The fine editions of the Aristotelian Commentary Series make available long out-of-print commentaries of St. Thomas on Aristotle. Each volume has the full text of Aristotle with Bekker numbers, followed by the commentary of St. Thomas, cross-referenced using an easily accessible mode of referring to Aristotle in the Commentary. Each volume is beautifully printed and bound using the finest materials. All copies are printed on acid-free paper and Smyth sewn. They will last.

On Power (De Potentia) is one of Aquinas's ''Disputed Questions'' (a systematic series of discussions of specific theological topics). It is a text which anyone with a serious interest in Aquinas's thinking will need to read. There is, however, no English translation of the De Potentia currently in print. Fr. Richard Regan has produced this abridgement, which passes over some of the full text while retaining what seems most important when it comes to following the flow of (...) class='Hi'>Aquinas's thought. (shrink)

Aquinas Saint Thomas. The Commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas on Aristotle's Treatise on the soul Aquinas Saint Thomas TI-IE COMMENTARY. OF * ST. THOMAS AQUINAS ON I. Front Cover.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

Maxims concerning God and man -- Is there a God? -- The problem of evil -- Reflections on the divine nature -- Creation -- The Incarnation -- What is man? -- Human society -- The Corpus Christi sequence.

Provides a substantial selection and new translation of texts from the full range of Aquinas' writings.

Today's conversations in virtue ethics are enflamed with questions of “pagan virtues,” which often designate non-Christian virtue from a Christian perspective. “Pagan virtues,” “pagan vices,” and their historied interpretations are the subject of Jennifer Herdt's book Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (2008). I argue that the questions and language animating Herdt's book are problematic. I offer an alternative strategy to Herdt's for reading Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae. My results are twofold: (1) a different set (...) of conclusions and questions regarding the moral life that lend a fresh perspective to “pagan virtues” and (2) corresponding methodological suggestions for improving Herdt's project that would, to my mind, reaffirm her normative conclusions regarding the most viable ways forward for contemporary discussions of virtue. (shrink)

The ‘theory of universals’ of St. Thomas Aquinas has been interpreted in one of two ways by most commentators. Traditionally, commentators have attributed to Thomas the theory which is usually also attributed to Aristotle: “moderate realism,” the view that universals exist in things, subject in some way to individuating principles in the things. For example, according to Copleston.

"The following pages were written in the hope of interesting, not primarily the Catholic student of St. Thomas, but the non-Catholic reader who finds himself attracted by the breadth and depth of his wisdom, yet repelled by what he conceives as a too exclusively rational approach to reality, an approach which, as he sees it, diminishes the immensity of truth. I feel that this conception of Thomism is understandable indeed, but tragically false; and I have therefore tried to show (...) both how it may arise and--by setting it against what seems to me a truer and more complete view--why it is false." -- Preface. (shrink)

If Saint Thomas Aquinas was a great theologian, it is in no small part because he was a great philosopher. And he was a great philosopher because he was a great metaphysician. In the twentieth century, metaphysics was not much in vogue, among either theologians or even philosophers; but now it is making a comeback, and once the contours of Thomas's metaphysical vision are glimpsed, it looks like anything but a museum piece. It only needs some (...) dusting off. Many are studying Thomas now for the answers that he might be able to give to current questions, but he is perhaps even more interesting for the questions that he can raise regarding current answers: about the physical world, about human life and knowledge, and (needless to say) about God. This book is aimed at helping those who are not experts in medieval thought to begin to enter into Thomas's philosophical point of view. Along the way, it brings out some aspects of his thought that are not often emphasized in the current literature, and it offers a reading of his teaching on the divine nature that goes rather against the drift of some prominent recent interpretations. (shrink)

Aquinas occupies an extremely important position in the western philosophical tradition. His work contains influential contributions in logic, metaphysics, theory of knowledge, ethics and philosophy of religion, and his commentaries on Aristotle played a major role in the incorporation of the philosophy of Aristotle into the understanding of Christian doctrine and into western culture at large. Yet many people find it difficult to begin the study of Aquinas's work, daunted by its volume and by its being worked out (...) within in the context of Catholic doctrine, which must now be obscure to most readers. This book can help rectify this. (shrink)

An accessible and solid entry into the metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas.

