Due to my teaching load and doctoral research, I won’t be able to give the follow up to my previous post regarding the nature of wisdom right now. However, I hope to do so in a week or two. In light of that, I’ll just present this thought …

Making the case that metaphysics—or more specifically—that ontology matters in our current cultural climate can be a tricky affair. Not many have the patience or interest in such things. And most, I imagine, are caught up in daily concerns that take up their time and energy. This is completely understandable. Nor is everyone called to be a philosopher. But there are those who believe that Max Planck was correct when he said, “there is a metaphysical reality behind everything that human experience shows to be real.” He also explained that, “metaphysical reality does not stand spatially behind what is given in experience, but lies fully within it.” There seems to be a fixed order of reality that lies within the sequence of phenomena in experience (what Aristotelian-Thomists call hylomorphism and we’ll get to that term later). How we understand these first principles determine how we understand and live in the world around us. What the great metaphysicians of the Western intellectual tradition are trying to get at is this—reality is the determinate of order, and understanding this order has implications for our personal lives, social concerns, and what it means for civilization to genuinely thrive. Wisdom is the virtue of using our metaphysical and ontological knowledge well.