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Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide (Beginners Guide (Oneworld))

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E. Feser's introduction to Aquinas' thought was exactly what I was looking for: a clear, contemporary introduction (and defense!) of Aquinas' thought which interacts with modern objections. Having read introductions by Ralph McInerny, Henri Renard, F. Copleston, Jacques Maritain, and A. Sertillanges, I can say that Feser's book is better than all of them.

First of all, Feser is faithful to Aquinas' thought. In content, Feser's philosophy is aligned with something, say, Garrigou-Lagrange might write, the difference only being style. If you think Garrigou-Lagrange understood Aquinas, then you will think Feser has, too. Most of the authors I mentioned above more or less understand Aquinas adequately, so far as I can tell. Like them, Feser won't give you any surprises by departing from the tradition (like, say, E. Stump might).

Second, Feser's book is better because it is clearer. There are plenty of thinkers who understand Aquinas decently enough---one thinks of Maritain or Renard, for example. But anyone who has tried to read these thinkers is painfully aware that their prose is not always clear. Feser has given us a book which is in a class by itself for clarity. If you are puzzled by 'matter', 'form', 'act', 'potency', and so on, then this is the book for you.

Third, Feser's book is better because it understands modern thinkers and their objections to Aquinas. Feser admirably defends the existence of God, the classical attributes of God (including divine simplicity), the immortality of the soul, Aquinas' ethical theory, and so on. Not only this, but he shows why objectors to Aquinas usually have not understood him properly. He treats older objectors like Locke, but also newer ones like Dawkins (and many analytical philosophers, too). It is especially its mastery of analytical philosophy and the issues it brings up which makes this book relevant to modern concerns.

Fourth, Feser has a list of recommended reading which is very, very useful.

And to top it all off, this book has one of the best discussions of causality, especially final causality, which I have encountered.

So, if you're shopping for one book to start with in studying Aquinas, you've found it. Or if you've read many introductions but still feel lost, this is the book for you, too. Feser brings the clarity of analytical philosophy, the relevance of modern issues, and the content of classical Thomism all together in this volume.

This book not only clearly elucidates Aquinas' central philosophical theses, it also demonstrates that Aquinas, and indeed Aristotle, are just as relevant to our modern world as they were in their own respective times.

Beginning with Aquinas' view of reality in general, Feser provides brief but highly detailed and carefully crafted chapters that explain Aquinas' arguments for God's Existence, His divine attributes, the immortality and immateriality of the soul, and classical natural law (not to be confused with any modern version of new natural law theory). Moreover, Feser concisely critiques some of the more historically popular objections to Aquinas' arguments showing how they not only fail to forcefully counter Aquinas' claims but also how most of them do not even object to Aquinas on his own terms. In other words, most modern critics do not even properly understand what Aquinas is actually saying, and a careful analysis of the arguments is usually enough to respond to many of the objections against him.

This is a short and excellent introduction to the thought of the Angelic Doctor. I highly recommend it to all readers who are interested in philosophy and to those who think that Aquinas' philosophy is outmoded or that his arguments have long been conclusively refuted. Finally, to those who thought that Feser's previous book, The Last Superstition, was too polemical in nature, this book contains much of what is in TLS but with a much more "academic" tone.

Whenever I picked up The Last Superstition by Dr. Feser, I expected a standard critique of the poor reasoning of New Atheists. It excelled in that regard, but went further and opened my eyes to a whole realm of philosophy that I had never even properly considered. Whenever you take a standard introduction to philosophy you are told that Aristotle was largely influential, but that when his understanding of physics fell apart so did his metaphysics. Things like "final causes" had been disproved by modern science.

Thus, you are required to read a passage or two, and then quickly move to more "modern" things like Descartes, Hume, Kant and of course the plethora of readings in modern analytic philosophy. It is in these modern readings that you will learn of such things as the "mind-body problem" or the "problem of induction." When studying the philosophy of mind, you will learn of the troubles of accounting for qualia or intentionality on physicalist accounts, and the "interaction problem" for dualists.

