And at the top of this hierarchy was God, the being identified with Aristotle's First Mover which ultimately moved everything in accordance with Divine Providence.Ĭentral to this ontological hierarchy was the Aristotelian doctrine of hylomorphism. Human beings had a special place in this hierarchy – they were the most superior of the animals since they were endowed with an intellect, yet they were lower than the angels since angels were pure intellects in the Christian-Aristotelian synthesis. According to both Christianity and Aristotelian philosophy there was a hierarchy of being. For this it had the Christian-Aristotelian synthesis to thank. The medieval Church of course had its own struggles to face, but at least the central tenets of the Christian faith were not obviously unreasonable. Since the rise of the modern scientific world view and the abandonment of Aristotelianism, the Christian world view has come under a lot of pressure.
One of the goals of this book is, therefore, to encourage a greater interest in neo-Aristotelian metaphysics, and it does this by bringing together a series of sixteen essays that highlight what neo-Aristotelianism has to offer in contemporary debates in the philosophy of science and religion. Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics and the Theology of Nature will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in metaphysics, philosophy of science, natural theology, philosophical theology, and analytic theology.Although by no-means insignificant, the number of Christian theologians and philosophers who embrace neo-Aristotelian metaphysics is still relatively small. By pushing the current boundaries of neo-Aristotelian metaphysics to recover the traditional notion of substantial forms in physics, reframe the principle of proportionality in biology, and restore the hierarchy of being familiar to ancient philosophy, this book advances a metaphysically unified framework that accommodates both scientific and theological knowledge, enriching the interaction between science, philosophy and theology. The chapters in this volume are collected into three thematic sections: Naturalism and Nature, Mind and Nature, and God and Nature. Despite the growing interest in Aristotelian approaches to contemporary philosophy of science, few metaphysicians have engaged directly with the question of how a neo-Aristotelian metaphysics of nature might change the landscape for theological discussion concerning theology and naturalism, the place of human beings within nature, or the problem of divine causality.
It features original contributions by some of the best scholars engaging with Aristotelianism in contemporary metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophical theology.
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