Dividing and Relating the Sciences in Aquinas – Fr. Philip-Neri Reese, O.P.

The Thomistic Institute

Christianity, Religion &Amp; Spirituality, Society & Culture, Catholic Intellectual Tradition, Catholic, Philosophy, Religion & Spirituality, Thomism, Catholicism

4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 23 September 2025

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Fr. Philip-Neri Reese analyzes Aquinas’s method for dividing and relating the sciences, clarifying the distinction between speculative and practical sciences, the role of material and formal causes, and the concept of mixed or subalternated sciences.

This lecture was given on July 17th, 2025, at Dominican House of Studies.

For more information on upcoming events, visit us at thomisticinstitute.org/upcoming-events.

About the Speakers:

Fr. Philip-Neri Reese is a Dominican friar of the Province of St Joseph and a Professor of Philosophy at the Pontifical University of St.Thomas (Angelicum) in Rome. He is also the principal investigator for the Angelicum Thomistic Institute’s new Project on Philosophy and the Thomistic Tradition. He received his Licentiate in Philosophy from the Catholic University of America in 2015 and his Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Notre Dame in 2022. From 2015-2017 he taught philosophy at Providence College in Providence, RI. His main area of research is metaphysics and anything adjacent to it, with a special emphasis on the metaphysical thought of St. Thomas Aquinas and its subsequent reception and interpretation. His publications, however, range widely, including articles on philosophical anthropology, ethics, and economics. He is also an enthusiast of classical Indian philosophy. Fr Philip-Neri is a member of the American Philosophical Association, the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy, the Aquinas and the Arabs International Working Group, the Society for Medieval and Renaissance Thomism, and is currently serving on the executive committee of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

Keywords: Aristotelianism, Causality, Formal and Material Division, Intellectual Virtues, Mathematics, Metaphysics, Mixed Sciences, Natural Philosophy, Practical Sciences, Summa Theologiae

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to the Tumistic Institute podcast.
0:05.2	Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.
0:12.1	The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Tumistic Institute chapters around the world.
0:18.5	To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at
0:21.5	Thomistic Institute.org. So as Father Thomas mentioned, this talk is called dividing and relating
0:28.8	the sciences in Aquinas. And so I'm going to do some of the things that I say are going to
0:35.0	overlap in hopefully interesting and mutually reinforcing ways with some of the things that I say are going to overlap in hopefully interesting and mutually
0:39.0	reinforcing ways with some of the things that Dr. Gorman said earlier today.
0:44.0	I'm also going to be engaged in a project of translating Tomes or Tomish, is that
0:50.8	Tomish, into sort of more ordinary everyday speak?
0:57.0	But my approach is going to be a little bit more methodological than his approach.
1:03.0	One thing, what I will not be discussing in this lecture is a so-called hierarchy of the sciences.
1:10.8	So is it possible to order the different disciplines in kind of a hierarchical list from best to worst?
1:22.3	Yes, it is.
1:23.5	I'm not going to be interested in doing that today.
1:26.3	My goal is not to sort of like be a metaphysical triumphalist or something like that. Rather, what I want to do is talk about how to divide them and then how to relate them. So this talk has three very simple goals. First, I want to clarify for you the meaning of the term science as it appears in Aquinas
1:47.0	and contrast that with the way that we ordinarily speak of science.
1:52.0	Then I want to walk you through Aquinas' principled divisions between the kind of the basic genre or the broadest kind of classifications of science.
2:03.6	And then I'll introduce you to the basics of his theory of what are called mixed or subalternated sciences.
2:11.6	But on that point, I'm going to leave much of the hard work to Dr. Brian Carl for later on in the talk. So this is great.
2:20.3	So I get to build off of what Professor Gorman has done, and then I get to punt all the really
2:25.8	hard stuff to Professor Carl later on, and I get to occupy the sort of happy, virtuous mean.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Thomistic Institute, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of The Thomistic Institute and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.