The Aristotelian Society of Marquette University each year invites a scholar to speak on the Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. Those lectures have come to be called the Aquinas Lectures and are customarily delivered on the Sunday nearest March 7, the feast day of the Society's patron saint.

Part I: Reprinted articles -- Twenty-fourth award of Aquinas medal by the American Catholic Philosophical Association to W. Norris Clarke, SJ -- Interpersonal dialogue : key to realism -- Causality and time -- System : a new category of being -- A curious blind spot in the Anglo American tradition of antitheistic argument -- The problem of the reality and multiplicity of divine ideas in Christian neoplatonism -- Is the ethical eudaimonism of Saint Thomas too self-centered? -- (...) Conscience and the person -- Democracy, ethics, religion : an intrinsic connection -- What cannot be said in Saint Thomas's essence-existence doctrine -- Living on the edge : the human person as frontier being and microcosm -- The metaphysics of religious art : reflections on a text of Saint Thomas -- Part II: New articles -- The immediate creation of the human soul by God and some contemporary -- Challenges -- The creative imagination : unique expression of our soul-body unity -- The creative imagination as treated in western thought -- The integration of personalism and thomistic metaphysics in twenty-first-century Thomism. (shrink)

The ethical authority carried in the conventions of fairness and human well-being has been widely adopted under the idea of “moral economy,” forming an eclectic and interdisciplinary debate. Significant, though external to this debate, is a corpus of medieval thought which exhibits a fundamental interest in legitimate market protocols, and the political rights and obligations of agents in relation to the common good of the community. This article asserts the imperative status of a customary basis for understanding not just the (...) analytic version of moral economy but the legacy contained in what might be termed the “the moral economy of Aquinas.”. (shrink)

This admirable volume is the first book of a new translation of the Summa Contra Gentiles by the general editor, Dr. Pegis. Made from the manual Leonine text of 1934, the closest critical edition of St. Thomas, it is meticulously presented with precise references to sources, a concise analysis of argument and a double index of matters and authors. The translation has a clear simplicity which systematically denies itself any attempt to improve the original text: the editor properly thinks (...) it his “business to set down what St. Thomas said, not what he meant” and, therefore, resists the urge to clarify or interpret by personal additions to his statement. The resulting version is so literally faithful that it incorporates some Latin words bodily into the English language. Thus, Ch. 14 is headed: “That to Know God We Must Use the Way of Remotion”. The fifty years’ old version of Fr. Joseph Rickaby has the flowery heading: “That in order to a Knowledge of God we must use the Method of Negative Differentiation”. The new translation is obviously closer to the simple original but its self-discipline tends to sacrifice native idiom and may affront or bewilder the literary reader. (shrink)

This admirable volume is the first book of a new translation of the Summa Contra Gentiles by the general editor, Dr. Pegis. Made from the manual Leonine text of 1934, the closest critical edition of St. Thomas, it is meticulously presented with precise references to sources, a concise analysis of argument and a double index of matters and authors. The translation has a clear simplicity which systematically denies itself any attempt to improve the original text: the editor properly thinks (...) it his “business to set down what St. Thomas said, not what he meant” and, therefore, resists the urge to clarify or interpret by personal additions to his statement. The resulting version is so literally faithful that it incorporates some Latin words bodily into the English language. Thus, Ch. 14 is headed: “That to Know God We Must Use the Way of Remotion”. The fifty years’ old version of Fr. Joseph Rickaby has the flowery heading: “That in order to a Knowledge of God we must use the Method of Negative Differentiation”. The new translation is obviously closer to the simple original but its self-discipline tends to sacrifice native idiom and may affront or bewilder the literary reader. (shrink)