Thomists and contemporary epistemologists don’t often seem to have much to say to one another. I here argue that Thomism fits very well with at least one school of thought in contemporary epistemology: commonsensism. I prosecute my case by arguing that Étienne Gilson’s dismissal of commonsense philosophy as incompatible with Thomistic realism is a mistake. I begin by outlining commonsensism. I then proceed to a discussion of Gilson’s rejection of commonsense philosophy. I finish by arguing that Gilson’s criticisms fail and that Thomists should be commonsense epistemologists.

Personhood, for Aquinas, functions on the paradoxical structure of the soul’s incompleteness and completeness. The soul is an incomplete part absent the specific human body and yet if the soul were only an incomplete part, it could not function as the substantial form of the body and thus as its guiding principle as consciousness. It appears that Aquinas is placing us in a dialogic tension, a metaphysical gray area. This chapter addresses how this Thomistic ontological tension at the heart of the human person is more receptive of, and in more decisive confrontation with, postmodern views of personhood that fail to achieve coherence and consistency, often due to rejections of manufactured unity and then because of the epistemological crisis rooted in long-discarded and devastated metaphysical foundations. The dignity of the human person necessitates an open nature understood in Aquinas, and sensed in postmodern weak theological and poetic thought, but one metaphysically decisive and real, that does not fall into a taxonomy of cultural and social conventions.

The current practice of disability studies largely groups itself according to various “models” of disability, such as the “medical,” “social,” “identity,” and “minority.” While insightful, each is incomplete: some focus on the medical component of disability, others on its social implications, and yet others on its personal significance. The present chapter proposes an account of disability grounded in Thomistic anthropology. In this system, an individual is a human being insofar as he or she possesses a particular kind of essence or nature. Given this nature, a person has certain natural abilities that, if certain other requisite conditions are met, allow the person to perform typical operations. Disability – and the closely related term “impairment” – concerns inabilities to perform given activities and various consequent inequities that may arise. The “Thomistic model” proposed aims to incorporate insights from prevailing models of disability and, thus, to enrich contemporary disability studies through the application of Thomistic philosophy.

Drawing from both the medieval Scholastic philosophical-theological tradition and Aristotelian virtue ethics, Thomas Aquinas offers a comprehensive and nuanced account of the virtuous life – one that suggests fruitful relationships not only with contemporary philosophical and theological discussions but also with recent empirical work. In this short chapter, I sketch the big picture using an Aristotelian, four-causes approach. Section 1 mainly addresses the final cause or telos of virtue: ultimately, perfect happiness in eternal life – although a good earthly life affords “a certain participation” in happiness. Section 2 considers virtue’s quasi-material causes: reason and the appetites, including the intellectual appetite or will. Section 3 focuses on the formal causes (modes) of virtue in general and of the cardinal and theological virtues in particular, as well as the relationships between various virtues in the larger structure of Thomistic virtue ethics – including the possibility of a unity of the virtues. And Section 4 discusses proposed efficient causes of such virtues, drawing on the various ways in which virtues are developed and related to each other in the Thomistic picture. Throughout, I consider connections between Aquinas’s account of the virtuous life and contemporary work in ethics, psychology, and education.

This chapter uses text from throughout Aquinas’s corpus to reconstruct the main elements of his views on causation. Causation for Aquinas is a type of ontological dependence. Following Aristotle, Aquinas recognizes four species of causes. The chapter focuses in particular on efficient causation since this is the type of cause that most closely corresponds to what contemporary philosophers mean by a “cause.” Aquinas thinks that efficient causes act through active casual powers to bring about their effects. To highlight the philosophical significance of Aquinas’s views, the chapter compares Aquinas’s views on efficient causation with two prominent contemporary theories of causation, Humeanism and Nomicism.

At first glance, Thomism and feminism seem like unlikely bedfellows. In spite of the apparent incongruity, I argue that a fruitful dialogue can exist between Aquinas and feminism, particularly regarding the relationship between the body and reason. To this end, I make three points. First, I argue that Aquinas’s anthropology provides a fertile ground for a discussion of women’s nature and flourishing. Second, I argue that there is surprising degree of similarity between the attitude of Thomas toward the female body and the attitude of certain contemporary feminists, such as Simone de Beauvoir and Shulamith Firestone. All three of these authors recognized that women are more affected by their bodies than men are, and all three saw this as a source of inequality between men and women. Third, I argue that, while Aquinas is wrong to conclude that women are less rational than men, it may nonetheless be true that women experience more frequent interruptions to their ability to exercise fully their highest powers because they experience more pain and fatigue related to their biology. Finally, I consider how the nature of the female body may dispose women to exercising their reason slightly differently than men do.

