A school of thought based on the work of Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), Thomism is, like Scholasticism, principally concerned with metaphysics and understanding the attributes of God. Aquinas expanded Aristotle’s investigation into the nature of being by distinguishing between the empirical and quantitative studies of being, with the distinctive negative judgments required for studying being qua being. He also developed a theory of analogy to explain how we can speak intelligently about God.
One of the most distinctive contributions of Thomism is a clear distinction between theological investigation, which presupposes faith, and philosophical investigation, which depends solely on the light of natural reason. He argued that, while some truths are only available through faith, philosophy is consistent with theology and can even help illuminate it. Thus, Aquinas presented his “Five Ways” for proving the existence of God based on reason alone by starting from the Aristotelean proposition that the causal order of the universe must originate in a First Cause. This approach helped lead to the development of Natural Theology in the seventeenth century. Similarly, the Neo-Thomist revival in the late nineteenth century was an important contribution to a renewed interest in virtue ethics.
