Surveys the course of philosophy from the Pre-Socratics to the present era, contending the modern concentration on epistemology has severed reason and faith, undercutting the discipline’s value for humanity. Science confronts questions it cannot answer while automatically rejecting answers which theology might supply. The wrong turn began with William of Ockham as well as Duns Scotus, each of whom undermined Thomistic reconciliation, and accelerated with the Enlightenment. Most moderns sought to make ‘more sense than God’, and to define freedom as escaping natural limits of God and nature. The author is less concerned with science’s claims to autonomy that skepticism’s role in abandoning man to uncaring, everchanging universe. In sketching this decline, the author does not address the Straussian view that human things too must be at the center of consideration. What is the arbiter of natural law and natural rights?

The Socratic method first turned philosophy from metaphysics to ethics and epistemology. Plato’s universals are a limit on freedom: humans can’t define certain topics, so the Good measures mankind. Aristotle’s final cause (purpose) is another reminder of man’s limited freedom. Skepticism foreshadowed relativism.

Augustine asserted God does not author evil but allows it via free will. A city is a community of rational people united by agreement of interests and passions for the most important things. Boethius, the first scholastic, distinguished reason from faith. Al-Ghazali’s attack on Avicenna closed Islam to science. Aquinas held reason could be trusted but not everything could be reasoned, the converse of the position that all knowledge is suspended until proven. Distinguishing between essence and existence, as Aristotle had done (and al Farabi resurfaced) with the concepts of actuality and potentiality, leads back to the first mover: what started the chain of events is pure existence. There are three common arguments for God’s existence: cosmological (first mover), teleological (the order of the universe suggests purpose), and ontological (the conception of the highest being). Aquinas rejected the latter as relying on essence to prove existence, since once can’t start from a definition.

Ockham: acts have no intrinsic moral qualities, but are dependent on intent (voluntarism). Will takes precedence over reason. Thus an act isn’t good because one is trying to do God’s will but good because God wills it; but one can’t know God’s will, so religion becomes faith alone. This conceptualism does the work of nominalism: universals are just names, there are no shared essences. Further, knowing purpose in an Aristotelian sense is impossible. Ockham’s denials gave rise to radical empiricism, wherein all is continent, nothing necessary, and there is no explaining God but only physical processes. Ockham’s conclusions were perverse. The church could not simultaneously eradicate error while being denied the ability to define the truth. Christianity was cut off from the ability to defend faith using reason; the Protestants were comfortable with this personalized justification.

After Bacon, science was no longer to understand nature for the sake of knowledge but for control, utility, and power. Hobbesian determinism asserted every event has a cause, and all valid explanations are mechanistic, given in terms of shape, size, motion, etc., but purpose is an unacceptable explanation. Descartes (again) turned the focus of philosophy to epistemology (i.e., how can we know?). Pascal’s views also confronted faith; his ‘wager’ is an orthodox Christian view of rationalism. Hume distinguished between impressions (empirical) and ideas (mental copies of impressions, the result of evaluating sense data), and concluded that to eliminate doubt about knowledge, only impressions could be admitted, resulting in radical doubt of ideas. Further, since it was impossible to define causation, as all that is valid is sensory, so it’s best to make educated guesses in favor of custom. Smith: morality develops from human sentiments: the ultimate standard of right and wrong is the standard of the impartial spectator (not the divine will).

Rousseau’s legislator replaces the messiah, as politics is the center of humanity, and he can solve problems by creating new kinds of men. Whereas Burke thought ancient legislators commenced from human nature. Kant: humans create reality by applying mental templates to objects we encounter, but we wouldn’t know the states of our minds were we not aware of permanent substances outside the mind. The existence of the world around us proves minds are working: rationalism (a priori template of the mind) and empiricism (the template translates sense data) results in transcendental idealism. Knowing the world beyond senses is transcendence, understanding the mind’s processes is idealism. Nietzsche’s understanding that weakened belief in Christianity led to disbelief is the culmination of Ockham-cum-Luther view that God can only be known by faith. From Ockham and Duns Scotus to Descartes to Hume and Kant, the emphasis was what we couldn’t know – doubt is the basis of epistemology – for the purpose of ‘freeing’ the individual.

Unlike the moderns, but equally in pursuit of individual liberation, the postmoderns rejected both reason and science. Husserl’s phenomenology focused not on the object in itself but on its perception. Preconceptions are to be ‘bracketed’ because our thoughts are intentional. The result reopens the Cartesian mind-body problem, so Husserl solves the solipsism by empathizing with others, which reveals the shared life-world. Heidegger disagrees, focusing on existence not knowledge, ontology not epistemology. Sartre: man has no essence prior to existence: the project of a lifetime is to determine one’s own essence. Derrida, following Saussure, uses binary opposition of terms (e.g., white-black) to turn every statement into its opposite, thus creating instability, not revealing it. Almost all of the things that matter most cannot be expressed by language, contrary to the view that language subsumes power. (Popper: we can’t prove ultimate truths but can show untruths. The open society embraces criticism in the spirit of intellectual excellence, but unlimited tolerance to the intolerant extinguishes criticism.)

Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II) followed Aquinas in combining reason and the senses. ‘Action constitutes the specific moment when the person is revealed’; ‘the body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible; the spiritual and the divine’. Alasdair McIntyre asserted a new dark age has arrived, for the moral life is already opposed by Westerners. Nietzsche’s call for ubermensch fails if Aristotle was right to emphasize ethics as natural and foundational. There are people as they are in nature, people as they could be, and the link is virtue.