Augustine and Aquinas: The Influence Essay

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Thus while he does allow for some Aristotelian influence of the value of sensory experience so he does not fall back into a Manichean divide between good and evil, heaven and earth -- there is some 'good' to be learned with the senses -- Augustine's mistrust of his old sinning life and the world of the senses makes him fundamentally Platonic rather than Aristotelian in nature.

In contrast, Aquinas whole-heartedly embraced the Aristotelian approach to the world. True, some philosophers have since stressed the "prominence in Thomas of such Platonic notions as participation, have argued that his thought is fundamentally Platonic, not Aristotelian. Still others argue that that there is a radically original Thomistic philosophy which cannot be characterized by anything it shares with earlier thinkers, particularly Aristotle. " However, by and large, because of Thomas' emphasis on natural philosophy and the need to proceed from the observable to what is less obvious to prove truths about the divine, he is called Aristotelian in his approach.

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Even though Aquinas is a Christian and Aristotle is a pagan, unlike Augustine and Plato, who stress the ability to know something in a pre-experiential fashion, Aquinas stresses the need for everything to logically proceed from principles in an inductive fashion. "He adopted Aristotle's analysis of physical objects, his view of place, time and motion, his proof of the prime mover, his cosmology. He made his own Aristotle's account of sense perception and intellectual knowledge." The strikingly distinct approaches of these two foundational Christian fathers to pagan philosophy, the importance of inductive vs. deductive reasoning and to the question of knowledge as pre-existing within the human mind demonstrate the pluralism of early medieval thought.

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