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Are there other books like *The Unity of Philosophical Experience* by Etienne Gilson?

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I really liked this book, and I have every reason to believe the userbase here will know of other, similar books of which I am ignorant.

On reflection, the reasons I liked the book were that it's Aristotelian, very confident of our ability to know the truth objectively (in this case, in metaphysics), informative, well written, seemingly well argued, and has a lot of inspiring quotes scattered throughout. That sounds like an ad for the book, but it's not. It's just a description of the sort of book I'm looking for.

Here's the back cover:

Quote

The best summary of this book is in the authors words from the foreword: "It is the proper aim and scope of the present book to show that the history of philosophy makes philosophical sense, and to define its meaning in regard to the nature of philosophical knowledge itself. For that reason, the various doctrines, as well as the definite parts of these doctrines, which have been taken into account in this volume, should not be considered as arbitrarily selected fragments from some abridged description of the medieval and modern philosophy, but as a series of concrete philosophical experiments especially chosen for their dogmatic significance. Each of them represents a definite attempt to deal with philosophical knowledge according to a certain method, and all of them, taken together, make up a philosophical experience. The fact that all those experiments have yielded the same result will, as I hope, justify the common conclusion...that there is a centuries long experience of what philosophical knowledge is—and that such an experience exhibits a remarkable unity."

So basically, I'm looking for more books by Aristotelians or neo-Thomists that you liked or think an Objectivist would like.

Thanks in advance.

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I mean consuming anything by Gilson should profit you substantially. His Methodical Realism is a very good, short read. His Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge is good for setting the ground rules on engagement with Cartesian and Kantian epistemology.

More neo-Thomist stuff:

Anthony Lisska's two books Aquinas' Theory of Perception and Natural Law is a reconstruction of Thomistic epistemology and meta-ethics that engages with contemporary analytic philosophy.

John O'Callaghan's Thomistic Realism and the Linguistic Turn employs Aquinas' semantic theory to describe how concepts as formal signs of knowledge are replaced by words in contemporary pragmatism targeting what he calls the "third thing" thesis of Quine, Putnam, and Rorty.

Edward Pols' Radical Realism engages with the presuppositions of what he calls the "linguistic enclosure" of knowledge from reality by employing a Thomistic point of view.

Henry Veatch's Rational Man is a Thomist counter to existentialism and all around classic. You should pretty much think of Veatch as the American version of Gilson and consume all of his stuff actually.

Anything by Anthony Kenny, Eleanore Stump when reading Aquinas.

 

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7 minutes ago, 2046 said:

I mean consuming anything by Gilson should profit you substantially. His Methodical Realism is a very good, short read. His Thomist Realism and the Critique of Knowledge is good for setting the ground rules on engagement with Cartesian and Kantian epistemology.

More neo-Thomist stuff:

Anthony Lisska's two books Aquinas' Theory of Perception and Natural Law is a reconstruction of Thomistic epistemology and meta-ethics that engages with contemporary analytic philosophy.

John O'Callaghan's Thomistic Realism and the Linguistic Turn employs Aquinas' semantic theory to describe how concepts as formal signs of knowledge are replaced by words in contemporary pragmatism targeting what he calls the "third thing" thesis of Quine, Putnam, and Rorty.

Edward Pols' Radical Realism engages with the presuppositions of what he calls the "linguistic enclosure" of knowledge from reality by employing a Thomistic point of view.

Henry Veatch's Rational Man is a Thomist counter to existentialism and all around classic. You should pretty much think of Veatch as the American version of Gilson and consume all of his stuff actually.

Anything by Anthony Kenny, Eleanore Stump when reading Aquinas.

 

Excellent, this is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you.

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  • 10 months later...

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