4 Comments

Bret Lythgoe
August 18th, 2012 | 6:27 pm

What wonderful news! Although I’m not Catholic, (at least not yet), I have a great love for Aquinas, and want to have access to more of his great masterpieces. Anthony Kenny, a leading expert on Aquinas, asserted that the latter is one of the top ten greatest philosophers. Peter Kreeft, another leading expert on Aquinas, has said that Aquinas is the greatest philosopher.

John W Gillis
August 19th, 2012 | 1:53 am

Indeed, these look very nice, but I wonder about their practicality. Logos has also made a number of Thomas’ works available in Latin & English over the past couple years, in very well-done and functional electronic editions which, for my money, are far superior to hard copies for study. You can’t very well pass them down to your grandchildren, I suppose, but you can carry them with you, and their integration with referring works (e.g. the CCC) and referenced works (e.g. the ECF) is fabulous.

So far, they’ve completed the Summa, and the Sentences and the commentaries on Isaiah and Jeremiah are under development. In English-only, they’ve also published the Summa Contra Gentiles and the Catena Aurea.

These editions seem so much more functional to me than a bound book, unless you really just want to sit down and read it cover-to-cover, and then put it away.

Maximilian
August 19th, 2012 | 5:53 pm

Here are some of the works of Thomas in Latin (including the first part of the Summa), if anyone is interested:

http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/aquinas.html

Tex Tradd
August 20th, 2012 | 6:12 am

Enthusiasts of St. Thomas, who should diligently attend to potential bridges between Thomism and modern science, should know that one of the most important cognitive neuroscientists in the world, and possibly the most knowledgeable expert on EEG alive, Walter Freeman of Berkeley University, has embraced Thomism as a non-Cartesian theory of embodied cognition:

“Thus, a modern paraphrasing of Aquinas is that each individual has unique knowledge supported by synaptic changes in the brain; that individuals express their knowledge by creating and transmitting representations by manipulating their bodies and materials that can be grasped and shaped by hands, which constitute information given to the senses of others; that shared knowledge is created through the reception of information. Truth is in the reality, and simultaneously it is unveiled by the joint intentional activity of human cognitive powers in concert. The meanings of knowledge and information emerge through social interactions among intentional beings.”