After reading Feser's book against the New Atheism, my eyes were opened. Aristotle's metaphysics were in no way disproven by modern science, nor were they even adequately argued against by modern philosophy as much as they were simply ignored as the mechanistic view of the world became standard. I learned that these "classical problems" in philosophy were not classical at all, but that they were simply the result of accepting the mechanistic paradigm and were not problems in the Aristotelean-Thomistic tradition. Aquinas' "proofs" of God's existence that Dawkins dismisses (mainly due to his ignorance of the topic), are not even "proofs" but metaphysical demonstrations that must be true if his metaphysical principles are true.

Feser takes the basic outlines given concerning the A-T tradition in The Last Superstision and expands on them in this book. He takes the reader through a general introduction to Aquinas' Metaphysics, followed by a wonderful explanation and defense of his Natural Theology (and thus the famous Five Ways), followed by his Psychology ("philosophy of mind") and Ethics. I will not spoil the book by giving a chapter-by-chapter outline of the book, but would strongly encourage anyone interested in philosophy and particularly those who struggle with the modern "problems" in philosophy to think outside of the box and read this book.

Even if you think you are familiar with the A-T tradition, but have dismissed it for some reason, please read this book and see if you have rejected the tradition for valid reasons or simply due to a misunderstanding. When given the opportunity to teach or discuss introductions to philosophy, I will insist that this book is required reading.

Not only is this the best introduction to the thought of Aquinas that you're ever likely to find, but it's also a superb primer on the metaphysics of Aristotle. Act & potency, form & matter, the four causes...they are all explained here about as clearly & simply as they can be.

When teaching philosophy, I prefer to use original texts. But it's not always possible - especially in introductory courses. Some of the greatest philosophers were also great communicators: Plato, Descartes, Hume, Nietzsche, & William James are among the names that spring to mind. But not all were: Aristotle, Aquinas, Spinoza, Kant & Hegel, among others, are notoriously difficult, without a Vergil to guide one from one hellacious circle to the next.

For Aristotle & Aquinas, Edward Feser here proves himself a reliable Vergil. Aspects of Aristotelian/Thomistic thought that once seemed to me like no more than antiquated curiosities suddenly come to life as real, philosophically defensible, options. In particular, Feser's defense of the A/T conceptions of efficient & final causation, as against the Humean account that has ruled the roost for the last couple of centuries, is a real eye-opener.

One word of warning: this may be, relatively speaking, a "beginner's guide" to Aquinas, but it is by no means "Aquinas for dummies." Feser frequently addresses recent literature, some of which gets a bit technical. Real "beginners" may need a lot of help from their professors to get the drift.

But, then, that's what professors are for, no?

In Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide, Edward Feser has given us a very concise, well written, and understandable introduction to Thomistic thought. This is not an introduction to philosophy, scholasticism, or metaphysics: if you're unfamiliar with the concepts and terminology of these disciplines as I was, keeping a Catholic Encyclopedia or at least a good search engine on-hand will help your comprehension a great deal.

Feser covers the following topics in an engaging style, addressing competing views from the Middle Ages through to the moderns:

Metaphysics:
1. Act and Potency
2. Hylemorphism (doctrine of objects being composites of form and matter)
3. The Four Causes (material, formal, efficient, final)
4. Essence and Existence (they are distinct - except for God whose essence is His existence)
5. The Transcendentals (being, thing, one, something, true, good)
6. Final Causality (virtually the whole of Thomastic metaphysics depends on this)
7. Efficient Causality (as it upholds the principles of causality and proportionate causality)
8. Being

Natural Theology:
1. The Five Ways (From Motion, From Causality, From Contingency, From Grades of Perfection, From Finality)
2. The Divine Attributes

Psychology:
1. The Soul
2. Intellect and Will
3. Immateriality and Immortality
4. Hylemorphic Dualism (the road between dualism and materialism)

Ethics:
1. The Good
2. Natural Law
3. Religion and Morality

The body of the book is about 190 pages and reads relatively quickly, given the subject matter. In addition, there are 10 pages of quite useful bibliographic information, and a topical index - a quick scan of which shows Aristotle, Plato, and Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange as authors with the most index entries; a good sign, I would think, for serious Thomists.

