Should Old Aquinas be forgot?

David Chalmers asks if anyone knows the words to the philosophers’ drinking song “Should Old Aquinas be forgot?”. This is the kind of thing at which Ecco excels. Within seconds I have extracted from its bowels eight lines:

Should old Aquinas be forgot
and never brought to mind?
Should old Aquinas be forgot
in these days of Wittgenstein?

Can quiddity, haececity,
analogies divine,
Resolve the paradoxes of
Willard van Orman Quine?

I thought this was taught me by the late, great, and sometimes sober Dominican Herbert McCabe, and that Terry Eagleton would sing it at his unBirthday parties in the garden of the Oxford Blackfriars. That is almost certainly where I first heard it. But my version is credited to Richard Aquila posting to “one of the philosophy mailing lists” some time in the Nineties.

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