W. Norris Clarke

The Reverend William Norris Clarke SJ
Born	1 June 1915
Died	10 June 2008 (aged 93)
Era	21st-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy

William Norris Clarke, SJ (1 June 1915 - 10 June 2008) was an American Thomist philosopher and Jesuit priest. He was a president of the Metaphysical Society of America, as well as founder and editor of the International Philosophical Quarterly.

Possessing a lively personality and restless intellect, Clarke did not allow his philosophical quest to be limited by traditional interpretations of the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. He insisted that

interpersonal phenomenologies need the ontological grounding of dynamic substance or nature as a unified center for its many relations and its self-identity through time; Thomistic metaphysics needs to enrich the data it is seeking to explain by the more detailed concrete descriptions of the actual life of real persons provided so richly by phenomenology.

He was a major opponent of Neo-scholastic interpretations of Saint Thomas and Saint Anselm.

Books

• The Philosophical Approach to God: A Contemporary Neo-Thomistic Perspective, 1979, revised edition in 2007.
• Person and Being 1993; reprinted with additional commentary by Ranier R. A. Ibana as Person, Being and Ecology in 1996
• Explorations in Metaphysics: Being-God-Person, University of Notre Dame Press, 1995
• The One and the Many: A Contemporary Thomistic Metaphysics (2001)

Media

• A Taste of Existence with W. Norris Clarke
• A Creative Retrieval of Thomism with W. Norris Clarke, S.J.
• A Reflection on God's Existence, by Fr. Norris Clarke