Medieval Modal Logic & Science uses modal reasoning in a new way to fortify the relationships between science, ethics, and politics. Robert C. Trundle accomplishes this by analyzing the role of modal logic in the work of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, then applying these themes to contemporary issues. He incorporates Augustine's ideas involving thought and consciousness, and Aquinas's reasoning to a First Cause. The author also deals with Augustine's ties to Aristotelian modalities of thought regarding science and logic, reassessing the commonly held belief in Augustine's Platonism to not be a mistake as much as a simplistic view of his philosophy. Trundle links contemporary issues in epistemology, morality, theology, and logic, making several useful connections between ancient and medieval studies in modal logic and modern concerns. These applications of modal theory illuminate many puzzles in the works of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Whitehead, and Kuhn.

This book reveals a remarkable oddity about the mainstream philosophy of science. While rejecting a noxious relativism, it is unable to ascribe "truth" to scientific theories that also are divorced conceptually from ethics and politics. There is much at stake since these dilemmas have led to a politicized truth whereby "truth" in these areas is often decided ideologically. But the ideology and splintered areas collide head-on with our awareness of ourselves and the world. By relating a world of which we are phenomenologically conscious to a common-sense reasoning, a novel case is made for objective scientific truth, a true causal principle, and the principle's implication of a First Cause. This Cause, as a Creator of Nature, begets moral norms intrinsic to scientific descriptions of our psycho-biological nature since our nature was created as it ought to be; affording a naturalistic ethics that can be as true as the science that informs it. Medicine and its allied sciences are used to illustrate this moral import in terms of a revitalized support of the traditional family -- a perennial norm expressed by the dictum "As the family goes, so goes the state." Thus a state's support of the family exemplifies how normative political claims can be as true as a scientific ethics that informs them. The logical link of ethics to science and politics marks the reasoning implicit in a natural theology common to the major monotheistic religions. And so despite the faults of all organizations, this book suggests one reason why those religions flourished over the ages. Outlasting the Roman Empire and modern ideologies that boasted vainly of reigning to the end of history, the religions address a personal spirituality and fulfill human nature. They render coherent an experienced world where truth coincides in science, ethics, politics, and religion.