Metametaphysical reflection is nothing new. Avant la lettre, Aristotle’s attempt to lay out a science of “being qua being” and its first principles – the scientific discipline that came to be called “metaphysics” – involved an attempt to justify his methodology as well as to develop responses to skeptics. Contemporary metametaphysics has revived some of these discussions. Whereas all metaphysicians roughly agree on the sorts of problems that count as “metaphysics,” and generically that the subject matter concerns the nature and structure of reality, not all metaphysicians agree about what constitutes the form of an answer to such problems. Some contemporary metaphysicians focus on existence questions – listing what exists – whereas others focus on “grounding” or dependence relations of some kind – what depends on what or is fundamental. These differences tend to appear in responses to skeptical challenges to metaphysics.

Much has been written about the historical sources – Aristotelian and neo-Platonic – used by Thomas Aquinas in his theological works. Without neglecting such research, this chapter examines the broader speculative framework of themes at the intersection of faith and reason in Thomistic thought. The goal is to provide philosophers and theologians with a clearer view of Thomism’s key speculative concerns regarding human reason and revealed truth. These include the degree of theology’s influence on faith (Christian philosophy), the preambles of faith, rational credibility, the relationship between common sense, philosophy, and faith, analogy in relation to revealed truths, the scientific structure of theology, and the potential for a Thomist account of knowledge’s historicity.

According to Aristotle’s hylomorphic analysis of substance, matter and form are metaphysical constituents of a substance that contribute to the reality of the substance. According to Aquinas, prime matter underlies every substance, which is merely a potentiality for substance that has no actual being apart from substantial form. Aquinas’s conception of prime matter was widely rejected by scholastics in favour of theories which endowed matter with intrinsic causal, spatial, and mereological properties. Aristotle’s hylomorphic analysis of substance was subsequently abandoned in the wake of the Scientific Revolution.

In this chapter, I shall raise doubts about contemporary atomistic philosophies that exclude matter or form, and I shall seek to situate Aquinas’s theory of prime matter in relation to the ‘primitive ontology approach’ to quantum mechanics, which posits the existence of a spatiotemporal distribution of matter that lacks any intrinsic properties.

Modern proponents of free speech maintain that the value of expression resides in its authenticity-making power, which generates political legitimacy. They simultaneously concede that the value of expression is not without abridgments, no matter how deeply felt or authentically fulfilling such expression may be. Given these commitments, how can free speech be valued for its authenticity-making power, and yet also conditionally regulated? This chapter explores a resolution based on an interpretation of Aquinas’s thought on speech and expression. First, Aquinas clarifies Aristotle’s distinction between vox (animal expression) and loquutio (logical discourse) as an irreducible relationship of explanandum and explanans: loquutio is uniquely disposed to comprehending what is just or unjust within what is pleasant or painful. Second, Thomistic loquutio is directed to truth while permitting false claims as logical-temporal constituents of discourse, requiring above all a “discursive situation” that avoids both contradiction and epistemically unjustified conviction. These characteristics of Thomistic loquutio are supported by his treatment of angelic communication, which is not revelatory so much as consultatory from a second-person perspective and clarificatory from a first-person perspective. Ultimately, this interpretive Thomistic account rejects the modern commitment of authenticity without absolutism, while affirming certain aspects of what makes speech politically valuable.

Thomism is a tradition of thought that has attracted adherents through the centuries. It goes without saying that Thomists recognize the decisive genius of St. Thomas Aquinas. But a commitment to Thomism is not just a commitment to the man, despite whatever admiration we may have for his personal character. Thomism is adopted because it is recognized that the way of thinking involved therein conveys something important, indeed true, about a significant aspect of reality. It is precisely because Aquinas’s way of thought conveys something of the truth that people have been prepared to adopt and defend it through the centuries; hence we have a tradition of thought that is Thomism.

Neoclassical theists reject the traditional divine attributes of impassibility and immutability, holding that God can be affected by the things he has created and is thus changeable. Some claim, for example, that God undergoes changes in emotional state, has desires that can be either satisfied or frustrated, grows in knowledge, and can suffer. I argue that this position rests on a simplistic distortion of perfect being theology grounded in highly contestable intuitions and conceptually sloppy usage of key terms (such as “emotion” and “knowledge”). By contrast, the first-cause theology of Thomism is grounded in a rigorously worked-out metaphysics that neoclassical writers typically engage with only superficially if at all. Nor is “neoclassical” theism really new, but in fact marks a regression to a crudely anthropomorphic conception of God that Western thought moved beyond at the time of Xenophanes.