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The response to the special 2019 issue of Studia Gilsoniana on economics was so positive that it led to the creation of the Aquinas School of Leadership School of Economics (ASLSE). This 2021 publication is, therefore, a second special issue of Studia Gilsoniana on the same theme and the second installment of ASLSE’s economic journals. We are delighted to present here further fruits of thought from the maturing Studia Gilsoniana and ASLSE partnership. Economics is held to be a value-free, scientific enterprise, and as such there can be no relationship between economics and religion. Ayn Rand, a well-known novelist-turned-philosopher, took this position in an unapologetic way in her writings, specifically in her novel Atlas Shrugged. The contrary position to what we might call the Randian “strict separation” thesis holds that economics and religion are related, in some way and to some degree, and therefore should be considered in tandem. The papers in this special edition of Studia Gilsoniana set out to show the extent and quality of the relationship between economics and religion from a variety of viewpoints and historical periods.

Jorge J. E. Gracia, was born in Cuba in 1942. At age 19, he escaped Cuba and arrived in the United States. In 2019, 58 years later, in a nation which, prior to his arrival in North America, had no major Latino cultural presence in higher education and philosophy, Gracia rose to hold the Samuel P. Capen Chair and State University of New York at Buffalo Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literature. In this position, he became the leading figure to institutionalize Latin American philosophy in the U.S. academy and an internationally-renowned scholar in medieval philosophy. Jorge J. E. Gracia died in the United States on July 13, 2021. In this paper the author shows that what properly explains the philosophical and adult-personal life of Gracia is the Thomistic principle of virtual quantity. He contends that the only way to understand Gracia’s personal and philosophical life is to grasp this life as one of an organizational psychologist pursuing perfect self-realization in action and understanding: someone chiefly interested in intellectually grasping precisely how organizational wholes (including his own psyche) become united and divided, and operate when so united and divided.

This article considers the nature of Marxism as a species of Enlightenment Utopian Socialism, the relation of both these to a denial of nature of common sense properly understood. It argues that underlying all species of Enlightenment Utopian Socialism are psychological principles that deny the reality of evidently known first principles of understanding that are measures of truth in all forms of psychologically healthy human knowing and reasoning. In addition, it maintains that, as a result of these essentially anarchic psychological first principles inherent in its nature, any attempt to apply any species of Utopian Socialism to develop healthy social organizations and cultural institutions—such as forms of human communication and educational and political instittions—is doomed to fail. Utopian Socialism will always destroy common sense in whatever it infects with its disordered habits of understanding and reasoning.

This article defends the teaching of Mortimer J. Adler that human education must aim at the betterment of human beings by forming good habits in us; and that, if intellectual and moral virtues, or good habits, are the same for all human beings because our natural capacities are the same and tend naturally to the same developments, then what logically follows is that the intellectual and moral virtues, or good habits, as the ends of education, are the absolute and universal principles on which education should always and everywhere be founded. This being the case, it concludes that, because of its essential foundation in the essentially flawed Enlightenment understanding of human nature, the New World Order can never be a cause of higher education, can, at best, cause a caricature of it.

This paper is written to articulate in a summary form 14 evidently-known essential and personalistic principles from the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas needed, especially by Pope Francis, to understand a third period of neo-Thomism we are now in: Born-again, or Ragamuffin, Thomism. It maintains that, without application of these principles to the Church’s “new evangelization,” this movement will fail. With that failure the Church will be unable to halt the cultural suicide in which the West is presently engaged.

While Aristotle’s and St. Thomas’s teachings about economics are often ridiculed today, this article argues that actually what they had to say about this issue, especially about the nature of sound currency, backed up by force of law, is quite profound. According to both of them, sound money plays an essential role in the preserving commutative justice within States. By so doing, it preserves communication between talented people who make qualitatively unequal contributions to a State’s continued existence and welfare.

