Anthony Kenny offers a critical examination of Thomas Aquinas's influential account of being, arguing that it suffers from systematic confusion. Because of the centrality of the doctrine, this has implications for other parts of Aquinas's philosophical system. Kenny's clear and incisive study dispels the confusion and offers philosophers and theologians a guide through the labyrinth of Aquinas's ontology.

S. Tommaso occupa un posto di enorme importanza nella Storia della Metafisica. Ma la sua è una dottrina originale, o una rielaborazione della metafisica aristotelica e di quella neoplatonica? Per rispondere a questa domanda il P. Battista Mondin, con il suo solito stile chiaro ed essenziale, nella Prima Parte del volume presenta le principali interpretazioni della metafisica di S. Tommaso; nella seconda espone approfonditamente le caratteristiche e le grandi ricchezze della concezione metafisica dell'Aquinate, nei suoi vari aspetti: Tommaso e la (...) metafisica aristotelica; le proprietà della metafisica; la conoscenza dell'essere; il linguaggio antologico di Tommaso; la metafisica dell'essere e la sua struttura ontologica; l'analisi delle cinque vie per conoscere l'esistenza di Dio; i nomi divini e il problema dell'analogia, i trascendentali, la creazione e la provvidenza. (shrink)

About beauty is Armand Maurer's interpretation of Saint Thomas on the beauty of nature.

Réflexions sur la controverse saint Thomas - saint Augustin -- La vertu de patience selon saint Thomas et saint Augustin -- Note sur un texte de saint Thomas -- Prolégomènes à la prima via -- Sur la problématique thomiste de la vision béatifique -- L'esse du verbe incarné selon saint Thomas -- Eléments d'une métaphysique thomis-te de l'être.

This book is a major contribution to the history of philosophy in the later medieval period (1250-1350). It focuses on cognitive theory, a subject of intense investigation during these years. In fact many of the issues that dominate philosophy of mind and epistemology today - intentionality, mental representation, scepticism, realism - were hotly debated in the later medieval period. The book offers a careful analysis of these debates, primarily through the work of Thomas Aquinas, John Olivi, and William Ockham. Each (...) of these figures attempts to reconceptualise cognition along direct realist lines, criticising in the process the standard Aristotelian account. Though of primary interest to medieval philosophers, the book presupposes no background knowledge of the medieval period, and will therefore interest a broader community of philosophers concerned with the origins of contemporary cognitive theory. (shrink)

One of the few studies to date which considers in a comprehensive way the relation between these remarkable thinkers. By concrete example and continual reference it illustrates both the pervasive influence of Pseudo-Dionysius and the profound originality of Aquinas.

This book offers a philosophical analysis of the main themes and problems of Aquinas' metaphysics of creation, centred on the concept of participation, the systematical meaning of which is examined in a critical discussion of the prevailing views of contemporary Thomas scholars.

Among the great philosophers of the Middle Ages Aquinas is unique in pursuing two apparently disparate projects. On the one hand he developed a philosophical understanding of Christian doctrine in a fully integrated system encompassing all natural and supernatural reality. On the other hand, he was convinced that Aristotle's philosophy afforded the best available philosophical component of such a system. In a relatively brief career Aquinas developed these projects in great detail and with an astonishing degree of success. In this (...) volume ten leading scholars introduce all the important aspects of Aquinas' thought, ranging from its historical background and dependence on Greek, Islamic, and Jewish philosophy and theology, through the metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, to the philosophical approach to Biblical commentary. (shrink)

This article stresses the main lines of Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy on the nature of the body-soul union. Following Aristotle, Aquinas sees the soul as a ‘principle of life’ which is intimately bound to a body. Together they form a noncontingent composition. In addition, the distinctive feature of the human soul is rationality, which implies that a human needs a mind to be what it is. However, this is not to say, as Descartes proposes, that the reason that I am a (...) human is that I am fully self-conscious. On the contrary, I will show that selfconsciousness is not necessarily a key to defining a human being. To that aim, and based on Aquinas’s views, I draw a distinction between what I will call ‘egos’ and ‘selves’. (shrink)