An Introduction To The Metaphysics Of St Thomas Aquinas

An Introduction to the Metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas is an accessible Aquinas and a solid entry into his work. The format is manageable, and the scope, appropriately limited. James F. Anderson's skillful collection and lucid translation makes the pleasure of reading Aquinas available as it has not been before.

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

Metaphysics now joins the series of translations of Father Gardeil's Initiation a la Philosophie de S. Thomas d'Aquin. After an Introduction which discusses the general notion of metaphysics as a science, the relation of metaphysics to the critical analysis of knowledge and metaphysics as developed by Aristotle and St. Thomas, the author turns to the questions of First Philosophy which have concerned philosophers from Parmenides to Sartre and Heidegger. In seven chapters he considers being in itself and as it is known, the transcendental, the categories of being, act and potency, essence and existence and causality. As in the other volumes of this series, the author includes a generous selection of texts from the works of St. Thomas carefully correlated with the various chapters of the work itself. These are not mere snippets, but substantial quotations drawn from the Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics, De ente et existentia, the Disputed Questions and the two Summas. The reader has the words of Aquinas in the best modern English versions before him. Here is St. Thomas for the thinker--unfiltered. A most valuable addition in this fourth volume is the technical vocabulary of Thomistic and scholastic terms, covering all four volumes of the Initiation. The beginner in metaphysics will find this book most valuable, for it presents clearly the basic problematics and the Thomistic solution of them. For the more profound student here is a clear, concise (but not cursory) review of the science. Thomistic metaphysics, in Father Gardeil's presentation, is not an historical curiosity but a living and lively discipline. While the aim of the work is to give a synthetic view of St. Thomas' thought, the insights of modern or contemporary philosophers is not neglected. The translator's notes offer clarification and add bibliographical information on works published since the French edition. Valuable as a class manual, indispensable as supplementary reading, this book can serve the needs of a strictly philosophical course or one designed as a preparation for theology.

"In the brief span of some 140 pages Pere Gardeil succeeds remarkably well in the simple presentation of the Aristotelian principles of mobile being, quantity, motion, causation, place, time, inanity, the first mover, and astronomical theory. A second section (of some forty-five pages) selects five capital texts from the classic commentary of St. Thomas upon Aristotle's Physics and the full text of his model synopsis of Aristotelian cosmology in the early Paris opuscule, De Principiis Naturae. The translation of the original French work of 1953 has been accomplished with sober clarity and served editorially with a useful index and notes. Its frank, working language should attract both philosophical novice and pragmatic scientist alike and effect their working contact with a classic vision of the universe."--Philosophical Studies

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 eithertheologians 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 emphasised 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.