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,^[1] 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.^[2] 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.^[3]

He was a major opponent of Neo-scholastic interpretations of Saint Thomas and Saint Anselm.^[4]

Books[edit]

• 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[edit]

• 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

References[edit]