Professor Knasas has kindly responded to my rejoinder to his reply to my review of his book. He considers, once again, Aristotle’s argument for the eternity of motion from time, discusses the limits of natural philosophic speculation when it comes to imagining realities beyond those limits, discusses the limits of the considerations of natural philosophy in regard to the human soul as a subject of contemplation, and concludes with a reminder to a text central to his aforementioned book (ST, Ia, q. 44, a. 2) as emblematic of his interpretation as part of the project of existentialist Thomism.

In this essay, I respond to various points and counterarguments made by John F. X. Knasas in his reply to my review of his book. (In what follows, all quotations unless sourced otherwise are from Knasas’s reply.) Knasas’s main focus is my contention that it is not necessary to deploy metaphysics to defeat the Aristotelian arguments for the eternity of motion and time. In particular, he disputes the end of §4 of my review, beginning with “Absent from this analysis, however, ...”.

For too long has Aquinas’s motion proof languished in the gaol of a contemporary Thomistic metaphysics unwilling to fully countenance the debt which Aquinas’s metaphysics owes to Aristotelian natural philosophy and unable to recapture the ground taken by materialist, naturalist, or positivist accounts of the cosmos. Shields’s book represents a real jail-break and counterattack.