Review of new book of the First Way

Over at Thomistica, I have reviewed Daniel Shields’s book Nature and Nature’s God. It is highly recommended.

An excerpt from the review:

For too long has Aquinas’s motion proof languished in the gaol of a contemporary Thomistic metaphysics unwilling to fully countenance the debt which Aquinas’s metaphysics owes to Aristotelian natural philosophy and unable to recapture the ground taken by materialist, naturalist, or positivist accounts of the cosmos. Shields’s book represents a real jail-break and counterattack. The rich achievements and possibilities of his Thomistic engagement with the natural sciences avoid an overarching methodological critique one might lodge. That is, one might think that the historical part of the book is surreptitiously doing the work of an unwritten philosophical part of the book that in turn reads the history of science in a spirit of “facile concordism” (see Maritain, Degrees of Knowledge, 60). This is not the case. The careful examination of what Aquinas actually meant and upon what empirical basis he propounds natural philosophical principles are included in both parts of the work and subjected to scrupulous examination.