The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy) First Edition

Aquinas stands along with Augustine, Duns Scotus and Ockam as the greatest Christian theologian-philosophers of the medieval period. Yet quite often Aquinas's thought is overlooked in most philosophy courses which skip from Plato and Aristotle to Descartes. This volume helps remedy the situation by giving a rigorous and up to date precis of Aquinas's philosophical thought, from his metaphysics, theory of mind and cognition, ethics, and his relation to theology. The volume is edited with contributions from Stump and Kretzmann, who themselves are leading experts on medieval philosophy.This book is a must have for any serious student of Aquinas and medieval philosophy.

Got his for my Brother and he loves it

This is a nice piece. It gathers fine articles written by well-known scholars of Thomas Aquinas. The themes are very well chosen inasmuch as they go thru all the most important aspects of the philosophy of this great thinker. It gives you, at the same time, a just idea of the relation of Thomas' thought with that of Aristotle an also its independence, its uniqueness. It makes you want to dive into Thomas Aquinas' system. Don't hesitate: just buy it.

The back cover blurb states that "new readers and nonspecialists will find this the most convenient, accessible guide to Aquinas currently in print." This is completely untrue. That doesn't make this a bad book, but it really is not an *introductory* book. It is a book for people who are familiar with very distilled forms of logical argument and are sufficiently convinced by such argument not to need further persuading. The authors of the chapters are university professors who have written whole books on particular aspects of Aquinas's thought, and their chapters read like distillates of such highly specialized research, rather than sociable introductions.A much better introduction is "Aquinas: a very short introduction" by Fergus Kerr (indeed very short, but precise and witty), and "Aquinas" by Frederic Copleston (out of print, but lucid and beautifully written).Like most great philosophers, Aquinas is demanding. His insights are surrounded by a terminology and a methodology of their own (or rather, by a terminology and a methodology developed by many thinkers, of which he is the paradigmatic example). For those who want to make an expedition into this arid but beautiful region of the mind, it is necessary to begin not by flying near the summit in a jet-plane, but by setting off on foot, after packing the right equipment in their bags. The two books cited above are a good first move in that direction. The next step should probably be to participate in a seminar or discussion group in which an actual text of Aquinas (normally the "Summa") is read and discussed.