Richard Rorty once said 'The world does not speak'. The resultant practice of deconstruction and the tendency to reduce difference to cultural artefacts lead, in Keenan's view, to intellectual fragmentation and socio-cultural polarisation. (intensified by the ongoing pandemic). But, for Aquinas the world does 'speak', it is possessed of an intrinsic intelligibility and coherence.
Here, Aquinas offers an alternative to today's congenitally postmodern thinkers, students and intelligent general readers - an antidote to their deconstructive slumbers - an alternative and surprisingly intuitive picture of reality that 'works' on both scientific and philosophical levels. On Keenan's understanding of Aquinas, the world's 'speaking' is a bulwark against the more violent and nihilistic aspects of deconstruction. Those who subscribe to a mute cosmos will find in Aquinas a formidable opponent. Thinkers who are influenced by postmodernism have celebrated disruption as generative of fresh insights and as undermining perceived hegemonies. But Aquinas's world view is integrative, it is resistant to the totalitarianism feared by postmodernity.