The chief aim of this article is to show that St. Thomas Aquinas’s Fourth Way of demonstrating God’s existence can only be made precisely intelligible by comprehending it as a real, generic whole in light of its specific organizational principles. Considered as a real, generic whole, this argument is one from effect to cause (from a real order of more or less perfectly existing generic, specific, and individual beings [habens esse] more or less perfectly possessing generic, specific, and individual ways of being within qualitatively different, hierarchical, orders of existence to a first cause of this order of perfections). In addition, this article maintains that, to comprehend this complicated argument, readers mush be familiar with philosophical principles that St. Thomas repeatedly uses throughout his major works, but with which most of his contemporary students tend to be unfamiliar. Consequently, a secondary aim of this paper is to introduce readers unfamiliar with them to some of these principle so that they may be able better to comprehend what St. Thomas is saying in this demonstration and in other teachings of his as well.

The author makes an attempt to show why (1) Darwin’s teaching in The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex cannot be “scientific” in a modern, classical, or any, sense and that, consequently, in them, (2) Darwin did not scientifically prove the reality of evolution of species. He claims that, while the question of the origin of genera and species is principally and primarily a metaphysical problem, Darwin’s ignorance of the nature of philosophy and metaphysics and the complexity of the problem of the nature of genera and species caused him mistakenly to frame this metaphysical problem as one of physics, more precisely as one of biology, which Darwin reduced to a natural history of living, physical beings.

Since most pressing today on a global scale is to be able to unite religion, philosophy, and science into parts of a coherent civilizational whole, and since the ability to unite a multitude into parts of a coherent whole essentially requires understanding the natures of the things and the way they can or cannot be essentially related, this paper chiefly considers precisely why the modern world has been unable to effect this union. In so doing, it argues that the chief cause of this inability to unite these cultural natures has been because the contemporary world, and the West especially, has lost its understanding of philosophy and science and has intentionally divorced from essential connection to wisdom. Finally, it proposes a common sense way properly to understand these natures, reunite them to wisdom, and revive Western and global civilization.

This article argues that, strictly speaking, from its inception with the ancient Greeks and for all time, philosophy and science are identical and consist in an essential relationship between a specific type of understanding of the human person as possessed of an intellectual soul capable of being habituated and a psychologically-independent composite whole, or organization. It maintains, further, that absence of either one of the extremes of this essential relationship cannot be philosophy/science and, if mistaken for such and applied to the workings of cultural institutions, will generate anarchy within human culture and make leadership excellence impossible to achieve. Finally, it argues that only a return to this “common sense” understanding of philosophy can generate the leadership excellence that can save the West from its current state of cultural and civilizational anarchy.

The chief aim of this paper is to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt how, through an essential misunderstanding of the nature of philosophy, and science, over the past several centuries, the prevailing Western tendency to reduce the whole of science to mathematical physics unwittingly generated utopian socialism as a political substitute for metaphysics. In short, being unable speculatively, philosophically, and metaphysically to justify this reduction, some Western intellectuals re-conceived the natures of philosophy, science, and metaphysics as increasingly enlightened, historical and political forms of the evolution of human consciousness toward creation of systematic science, a science of clear and distinct ideas. In the process they unwittingly wound up reducing contemporary philosophy and Western higher education largely into tools of utopian socialist political propaganda.

The author aims at answering why preserving, reading, and understanding the work of Étienne Gilson is crucial for the Western civilization if one wishes to be able to understand precisely the problems that are besetting the West and how one can best resolve them. He claims that among all the leading intellectuals of the past or present generation, no one has better diagnosed the philosophical ills of Western culture and better understood the remedy for those ills than has Étienne Gilson.

In this paper, I take for granted that, today, something is radically wrong metaphysically with Western culture. I maintain that this problem arises, as Marcel says, from the very depths of our being. This paper's purpose is to consider some aspects of Marcel's metaphysical teaching, especially about our need to start philosophizing in the concrete, not the abstract, situation, to battle against the spirit of abstraction, and use these reflections for the practical purpose of considering what sorts of steps we need to take at the present moment to recover philosophical practice in the postmodern age. Within the context of this paper, I argue that Marcel is a realist humanist in the tradition of Plato and Aquinas whose battle against the spirit of abstraction is fundamentally a fight against nominalism and sophistry.