This is the fifth in a series of posts on my own philosophical journey; the first post is here.

Time passed, and eventually I made the acquaintance of G.K. Chesterton. These were the days before Amazon was around, and when it came to buying books the thrill of the chase was everything. Where ever we went, we went to bookstores; and in every bookstore I looked to see if they had anything by Chesterton I hadn’t seen before. And eventually I acquired a copy of St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, Chesterton’s biography of St. Thomas Aquinas. I read it, and enjoyed it, but didn’t retain much of it, and put it away. Mostly what I remembered was Chesterton’s conjecture that there was something eminently sane about Thomas, something that couldn’t be said about Descartes and his successors. Then I put the book away, and it stayed put away until just a few years ago, when God’s grace led me back to Thomas and Thomas led me back to the Catholic Church (with the help of many others).

I’ve told that story before, at probably rather excessive length, so I won’t repeat it here. It suffices to say that I grew interested in Thomas and his philosophy and his theology, and began to start boning up on it. I blogged quite a lot of the early part of that here. But in order to understand Thomas, I discovered that I needed to understand Aristotle, and from the philosophical point of view that’s what I’ve been working on ever since.

And the fascinating thing about Aristotle, a thing that is completely retained by Thomas, is his emphasis on what we know from personal experience. Woohoo! Between the two of them, I felt like I’d come home.

Part VI