Stichwort: System

Autor, Quelle: Lonergan, Papers1

Titel:

Index: System; Axiome, Deduktion vs. Grundtätigkeiten

Kurzinhalt: Now St Thomas is systematic. Of what does his system consist? It consists of a basic set of operations that can be combined and recombined in various ways ...

Text: 68a Let me handle very briefly the notion of a system.1 If anyone reads St Thomas, one notices no similarity to Euclidean procedure. He does not start from a set of definitions and axioms, and he never treats any question by giving one proof and writing the matter off with Quod erat demonstrandum. Rather, he sets up an ordered series of questions, and in the Summa theologiae he subdivides the questions into articles. In a work like the Summa contra Gentiles, in his ordered set of topics, he brings to bear on each, not just one argument but several, and sometimes approximately twenty, and the arguments are all different; but when you move to the next question, well, it is pretty much the same arguments coming up again in a somewhat different application, and so on. Now St Thomas is systematic. Of what does his system consist? It consists of a basic set of operations that can be combined and recombined in various ways, and the various combinations are able to handle all the questions that arise. We have here, then, a concept, a notion, of system that is something far less static and abstract than Euclidean deduction. Moreover, it is a notion of system that can be applied to very concrete, very human developments. It is the fundamental notion of Piaget's some twenty volumes on child psychology.2 Now, if you conceive system this way - a man has a system, he is thinking systematically, he is reaching systematic knowledge, insofar as he possesses a basic set of related operations - then, because the operations are related, the terms, the products, of the operations will be related. Because the operations are related to one another, the operations can be combined in various ways. You can have all sorts of terms, all sorts of problems, and you will know exactly what the meaning is in each term because you know exactly what the operations are and what are the relations between them. Moreover, one has, as it were, the mastery of a field in which this group of operations is more or less the principle and the intelligibility. (Fs)