The Task of Catholic Philosophy in the Twenty-first Century in advance

This paper responds to the question before us by making three claims. First, that the morass of confusion that plagues contemporary culture is not the result of unaccountable forces but arises from basic ideas of human destiny quietly introduced into the Western intellectual tradition by the discipline of philosophy. More precisely, it can be traced to several historical philosophical errors that have entered into the aquifer of the common sense of Western culture. Philosophy has been “running the world”—and it still is. Second, that only a full-throated restoration of metaphysical realism, grounded in the method introduced by Aristotle that serves as the backbone of the order of being and Thomas Aquinas’s philosophical project, will provide the Catholic philosopher with the means to recover from the havoc the discipline has wrought. And third, that the situation demands the intellectual conversion both of those who trade in ideas for a living (the academy) and those whose work sustains our everyday lives. I will argue that Catholic philosophers need to persuade Chesterton’s ordinary “man on the street” that a true metaphysics is “simply common sense raised to philosophical perfection" and then partner with them to restore realism to its rightful place in the history of ideas.