I now have a tentative plan for reading and for posting here. I am starting to work my way once again through Summa Contra Gentiles. SCG is my favorite work of St. Thomas, and I have not read it in…
Recently a gentleman left a couple comments in response to a post here, and I don’t think I did justice to his remarks. In this post I would like to rectify that situation. He begins with this: Unfortunately, it seems…
It’s amusing to me when I come across answers to questions like that in philosophical works. People think that Aristotle, Aquinas, and Plato have nothing to say to them today, or that philosophy is dry as dust and lacks anything…
In a recent episode we saw that God’s existence is not self-evident to us. I said at the end of that post that I wanted to take a closer look at what St Thomas has to say about this subject…
As we’ve seen in previous posts, we need divine revelation because our End is God, and we cannot attain to that End by our own powers. We receive the truths of that revelation with the assent of faith because they…
Reason has its limits. Recently I wrote about intellectual modesty, and this post is certainly related to that. In Summa Contra Gentiles I:5, St Thomas writes that it is fitting for truths beyond the powers of reason to be proposed…
In a recent post we saw that we need revelation. In SCG I:4 St Thomas goes into a bit more detail as to why we need it if we are going to know God. He assumes here of course that…
Some things can be known with greater confidence than others. For example, I can’t know for sure why my brother hit me with a tennis racket 30 years ago, although it’s reasonable to assume that I must have provoked his…
St Thomas wrote the Summa Contra Gentiles with the following in mind: [2] And so, in the name of the divine Mercy, I have the confidence to embark upon the work of a wise man, even though this may surpass…
Reason is not omnicompetent. It cannot solve all problems. One problem it cannot solve for us has to do with helping us attain to our end. It was necessary for man’s salvation that there should be a knowledge revealed by…
Aquinas, Etc. 