Redpath on the Nature of Philosophy

• Main Author: Robert A. Delfino
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: International Étienne Gilson Society 2016-03-01
• Series: Studia Gilsoniana
• Subjects: Aristotle; Thomas Aquinas; Peter Redpath; Armand Maurer; philosophy; science; modern science; theoretical science; practical science; wisdom; wonder; fear; hope; first principle; sense realism; common sense; faculty psychology; problem of the one and the many; cause; universals; abstraction; formal object; method; demonstration; experimentation; aim; virtue; vice; happiness; habit; substance; genus; proximate subject; necessary properties; per se effects; incidental properties; accidents; existence; metaphysics; mathematics; natural philosophy; geometry; biology; medicine; logic; nominalism; William of Ockham; René Descartes; idealism; system; universal doubt; utopian socialism; decline of the West
• Online Access: http://gilsonsociety.com/files/033-053-Delfino.pdf

In this article the author discusses Peter A. Redpath’s understanding of the nature of philosophy and his account of how erroneous understandings of philosophy have led to the decline of the West and to the separation of philosophy from modern science and modern science from wisdom. Following Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, Redpath argues that philosophy is a sense realism because it begins in wonder about real things known through the senses. Philosophy presupposes pre-philosophical knowledge, common sense, which consists of principles rooted in sensation that make human experience, sense wonder, and philosophy possible. Philosophy is certain knowledge demonstrated through causes and thus philosophy is the same as science. Redpath understands science as a habit that we acquire through repeated practice. More precisely, a scientific habit is a simple quality of the intellect that enables us to demonstrate (prove) the necessary properties of a genus through their causes or principles. In this way, science is the study of the one and the many. Redpath argues that metaphysics is the final cause of the arts and sciences, providing the foundation for all of the arts and sciences and justifying their principles. Finally, he argues that with modernity’s loss of belief in God and its rejection of metaphysics as a science, utopian socialism has become an historical/political substitute for metaphysics.