Jared Oliphint wants you to know that non-experts should be very careful lest they get in trouble by practicing philosophy without a licence. He knows you might just start reading Augustine, but he does not recommend it. Better to let the contemporary experts tell you what philosophy is. In fact, better still, let them do it for you. Theologians and other "lay people" will likely just mess it up anyway.
For Oliphint, philosophy appears to be a technical discipline modelled on the scientific ideal embodied in the German research university definition of a science as it emerged in the nineteenth century. This sort of philosophy inquires into the meaning of language and uses logic to further its work. It is very technical and very hard for non-specialists to understand. Shh! Don't bother the adults when they are working.
But modern analytic philosophy has its own history. It didn’t fall of the sky fully formed in the twentieth century. Its context is the nineteenth century after the Enlightenment (eg. Hume) seemed to demolish the “substance metaphysics” of the mainstream philosophical tradition. In some ways modern, analytic philosophy still does some of the things philosophers have been doing for 2500 years, but not all of them. Various schools of post-Kantian philosophy cope with the rejection of traditional metaphysics in various ways. Most of them strive to find a way to keep philosophy relevant in an environment in which philosophical naturalist assumptions rule the academy.
The problem I have with most schools of modern philosophy, including Hegelian ones, phenomenology, existentialism, post-structuralism and analytic philosophy is that most of the time it is assumed that traditional metaphysics is either under suspicion or ignored entirely. For example, it is taken for granted all too often that the traditional proofs for the existence of God advanced by Aristotle, Augustine and Thomas are not valid. Even if one wanted to argue for their truth, one would have to do so without presupposing the metaphysical framework in which they made sense in the first place. The result of two centuries of this way of thinking has resulted in postmodern relativism and skepticism coming to dominate our culture. I criticize the philosophy as practiced in modern university departments to the extent that it either contributes to this relativism and skepticism or is impotent to reverse it.
For this reason, it seems clear to me that unless premodern metaphysics can be recovered as true, our present cultural decline – fueled by historicism, relativism and skepticism – cannot be reversed. You may say that this is a Quixotic mission – mission impossible even – but that is not the same thing as saying that the cultural decline we are living through can be reversed without such a recovery.
Christian theology from the early church fathers to the pro-Nicene fathers of the fourth century to Augustine and Anselm all worked in a careful and detailed manner to integrate valid insights from Greek metaphysics into their account of the Trinity and Incarnation. When the writings of Aristotle were rediscovered in the West during the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas built on the work of Augustine and the earlier fathers to integrate the valid insights of Aristotle into Christian orthodoxy and reject the secularizing and paganizing parts of Aristotle. The Protestant Reformers initially seemed to be rejecting Aristotle and Thomas entirely, but they never rejected Augustine. By the second generation of the Reformation, Protestant orthodoxy became very judicious about which bits of Thomas needed to be rejected and which needed to be retained as good. The Westminster Confession was written by theologians who stood within the orthodox tradition that employed scholastic categories skillfully to convey the truth of Scripture in doctrines such as the attributes of God, the Trinity, creation and providence and so forth. So, to simply join modernity in rejecting classical metaphysics creates enormous problems for those who wish to continue as historic Protestants by confessing the reformed confessions.
I did my BA (Hon) in the history of philosophy at Mount Allison University in the 1970's. We read only primary texts in all periods from the pre-Socratics to existentialism and logical positivism. I have read philosophy my whole life and hundreds of philosophy book sit on my bookshelves.
Mount Allison in the 1970’s was shaped by the University of Toronto philosophy department, which in the 1960s was the largest in the world and famous for its historical approach to the study of philosophy. One learns philosophy by doing philosophy with the tradition; one becomes a philosopher by being integrated into a way of life. In my opinion, the decline in the teaching of philosophy by teaching the history of the tradition is the biggest weakness in contemporary philosophy. (Not coincidentally, the teaching of theology suffers from a similar weakness in its approach.)
One example of the quality of philosophy at Toronto was the establishment of the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies, which was founded in 1929 by Etienne Gilson, among others. The revival of Thomism then in progress gave a large impetus to the pushback against modern ahistorical tendencies. The influence of the PIMS on the University of Toronto philosophy department was extensive. Even non-Thomists in the Toronto and Mount Allison orbit were highly respectful of the history of philosophy and saw ancient wisdom as a subject worthy of study in its own right and as containing much permanent wisdom.
The Platonic tradition (in the broad sense, which is inclusive of the Augustinian-Thomist stream) was seen as superior to modern philosophy in many ways. And here we come to the crux of the disagreement between Oliphint and me. I think that Thomistic metaphysics is in many respects true and of permanent value. Does he? I think that the classical metaphysics, which the reformed confessions use to express central Christian doctrines, is true. Does he?
I have to smile at his pretentious posturing as the "expert" in whom wisdom begins and ends. I’m afraid I must decline to agree that contemporary philosophy is superior to that of the ancients. No, except where it takes ancient wisdom as true, it is, for the most part, a reductionist parody of philosophy historically understood.
My advice is “To the sources!”