Pietra

and on this rock...

I have been trying to slowly chisel away at my Aquinas book but with the hours spent in the office, it is becoming a real herculean struggle. I've really gotten myself into a mess this time. What started off as a supposed cure to jet-lag induced sleepless nights has now become an addiction. Aquinas turns out to be surprisingly 'modern' for his time and reading him has made me realised how many modern day ideas stem from his writings. At the end of his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein writes one of his most quoted quotes 'Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is'. For him, how the world is is a scientific matter with scientific answers even if we do not have all the answers as yet. But he also states in Tractatus 'We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all'. This is an insistence on the point that even when the scientific answers are in, we are still left with the thatness of the world, the fact that it is. To my surprise, Aquinas seems to be of a similar mind. Aquinas appears to suggest that we can explore the world and develop an account of what things in it are. But he also thinks that we are then left with a non-scientific question. How come that there is any world at all?