I highly recommend this work, and intend to seek out other books by Feser on philosophy.

I've been reading Thomistic philosophers for some time as a personal hobby/interest. I thought I understood Aquinas' basic ontology, ethics, psychology etc, but after reading this clear introduction my understanding of Aquinas has increased a great deal. One thing that is missing however is an introduction to Aquinas' political philosophy. I find it very vague and I was hoping to see a treatment by Feser, since I suspect that I just don't understand Aquinas on this. And speaking of clearing up misunderstandings: Thanks to Feser I finally understand Aquinas' argument from perfection (4th way). Properly understood, it is actually a fascinating argument. Unfortunately it is difficult to understand without an "interpreter" like Feser who is able to succesfully straddle the divide b/n medieval and modern philosophical vocabulary so that Aquinas' arguments can be understood by modern readers. Many people (myself included) thought Aquinas was saying something like "there are more and less perfect apples, oranges and fires; there must be something that is the most perfect of all, therefore God exists." I'm glad the argument is actually quite different than that. Incidentally, this book is a good and necessary complement to "The Last Superstition" by Edward Feser.

This is a powerfully satisfying book, as is Feser's The Last Superstition - A Refutation of the New Atheism (see my review of the latter). The present book on the thirteenth-century Roman Catholic theologian St Thomas Aquinas (known commonly just as Thomas, or just as Aquinas) reinforces and amplifies the foundation for the arguments in the anti-New-Atheists book. All the previous reviews of this Aquinas book, by their ratings and the text of their reviews, clearly share my own high opinion of the book.

I must say a word of thanks to 'john' for his review of January 2, 2011 with its thorough listing of the contents of Feser's 'Aquinas', which tells the prospective purchaser who may not have yet read the book, what he will find in it. It saves me the trouble of spelling this out again in my own review.

In view of the many excellent comments already made by previous reviewers, I will limit myself to a small number of remarks.

Its most salient characteristic is its rehabilitation of the value of the Aristotelian/Thomistic philosophy, and specifically of the continuing validity of the Five Ways which Aquinas developed as proofs from 'natural theology' for the existence of God. This rehabilitation is now a real growth industry, from what I can see of the books referred to in, for example, the bibliographies in Feser's own book (excellently up-to-date, mostly post-1990, even mostly post-2000, but including also older traditional classics like Garrigou-Lagrange).

From what I have been reading generally in the religion/science debate, books like those of Feser, Peter S Williams (A Sceptic's Guide to Atheism), John Lennox (God's Undertaker: Has Science Buried God?), Robert J Spitzer (New Proofs for the Existence of God), Anthony Rizzi (The Science Before Science), David Bentley Hart (Atheist Delusions), Gerald O'Collins (Philip Pullman's Jesus), Antony Flew (There is a God), justified attacks on Hawking's 2010 book The Grand Design, etc. - from such reading I am convinced that the New Atheists and the radical agnostic/atheistic neo-Darwinians have been thoroughly routed. To repeat the constant thesis of Feser's book anti-the-New Atheists, and surfacing everywhere in the Aquinas book, the three contentions of traditional and now-reviving Thomism, that God exists, that the human soul is rational and immortal, and that morality depends ultimately on the existence of God, are overwhelmingly more likely (to say the very least) than the crass materialism of neo-Darwinism which would reduce all human activity to the mere blind action of material cells, and would deny free will, and would claim that there is no ultimate authority for morality outside of man's own manufacture.

