludes by charging Aquinas’s account with ‘sophistry and illusion’ (p.60). The significance of this, Kenny says, is that this is precisely the part of Aquinas’s philosophical work that is most cherished by his admirers and, in particular, by his theologian- admirers.