A Course on Evolution and Thomism 1 - Comments on Mariusz Tabaczek's Arc of Inquiry (2019-2024) Part 1

Presumably, the works covered in this commentary cover ideas spanning from long before the period of publication. Mariusz Tabaczek O.P. is first and foremost a Thomist, familiar with the labors of Aquinas, dating to the thirteenth century. At the same time, Tabaczek participates in a Thomistic revival, a quest for a "neo-neo-Aristotelianism" (because Thomas Aquinas marks the first neo-Aristotelianism), called for by a pope in the late nineteenth century in order to provide an alternative to modernism. Consequently, Tabaczek narrows his Thomism to a slightly modified view of thirteenth century concepts. He does very well, by the reckoning of this commentator, because he selects one of the weak joints in the modernist citadel, the scientific treatment of emergence. Scientists cannot build mathematical and mechanical models of emergence, both in material science (for example, the fairly simple hydrogen-oxygen fuel cell) and in biological science (for example, mitochondria). This is a real weakness, since scientists are supposed to build models based on observations and measurements of phenomena, using their specialized disciplinary languages. Somewhat disturbingly, this commentator proposes that Tabaczek's initial accomplishment is the dismissal (or perhaps, "termination") of the positivist intellect that serves as the relation within the Positivist's judgment. What great aim! With the positivist intellect "dismissed", the two great illuminations of the Positivist's judgment have no choice but to enter into secondness, resulting in a pair of dyads, one illuminated by the model and the other illuminated by the noumenon. Yes, a mathematical or mechanical model is not its noumenon, the thing itself, even though a triumphalist science-maven would have you believe that the…