By “this guy” do you mean Roderick Long, the author of the article? If so, then I don’t think you’ve correctly understood the “view of Christianity” he espouses. As a matter of fact, Long’s post is not about promoting any view of Christianity at all. If you’ll look more carefully at the post, you’ll see that it’s about promoting a particular view of conservatism.

Raphael,… See More

Roderick explains what he means by “Austro-Athenian” in the tagline of the blog: ‘”Austro” as in Rothbard and Wittgenstein, “Athenian” as in Aristotle and smashing-the-plutocracy.’ It has to do with Roderick’s interests in the joint and several insights of Viennese philosophy, the Austrian school of economics, classical philosophy, and Athenian democratic theory.

Junto,

Man, I already read Ayn Rand’s review of J.H. Randall’s /Aristotle/ a long time ago [*], and it didn’t taste any better coming back up than it did going down.

Rand was many things, but a careful scholar of antiquity she was not, and especially not when she lapsed into this kind of world-historical theorizing. Her view of Plato, and of Aristotle’s relationship to him, is so wide of the mark as to be laughable. (For starters, if you think that Plato’s point is to doubt “the cognitive efficacy of man’s [sic] mind,” or to “deny and surrender … [the human person’s] particular mode of consciousness” then I can only say that your reading of Plato is a curious one. And would perhaps benefit from actually doing some, well, reading, of what Plato has to say about reason, consciousness and cognition.)

[*] Originally appeared in the Objectivist Newsletter May 1963; reprinted in The Voice of Reason, pp. 6-12; also excerpted in the Ayn Rand Lexicon under “Aristotle,” if I’m not mistaken.

dhex,

Well, “politics” derives from the Greek root “polis.” At the time the word was made, “polis” was ambiguous between (or consistently conflated) (1) the organized government of the city, and (2) civil society within the city. So when Aristotle wrote about “politics” he was talking about government processes, but about public life broadly, including many institutions within the city (religious, civic, educational, etc.) which today would be thought of as part of the private rather than the government sector.

Nowadays most people use politics to refer mainly or only to the business of the government, but some traditions (especially on the Left and in the feminist movement) use “politics” in a broader sense to include not only government processes but also struggles within civil society, especially if they have a common impact on a lot of people and if the civil society dynamics are structured by the balance of power between different social classes (such as men and women, or white people and black people, or…).

So “political” is not being expanded so far as just to mean “affects other people” (presumably remembering your friends’ birthdays affects other people, but I wouldn’t call it a political commitment); rather, “politics” is being being used to describe anything that acts to systematically structure public life in terms of the power relationships between groups of people. That includes governmental processes but it also includes a lot of other things, such as the way in which rape dramatically constrains the freedom of movement of all women, as women, and puts women in a state of greater dependency upon men.

Does that help clarify?

Incidentally, I’ve discussed the use of the term “politics” at some more length in section 2 of the Libertarian Feminism essay that I co-authored with Roderick Long.

Kevin,

You’re right about the origins of St. Thomas’s Third Way. In On the Power of God, a work dated after the Summa contra Gentiles but before the Summa Theologica, he explicitly attributes the argument to Ibn Sina, with developments added by Ibn Rushd. (In fact, all of the arguments used in the Five Ways are explicitly attributed to other philosophers at some point or another in St. Thomas’s work.)

You wrote: What is “Thomistic”?

Of or pertaining to the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas, a Doctor of the Church and the leading figure of the revival of Aristotelian philosophy during the High Middle Ages.

St. Thomas famously believed that, although many of the mysteries of Christian faith could not be discovered by natural reason, and had to be revealed by the grace of God, there were at least some doctrines of natural theology, and in particular, the existence of an uncaused, necessary, and perfect Creator of the visible world), which could be proven through rational demonstration, and set out his Five Ways to prove the existence of God. The third of the Five Ways, the argument from possibility and necessity, is intended to demonstrate that there must be a single necessary being — i.e. a being which could not possibly fail to exist — to explain the existence of contingent beings — i.e. beings which do exist, but could fail to exist.

Kevin’s right about the origins of the argument; in an earlier book, Aquinas explicitly attributes the development of the argument to two Muslim commentators on Aristotle — the Persian philosopher-physician Ibn Sina (known in Europe as “Avicenna”) and the Spanish-Arab philosopher Ibn Rushd (known in Europe as “Averroës”). Generally speaking, a lot of the revival of Aristotelian philosophy in Christian Europe during the High Middle Ages was deeply influenced by the work of Muslim scholars a century or two before; indeed, without the texts that Arab scholars preserved and copied, the renewed interest in classical Greek learning in Christian Europe would hardly have been possible: most of the work of Plato and Aristotle, among others, had been completely lost in Western Europe for hundreds of years, until Muslim scholars re-introduced it.

Hope this helps.