This volume provides the first comprehensive treatment of the central topics in the contemporary philosophy of religion from a Thomist point of view. It focuses on central themes, including religious knowledge, language, science, evil, morality, human nature, God and religious diversity. It should prove valuable to students and faculty in philosophy of religion and theology, who are looking for an introduction to the Thomist tradition.

Thomism's influence upon the development of Catholicism is difficult to overestimate - but how secure is its grip on the challenges that face contemporary society? Culture and the Thomist Tradition examines the crisis of Thomism today as thrown into relief by Vatican II, the twenty-first ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church. Following the Church's declarations on culture in the document Gaudium et spes - the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World - it was widely presumed that a mandate had been given for transposing ecclesiastical culture into the idioms of modernity. But, says Tracey Rowland, such an understanding is not only based on a facile reading of the Conciliar documents, but was made possible by Thomism's own failure to demonstrate a workable theology of culture that might guide the Church through such transpositions. A Thomism that fails to specify the precise rôle of culture in moral fomration is problematice in a multicultural age, where Christians are exposed to a complex matrix of institutions and traditions both theistic and secular. The ambivalence of the Thomist tradition to modernity, and modern conceptions of rationality, also impedes its ability to successfully engage with the arguments of rivial traditions. Must a genuinely progressive Thomism learn to accomodate modernity? In opposition to such a stance, and in support of those who have resisted the trend in post-Conciliarliturgy to mimic the modernistic forms of mass culture, Culture and the Thomist Tradition musters a synthesis of the theological critiques of modernity to be found in the works of Alasdair MacIntyre, scholars of the international 'Communio' project and the Radical Orthodoxy circle. This synthesis, intended as a post-modern Augustinian Thomism, provides an account of the rôle of culture, memory and narrative tradition in the formation of intellectual and moral character. Re-evaluating the outcome of Vatican II, and forming the basis of a much-needed Thomist theology of culture, the book argues that the anti-beauty orientation of mass culture acts as a barrier to the theological virtue of hope, and ultimately fosters despair and atheism.

Using carefully selected resources, Romanus Cessario has composed a short account of the history of the Thomist tradition as it manifests itself through the more than seven hundred years that have elapsed since the death of Saint Thomas

Philosophers will be richly rewarded by reading John O’Callaghan’s new book, Thomistic Realism and the Linguistic Turn. Based on his broad knowledge of Aristotle and Aquinas, O’Callaghan provides not only an excellent treatment of Aquinas’s epistemology but also a superb demonstration of just how Aquinas might contribute to contemporary debates. Traditionally, the camps of realism and idealism fiercely engaged one another in the field of epistemology. Thomists participated in confronting idealism from their unique realist position. Post-Wittgenstein, the conflict has been dominated by a form of epistemology that grounds all knowledge in linguistic practice. Since Thomists work in a textual and historical mode, their response to the technical approach of the analytic philosophy in which most of the linguistic epistemologists write has been slow in coming. O’Callaghan expertly closes that gap by successfully bringing together these fields.

Analytical Thomism is a recent label for a newer kind of approach to the philosophical and natural theology of St Thomas Aquinas. It illuminates the meaning of Aquinas’s work for contemporary problems by drawing on the resources of contemporary Anglo-Saxon analytical philosophy, the work of Frege, Wittgenstein, and Kripke proving particularly significant. This book expands the discourse in contemporary debate, exploring crucial philosophical, theological and ethical issues such as: metaphysics and epistemology, the nature of God, personhood, action and meta-ethics. All those interested in the thought of St Thomas Aquinas, and more generally contemporary Catholic scholarship, problems in philosophy of religion, and contemporary metaphysics, will find this collection an invaluable resource.

In this book, renowned philosopher Ralph McInerny sets out to review what Thomas meant by the phrase and to defend a robust understanding of Thomas's teaching on the subject.

Contemporary western philosophy divides into three broad traditions: the analytical, the continental, and the historical. In the latter half of the twentieth century, analytical philosophy was dominant in the English-speaking world and tended to ignore the other two traditions. Now, however, analytical philosophy is less isolationist. It has come to appreciate the vitality of historical philosophy. Given their commonality of interests and shared appreciation of the values of conceptual clarity and argumentative rigour, it is particularly appropriate that there should be engagement between the main English-language tradition and the philosophy of Aquinas and, more broadly, of Thomism. The essays in this collection range widely across the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind and action, and theory of value with most linking analytical and Aristotelian-Thomistic ideas and some focusing on Aquinas in particular. This collection is distinctive in content and unusual in North American publishing in the areas of medieval philosophy, scholasticism, and Thomism in that the majority of the contributors are based in Europe--many at medieval universities in which scholasticism had a historical presence, and in some cases a prominent and distinguished one. Mind, Metaphysics, and Value brings together the interests, knowledge, and expertise of a wide range of scholars to form a broad and exciting intellectual community.

Ens Primum Cognitum in Thomas Aquinas and the Tradition presents a reading of Thomas Aquinas’ claim that “being” is the first object of the human intellect. Blending the insights of both the early Thomistic tradition (c.1380—1637AD) and the Leonine Thomistic revival (1879—present), Brian Kemple examines how this claim of Aquinas has been traditionally understood, and what is lacking in that understanding. While the recent tradition has emphasized the primacy of the real (so-called ens reale) in human recognition of the primum cognitum, Kemple argues that this misinterprets Aquinas, thereby closing off Thomistic philosophy to the broader perspective needed to face the philosophical challenges of today, and proposes an alternative interpretation with dramatic epistemological and metaphysical consequences.

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.

Cosmological reasoning is an important facet of classical arguments for the existence of God, but these arguments have been subject to many criticisms. The thesis of this book is that Thomas Aquinas can dodge many of the classic objections brought against cosmological reasoning. These objections criticize cosmological reasoning for its use of the Principle of Sufficient Reason; its notion of existence as a predicate; its use of ontological reasoning; its reliance on sense realism; its ignoring of the problem of evil; and its susceptibility to the critique of "ontotheology" as famously put forward by Heidegger. Secondly, the book proposes that the kind of reasoning found in Aquinas's De Ente can be formulated in a more robust version. Prompted by Aquinas’s admissions that philosophical knowledge of God is the prerogative of metaphysics, the second main portion of the book extensively illustrates how the more robust version of the De Ente is the interpretive key for Aquinas’s many arguments for God. Hence, the book should be of interest both to philosophers engaged in cosmological reasoning discussion and to Thomists interested in understanding Aquinas’s viae to God. Finally, the deep purpose of the book is to reawaken interest in Thomistic Existentialism, an interpretation of Aquinas that flourished in the 1950's in the works of Etienne Gilson, Jacques Maritain, and Joseph Owens. In this interpretation, a particular thing’s existence is the actuality of the thing in the sense of a distinctive actus not translatable into something else, for example, the fact of the thing or the thing having form. This book clearly explains how this interpretation looks at Thomas's metaphysics, and why it helps illuminate metaphysical realities.