Again, an ever-repeated argument of Feser in his Aquinas book is that the value of the arguments of Aristotle and Aquinas, when examined in the light of their fundamental metaphysical axioms, do not depend for their validity on the weak examples from physics and botany with which our ancient authors illustrated their arguments. For example, on p. 65 Feser says: " Aristotle's metaphysics stands or falls independently of his physics, and ... while [Aquinas's] Five Ways definitely presuppose certain Aristotelian metaphysical claims, there is never a point in any of the arguments where appeal need be made to now falsified theories in physics or any of the other sciences. Indeed, we will see that the Five Ways remain as interesting and worthy of consideration today as any other philosophical argument".

I underline also that Anthony Kenny on Aquinas is much rebutted by Feser, and (to my great delight) Hume's (to me) absurd rejection of cause-and-effect comes in, in this book of Feser's, too, for continual rejection. Feser stands by formal and final cause, against Hume and the moderns. Material and efficient cause are not enough. The essential underpinning of the metaphysics of Aquinas is the need to take into account the four causes of all created reality, the material, formal, efficient and final causes. 'Modern' philosophers (from the 17th/18th centuries onwards) have, by and large, rejected formal and final causes. Such philosophers simply cannot explain reality. I comment on this in various ways in my reviews of Flew (There is a God), Fergus Kerr (Theology after Wittgenstein) and Simon Blackburn (Truth: A Guide for the Perplexed). Blackburn's book surely does not un-perplex the perplexed. See also Anthony Kenny's Philosophy in the Modern World (being Volume 4 of Kenny's A New History of Western Philosophy). My overwhelming impression from my first quick read of Kenny-4 six months ago is that the book is a mere catalogue of famous names who have failed almost without exception to say anything that enlightens the human condition or gives anything by which the rational human being can live. A damning indictment of 'modern' philosophy (though that was hardly Kenny's intention in writing the book).

Throughout his book, Feser stresses that Aquinas's Five Ways (proofs for the existence of God), outlined briefly at the start of the Summa Theologiae, are not Aquinas's most complete treatment of this topic, but rather that his ideas on this topic are expanded and developed throughout all his works. Feser repeatedly introduces fresh quotations from Aquinas in proof of this. Failure to realize the summary nature of the Five Ways at the start of the Summa destroys the point of most of the 'modern' attack on the validity of these Five Ways. What they attack is usually a 'straw man' version of Aquinas's proofs.

And of course God is uncaused. It emerges from the views of Aquinas that God is the Uncaused Cause. So 'who caused God' is a nonsense question. He is pure Act. In him, there is no potency. In him, essence and existence are one and the same. And the divine attributes of the God of the Five Ways are, when fully understood, the attributes of the Christian God. All of this is in Aquinas/Feser.

Feser's book is one of a series of 'Beginner's Guides'. That does not make it an easy read. It deals with the absolute essentials and fundamentals of created and Uncreated being. An essential read.

This is an excellent introduction to the thought of Aquinas (it deals with his philosophy - it is not a biography of his life and times, nor does it cover all the theology). It is very accessible to the non-expert, but is best suited for those with some background knowledge of philosophy. In about 200 well written pages, Feser both presents and advocates for Thomist positions through 4 chapters devoted respectively to metaphysics, natural theology, psychology, and ethics.

I think Feser`s greatest success is in his arguments for a re-consideration of Aquinas' Aristotelian metaphysical ideas, especially with regard to causation, but also with regard to an ontology of potency and action, and hylomorphic (form/matter) dualism.

My main criticism is that while Feser's assumed role as Aquinas' champion is usually a benefit to the reader, as Aquinas is presented in most sympathetic light, he is inclined to insist that all of Aquinas' ideas are equally meritorious. In some cases this leads him to present arguments which seem to go beyond what would have occurred to Thomas himself.

But, with plenty of references for further reading, Feser has given the reader a roadmap for further study to follow onto his fine introduction.

