Dr. Christopher S. Morrissey
Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Redeemer Pacific College
Specialist in the Medieval Latin Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and His Commentatorial Tradition

"It is because the contemporary alternatives seem so one-sided and are not more evidently solutions to the problems which Thomas faced, and partly solved, that we return to him and to the tradition of theology and philosophy in which his Summa Theologiae appears: theology as the science of the first principle and this as the total knowledge of reality in its unity." -- Wayne J. Hankey, God in Himself (Oxford University Press, 1987), p.159.

My primary research interest is Metaphysics. This is a pursuit traditionally expressed (from St. Augustine of Hippo, to St. Thomas Aquinas, to John of St. Thomas, and beyond) in an interdisciplinary, intercultural enterprise of Metascience that Aristotle first discovered via the Philosophy of Nature as the foundational part of Natural Science. In connection with this, I am a certified member of the Institute for Advanced Physics.

Metascience in our day is called to build upon traditional metaphysics with "applied metaphysics", as W. Norris Clarke describes in his article, "Metaphysics as Mediator Between Revelation and the Natural Sciences," Communio: International Catholic Review 28, no. 3 (2001): 464-87. Benedict Ashley, in The Way toward Wisdom, p.440, describes this as "the most radical change" required "in present university education and in our culture": "a rethinking of the foundations of natural science."

I am especially interested in how Phenomenology "can help restore the understanding of being and mind that was accepted in classical Greek philosophy and medieval thought and can still take into account certain contributions of modernity, especially those of science" (as Robert Sokolowski put it). Still, one must constantly keep in mind how "phenomenology needs metaphysics" and how "a fully rounded philosopher must do both", as W. Norris Clarke puts it on page 570 of his "John Paul II: The Complementarity of Faith and Philosophy in the Search for Truth," Communio: International Catholic Review 26, no. 2 (1999): 557-570. (Cf. Benedict Ashley, The Way toward Wisdom, p.186, p.263, and p.290.)

My Aristotelian-Thomistic studies have focused on Aquinas' commentaries on the natural philosophy of Aristotle's Physics. My current interests include the development, from the Latin philosophy of nature of John of St. Thomas, of the foundational doctrine of signs for the interdisciplinary field of semiotics. My doctoral dissertation made a semiotic study of mimetic theory and generative anthropology. With all these researches, my purpose has been to help keep the perennial philosophy of St. Thomas as a living tradition fully engaged with the very best of the latest interdisciplinary, intercultural thinking. (On semiotics, cf. Benedict Ashley, The Way toward Wisdom, pp.51-2, 296-97.)

I am part of what Ralph McInerny has described in his book Aquinas (Polity Press, 2004) as "a new generation of freelance Thomists"; we are "autodidacts rather than disciples" and "there is something like a secret handshake by which the scattered devotees acknowledge one another" (p.150). Here's a picture of Ralph signing a copy of his book for me: