Sir, - In a rather brief piece about Prof James McEvoy entitled "A high achiever and a conservative" (The Irish Times, December 13th), Andy Pollak referred to the subject of Scholastic Philosophy and identified it as "Catholic philosophy". Such an identification is untrue.
Scholastic Philosophy is one among the many traditions of philosophical endeavour in the history of the West. As philosophy, it is a purely human enquiry, relying on the human capacities of experiencing, questioning, understanding, judgement, and depending on evidence and argument alone to establish its positions. It does not and cannot appeal to revelation or religious faith without ceasing to be philosophy, for it is constitutive of philosophy to proceed on the basis of human cognitional powers alone.
For this reason, philosophy in the proper sense cannot be correctly designated as Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, nor by any other religious prefix that connotes a notion of Divine revelation. - Yours, etc.,
Tim Lynch,
Department of Scholastic
Philosophy,
Queen's University, Belfast.