Welcome to the Tomistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.

Let me just say a few words of preface.

This lecture is, well, so my parents have been going to Acadia National Park in Maine

for about 30 years in a row every summer. And if you've

ever been to Acadia, you know it has a lot of small mountains next to the sea that you can

climb in a couple of hours, but they're very steep as sense. So, and there are long, rocky

trains where you can actually fall quite readily, very far if you're not careful. So they put

up these handrails that go

alongside the mountains so you can walk up in just like half an hour an hour to a wonderful view.

So what I'm going to do is Hugh quite close to the mountain here because I'm going to try to talk

about Aristotle Aquinas, Kant, and Nietzsche on the question of metaphysical knowledge.

And I have some texts to help guide us and to give kind of, you know, kind of, you might say, to scale a very high, you know, high perspective fast and hopefully accurately by staying close to the textual claims of the four authors in question.

Some reading I would recommend to go further, and in this domain you can go much further,

is Adrian Moore's excellent book from Oxford University Press, The Evolution of Modern

Metaphysics, which has a chapter on Kant and a chapter on Nietzsche,

each of which is simply wonderful, I think deeply insightful as to what's going on in each of

those thinkers in terms of aspirations to realism. And Moore himself, I think, was a Kantian

in his demeanor and then has kind of moved away.

And so there's an interesting dialogue going on there about skepticism and realism.

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