Thomas Aquinas comparison with Emmanuel Kant

Introduction

Thomas Aquinas born at the castle of Roccasecca, near Naples, Italy, to an aristocratic family. He got sent away before he was five to be educated at the Benedictine monastery of Montecassino, where his father's brother was abbot. Later he studied at the University of Naples. In this culturally rich environment, Thomas became familiar with the writings of the Muslim thinkers Avicenna and Averroës, whose study of the Greek philosopher Aristotle, the ideas of whom had been practically forgotten following the collapse of the Roman Empire, was beginning to attract the interest of Christian Europe. Thomas Aquinas was among those who studied Aristotle's theories.

Thomas was born in his family's castle in Aquino. His family had ties to Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor. In 1231, Thomas began school at the Benedictine monastery of Monte Cassino, where he learned Latin and studied the church fathers. He got forced to return home in 1239, when hostilities broke out between the emperor and the pope. Back in Sicily he attended the University of Naples from 1239 to 1244. The university was the first in Europe founded independently of the church, and it had ties to Frederick's court, where translations of Aristotle and his Muslim and Jewish commentators in Arabic and Greek texts were revolutionizing the way people thought about intellectual inquiry.

In Naples, Aquinas also met members of the new Dominican order of mendicant friars, who led a more austere and self-denying life than that practiced by the older established monastic orders such as the Benedictines. Aquinas was still a teenager when he decided to join the Dominicans. His family opposed this decision and held him captive for more than a year, trying to force him to change his mind. Eventually they had to accept that their efforts GOT wasted, and he got permission to take his vows in 1244.

Discussion

Thomas Aquinas wrote more than 60 works, all in Latin, the language of scholarship in his day. There are sermons, biblical commentaries, polemical tracts (he got repeatedly called on by Church leaders to respond to controversies and possible heresies), philosophical expositions, and theological works. His 13 commentaries on the works of Aristotle are still valued by students of philosophy for the help they give in understanding Aristotle's ideas, but as a Christian philosopher, Aquinas probably saw them more as a means to a clear understanding of the unity of God's creation (Nichols, 76).

The early medieval Catholic Church tended to dismiss classical philosophers like Aristotle, who had lived before the time of Christ, as pagan and therefore, irrelevant or even harmful to Christianity. Aquinas demonstrated that Aristotle's ideas were in fact, compatible with Christian teaching. Aristotle's confidence in the capacity of human reason to uncover the underlying order in the universe by studying the details of creation pursued by Aquinas, who identified that underlying order with God. Aristotle's proof of the existence of a prime mover got developed by Aquinas as proof of the existence of God. His modification of Aristotle's approach ...