Boethius
Who Was Boethius?
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (ca. 475–477 AD) was a Roman statesman, philosopher, public administrator, and translator of Aristotle's works. He is considered the Father of Scholasticism, or at least its principal contributor, the thinker who bequeathed to the Middle Ages a method and manner of philosophical inquiry that would shape Western thought for centuries.
Boethius lived at a critical hinge in history, when the ancient world was giving way to the medieval. He is best known for his Consolation of Philosophy, written while in prison after being wrongly accused of treason. In it, Lady Philosophy visits him in his cell to address the deepest questions of the human person, the nature of fortune, and how to live wisely in the face of adversity.
One of my favorite Boethian principles is his classical definition of the human person: persona est naturae rationabilis individua substantia, “an individual substance of rational nature” (Liber de Persona et Duabus Naturis). St. Thomas Aquinas builds directly upon this definition in his Summa Theologiae, and it remains philosophically vital today.
Boethius and the Unity of the Sciences
After his execution in 524 AD, Boethius's works became authoritative sources throughout the Middle Ages, serving as the foundation for the renewal of classical education. Even after Aristotle's works were reintroduced through Muslim scholars in 12th-century Europe, Boethius remained indispensable. St. Thomas quotes him extensively and builds upon his principles throughout his own corpus.
Of particular relevance to economics and the social sciences is St. Thomas's Commentary on Boethius's De Trinitate, which addresses the division and hierarchy of the sciences and their methods. St. Thomas's framework reveals that what we call “interdisciplinary” research today is only interdisciplinary because modernity has forgotten that all the sciences share a common starting point: the human person. Modern disciplines differ in their formal objects, not in their ultimate foundations.
A contemporary example makes the point sharply. Richard Thaler, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2017, is celebrated for “interdisciplinary” work that incorporates psychology into economic models. From the vantage point of St. Thomas's Commentary, however, economics and psychology are not two disciplines meeting across a divide. They are two perspectives on a single subject, the human person acting in social and economic life. The fusion Thaler achieved was not an innovation in method so much as a partial recovery of a unity that was always there.
Why This Matters Now
In the history of the West, certain developments have catapulted civilization by quantum leaps: ancient Greek philosophy, the Judeo-Christian tradition, ancient Rome, the learning culture of the monasteries, scholasticism, the medieval universities, the Gutenberg press, and the Industrial Revolution. Each expanded human capacity in a foundational way.
Our digital age offers something different: unprecedented access to information, but without the formation in wisdom needed to use it well. We have forgotten how to think about the information we obtain. I believe the Ancients would be perplexed to find a civilization of extraordinary technical specialization that has lost the capacity for part-whole reasoning, and that routinely mistakes the quick retrieval of facts for genuine understanding.
Like Boethius, my generation stands at a hinge moment. Generation X inherited perennial principles from the Baby Boomers and the Silent Generation, principles rooted in classical and medieval intellectual culture. That inheritance is now in danger of being lost in the transition to the world of Millennials and Generation Z.
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| Lady Philosophy offers Boethius wings so his mind can fly aloft. The French School (15th Century). |
My Purpose: The Boethian Renewal
I find myself in a situation that parallels Boethius's own. Like him, I hold positions in government, cherish philosophy, and feel a strong obligation to pass on the treasures of classical and medieval thought to those who will follow. Most economists agree that Adam Smith was the father of modern economics, but Smith was a moral philosopher who drew heavily on the classical tradition. Recovering that tradition is not antiquarianism; it is essential to making better policy decisions today.
There is a second parallel to Boethius that I have only recently come to appreciate fully. Boethius transmitted a tradition that was in danger of being lost due to the political collapse of the ancient world. I find myself in an analogous position with respect to a more recent rupture. The Lublin Philosophical School, developed at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (KUL), produced a sophisticated synthesis of Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics and the methodology of the sciences that remained largely unknown in the United States, not because of any philosophical shortcoming, but because the Iron Curtain sealed it off from the Western conversation for decades. This was a tradition that had thought carefully about the nature of science, the hierarchy of the disciplines, and how philosophy of science illuminates what science actually does — questions that twentieth-century philosophy of science in the United States was asking at the same time, without knowing that rigorous answers had already been worked out in Lublin. After 1989, KUL scholars began publishing in English to reach a broader international audience, but much of that work remains unfamiliar to American philosophers and scientists. My dissertation is a contribution to that effort: it makes explicit how KUL's methodology of the sciences helps clarify the nature of scientific knowledge and the role of science advice in public policy. In this sense, my work is itself an act of the Boethian Renewal — recovering and transmitting a tradition that history interrupted but did not extinguish.
The Boethian Renewal is my attempt to honor that obligation: to reintroduce classical and medieval philosophy into the study of economics, science, and society, and to help guide those who shape policy toward the wisdom that sound decision-making requires.