Edward Feser's book Aquinas is one in a series of Beginners Guides. I wish that as a beginner my first encounter with the thought of Aquinas had been Feser's book. Feser distills the essence of the arguments and presents them with great clarity, as for example in the way in which he gently introduces Aristotelian/Aquinian terms. An approach used by another author I read was to provide a glossary of terms used by Aquinas with definitions expressed in current terminology. Having perused the list, the reader then proceeds to read in "Aquinian," so to speak, and flips back and forth to "translate' terms, a very cumbersome process. Not so with Feser. He puts each concept in context first. Then when he quotes Aquinas, the sentence following the quote very often begins with, "That is to say...," or "In other words..." In explaining Aquinas' First Way (one of his five metaphysical proofs for the existence of God), Feser quotes Aquinas as saying "that which moves as an instrumental cause cannot move unless there be a principal moving cause." Having already explained that when Aquinas/Aristotle say "move," they mean what we call "change," Feser rephrases Aquinas by says "lower member of a causal series ordered per se have no causal power on their own." (p. 71) The example given is a hand moving a staff which moves a stone which moves a leaf. The staff, the stone, and the leaf have no power to move on their own. A common modern misconception is that Aquinas argues that there is at the beginning of a chain of events spanning the eons a First Mover, unmoved and unmovable in itself. Aquinas argument does not have to do with eons of time, but rather looks at the events here and now, as Feser tells us. Feser has a gift for clearing away misconceptions and presenting accurately and concisely what Aquinas thought. And so Feser teaches us in bite-sized chunks how to understand Aquinas.

Feser's intellectual clarity is crucial in explaining how concepts such as cause and effect, basic for Aquinas and Aristotle, have become almost unintelligible given some of the preconceptions of modern philosophers. For example, Feser explains how David Hume (1711-1776) thought that causes and effects were "loose and separate," such that a brick thrown towards a window might shatter the window, or turn into a bouquet of flowers, or disappear. (p. 20) Descartes' imagining the mind and body as separate and self-sufficient entities created the modern "mind-body problem," a problem which did not exist for Aquinas, who understood the human being to be a composite of both. I know from experience that it is rough going trying to understand such concepts without a competent guide. Feser is that guide.

One last thing; reading philosophy with Feser is not a spectator sport. He requires the full engagement of the reader's mind to consider in detail not only the titanic intellect of Aquinas, but of other thinkers as well. Also, after reading his book, one has the sense of being right up to date on the debates in the philosophical world. He brings in ideas from philosophers down the centuries right up to our day. Eschewing the use of distracting footnotes, he instead provides a wealth of references for further reading at the end of the book, aligned with the topics covered in each chapter. I highly recommend this book.

After giving up his philosophical and theological writing, following a Church service, Thomas was asked whether he might ever continue his writing. No, he replied: "All that I have written seems to me like straw compared with what has now been revealed to me."

I say, make me into a horse, open the barn, and let me feast on Aquinas' straw and his satiating theoretical hay. And in Edward Feser's "Aquinas: A Beginner's Guide" one finds more than a beginner's guide, it is thorough and accurate philosophy delivered for great utility. If you think philosophy can be dry and dull, but you want to learn important philosophical truths, then this fascinating book is for you.

In this potent little volume (224 pages V Aquinas' capacious works) the erudite scholar and the philosophical novice will both profit greatly. Additionally Feser asserts that many of the critics, both historical and modern, of Aquinas' work have only rebutted strawmen and he more than adequately sets the record straight.

Faser demonstrates:

- The position Thomas has among contemporary thinkers
- An analytical offering of Thomas' thought marked with exactitude and perspicuity
- How Thomas' work can assist modern apologists, laymen, and philosophers.

Herein is a power-packed and useful resource that presents a compelling case for the enduring relevancy of Aquinas' thought.
If you enjoy Feser's Blog and his powerful book: "The Last Superstition" (best refutation of the New Atheists!) then you will find this volume a great delight.

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