Books about Thomistic from Amazon.com

When it is taught today, metaphysics is often presented as a fragmented view of philosophy that ignores the fundamental issues of its classical precedents. Eschewing these postmodern approaches, W. Norris Clarke finds an integrated vision of reality in the wisdom of Aquinas and here offers a contemporary version of systematic metaphysics in the Thomistic tradition.

The One and the Many presents metaphysics as an integrated whole which draws on Aquinas' themes, structure, and insight without attempting to summarize his work. Although its primary inspiration is the philosophy of St. Thomas himself, it also takes into account significant contributions not only of later philosophers but also of those developments in modern science that have philosophical bearing, from the Big Bang to evolution.

Clarke pursues two central themes in his explication of Thomistic metaphysics. He uncovers the unity and diversity found at all levels of the universe, with all beings held together in harmony rather than disconnected chaos. He also proposes the act of existence as the core of the positive attributes of all real beings, which in its pure unlimited state is the very nature of God. In the end, he offers a final synthetic overview of being both emanating from and returning to God in the Great Circle of Being—a journey in which each of us is a traveler.

Through Aquinas' metaphysics, Clarke helps the reader develop a holistic view of the meaningfulness of our universe and of human life. His work rescues the essence of Aquinas' metaphysics, making this body of thought accessible to students and interested readers not trained in Thomistic terminology and contributing to a revival of this fundamental component of philosophy..
Price: $23.40 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This volume, the first collection of its kind available in any language, features twenty of the most significant essays written by Father Pinckaers, all but two of them after the first appearance in French of his highly praised book, The Sources of Christian Ethics. His highly acclaimed works offer a thoroughly Thomistic and contemporary vision of the Christian moral life. They reflect the philosophical and spiritual prowess of a moral theologian who is estranged neither from philosophical ethics nor from dogmatic theology, neither from Scripture nor from spirituality.

The essays featured in this book offer profound reflections that are only possible by a contemporary moral theologian who knows the thought of Aquinas from lifelong study. Rather than taking a simply historical approach to Aquinas, Pinckaers seeks the basis of the intelligibility of the moral life, providing rich spiritual and theological insights along the way. He plumbs the depths of fundamental moral theology in these essays, where he treats Thomistic method and the renewal of moral theology, beatitude and Christian anthropology, moral agency, and passions and virtues, as well as law and grace. Such a detailed treatment of key issues in fundamental moral theology and Christian philosophical anthropology will certainly demand attention from every theologian and advanced student interested in Aquinas and in a virtue approach to Christian ethics.

Pinckaers's work has been an important source for the revival of interest in virtue-oriented moral theology in recent years and will continue to be a major source for debates over the place of Scripture and the Holy Spirit in moral theology..
Price: $49.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Norris Clarke has chosen the fifteen articles in this collection, five of which appear here for the first time, as the most significant of the more than seventy articles he has written over the course of a long career.

Father Clarke is known for his development of a Thomistic personalism. To be a person, according to St. Thomas, is to take conscious self-possession of one s own being, to be master of oneself. But our incarnate human mode of being necessarily involves living in a body whose life unfolds across time, and whose life is therefore inevitably dispersed across time. If we wish to know in full self-consciousness who we are, we need to assimilate and integrate this dispersal, so that our lives become a coherent story.

The essays collected here cover a wide range of philosophical, ethical, religious, and aesthetic topics. Through them sounds a very personal voice, one that has inspired generations of students..
Price: $45.09 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This noteworthy book develops a new theory of the natural law that takes its orientation from the account of the natural law developed by Thomas Aquinas, as interpreted and supplemented in the context of scholastic theology in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

Though this history might seem irrelevant to twenty-first-century life, Jean Porter shows that the scholastic approach to the natural law still has much to contribute to the contemporary discussion of Christian ethics. Aquinas and his interlocutors provide a way of thinking about the natural law that is distinctively theological while at the same time remaining open to other intellectual perspectives, including those of science.

In the course of her work, Porter examines the scholastics' assumptions and beliefs about nature, Aquinas's account of happiness, and the overarching claim that reason can generate moral norms. Ultimately, Porter argues that a Thomistic theory of the natural law is well suited to provide a starting point for developing a more nuanced account of the relationship between specific beliefs and practices. While Aquinas's approach to the natural law may not provide a system of ethical norms that is both universally compelling and detailed enough to be practical, it does offer something that is arguably more valuable — namely, a way of reflecting theologically on the phenomenon of human morality..
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This book is a revised and expanded edition of three lectures delivered by the author at Wake Forest University in 1979. Long out of print, in its new edition it should be a valuable resource for scholars and teachers of thephilosophy of religion. The first two lectures, after a critique of the incompleteness of St. Thomas Aquinas’s famous Five Ways of arguing for the existence of God, explore lesser-known resources of Aquinas’s philosophical ascent of the mind to God: the unrestricted dynamism of the human spirit as it reaches toward the fullness of being, and the strictly metaphysical ascent to God from finite to infinite, in the line of Aquinas’s later, more Neoplatonicallyinspired, metaphysics of participation.The third, and most heavily revised, lecture is a critique of Whitehead’s process philosophy, distinguishing Aquinas more sharply and critically from Whitehead than in the first edition..
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This dissertation seeks to establish that there is a renaissance of Thomistic Philosophy in the Catholic Church since the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), specifically a reawakening of Scholasticism, as evidenced by Pope John Paul II in his encyclical Veritatis Splendor. An abridged survey of the concept of the Natural Moral Law from Aristotle, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, and Augustine is followed by an examination of the impact of Thomas Aquinas on this philosophical method of ethics and morality. Next, the revival of Thomism and its permeation throughout Veritatis Splendor is discussed along with pertinent texts of the encyclical followed by the comments of contemporary adherents shortly following its promulgation. While the Natural Moral Law predates Scholasticism by centuries, the impact and influence the former had on the latter is shown in John Paul’s refined reintegration of this perennially valid philosophy..
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"This is an impressive, well-researched book, of great value. It offers the wider philosophical community a point of entrance, by a proponent of a certain type of Thomism, into a domain that all philosophers think they already understand. The result is the creation of a 'big picture' of human knowledge." —Mark Johnson, Marquette University

Once thought to be the task of metaphysics, the synthesis of knowledge has been discounted by many philosophers today. Benedict Ashley, a leading Thomistic scholar, argues that it remains a valid and intellectually fruitful pursuit by situating metaphysics as an endeavor that must cross disciplinary and cultural boundaries.

Working from a realist Thomistic epistemology, Ashley asserts that we must begin our search for wisdom in the natural sciences; only then, he believes, can we ensure that our claims about immaterial and invisible things are rooted in reliable experience of the material. Any attempt to share wisdom, he insists, must derive from a context that is both interdisciplinary and intercultural.

Ashley offers an ambitious analysis and synthesis of major historical contributions to the unification of knowledge, including non-Western traditions. Beginning with the question "Metaphysics: Nonsense or Wisdom?" Ashley moves from a critical examination of the foundations of modern science to quantum physics and the Big Bang; from Aristotle's theory of being and change, through Aquinas's five ways, to a critical analysis of modern and postmodern thought. Ashley is able to interweave the approaches of the great philosophers by demonstrating their contributions to philosophical thought in a concrete, specific manner. In the process, he accounts for a contemporary culture overwhelmed by the fragmentation of data and thirsting for an utterly transcendent yet personal God.

The capstone of a remarkable career, The Way Toward Wisdom will be welcomed by students in philosophy and theology..
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