The synthesis of Thomism and phenomenology is one of the most fruitful philosophical programs of the twentieth century. Its fundamental thought: the phenomenological method discloses phenomena in their fullness and distinctiveness — it lets the things themselves speak. Thomism, the philosophical tradition founded by Thomas Aquinas, provides the ontological framework in which these phenomena find their systematic place: the doctrine of substance and accident, of act and potency, of form and matter, of the priority of being over acting.
Edith Stein was the first to realize this program systematically: in Finite and Eternal Being she joins Husserl’s phenomenology with the philosophy of being of Thomas. Karol Wojtyła follows a similar path in The Acting Person: he investigates the person phenomenologically — starting from the experience of acting — and interprets the results in a Thomistic key as acts of a substantial person. Josef Seifert, finally, develops in his personal ontology an independent synthesis that takes seriously both phenomenological evidence and classical ontology.
What unites these three thinkers is the conviction that neither pure Thomism nor pure phenomenology alone does justice to the reality of the person. Thomism without phenomenology threatens to become abstract — it speaks of the person in concepts that do not catch up with concrete lived experience. Phenomenology without Thomism threatens to lose ontological depth — it describes what shows itself, without asking what it is that shows itself there. Only in the synthesis of the two does it become visible that the person is an independent spiritual being that shows itself in its acts but does not dissolve into them. The Munich-Göttingen School of realist phenomenology forms the historical background of this program.
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology. Bexten 2017, pp. 92—155 (phenomenological personalists and their Thomistic grounding).
Further sources:
- Stein, Edith (1950/2006): Endliches und ewiges Sein. Versuch eines Aufstiegs zum Sinn des Seins. Freiburg: Herder. — Crit. ed.: ESGA, vols. 11/12, 2006. (Eng.: Finite and Eternal Being.)
- Wojtyła, Karol (1969): Osoba i czyn. Kraków. — Eng.: The Acting Person, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979.
- Seifert, Josef (1996): Sein und Wesen. Heidelberg: Winter (Philosophie und Realistische Phänomenologie, vol. 3).