On St. Albert the Great's Feast Day: Magisterium on the True Scientific Method

Pope Leo XIII says in his 4 August 1879 encyclical on the restoration of Christian philosophy, Æterni Patris:

30. And here it is well to note that our philosophy can only by the grossest injustice be accused of being opposed to the advance and development of natural science. For, when the Scholastics, following the opinion of the holy Fathers, always held in anthropology that the human intelligence is only led to the knowledge of things without body and matter by things sensible, they well understood that nothing was of greater use to the philosopher than diligently to search into the mysteries of nature and to be earnest and constant in the study of physical things. And this they confirmed by their own example; for St. Thomas, Blessed [now Saint] Albertus Magnus, and other leaders of the Scholastics were never so wholly rapt in the study of philosophy as not to give large attention to the knowledge of natural things; and, indeed, the number of their sayings and writings on these subjects, which recent professors approve of and admit to harmonize with truth, is by no means small. Moreover, in this very age many illustrious professors of the physical sciences openly testify that between certain and accepted conclusions of modern physics and the philosophic principles of the schools there is no conflict worthy of the name.

Happy feast day today of St. Albert the Great!

Benedict M. Ashley, O.P., RIP

Angelicum Newsletter Blog: Benedict M. Ashley, O.P., RIP

He wrote his last email to me when he just turned 97 years old!

See my Aristotelian Thomism page (he preferred that term to River Forest Thomism) and his page on MoreC.com. He assumed a special rôle in the review process of Physics for Realists by Dr. Anthony Rizzi of the Institute for Advanced Physics.

Requiescat in pace.

UPDATE: A close correspondent of Fr. Ashley just wrote to me what could be considered a good obituary, the beginning of which is below:

As you probably have heard by now, Father Ashley died on Saturday, only 69 days short of his 98th birthday. He is a tremendous loss to all of us. I am told that he was intellectually active until the end, and that a month before he died, he was able to receive into his hands the printed version of his autobiography [available online] published now by the New Priory Press. In one of my letters to him, I had written that in my opinion, that is his most important book, since it supplies the absolutely essential keys to understanding his whole philosophical and theological enterprize (the 'experimentum' which serves as both the ground and the terminus of all human knowing in this life). In reply to my letter of condolance, the provincial, Fr. Bouchard, told me that, at the time of his death, Ashley had several completed or almost completed manuscripts on his desk and that his confreres are now preparing them for publication. I don't know their content as yet, but I can hardly wait to see them.