Customer Reviews

An Aquinas Reader: Selections from the Writings of Thomas Aquinas

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This is an unfortunate example of the sort of thing which academics produce and then force undergraduates to wade through. The author has found all the similar passages in Aquinas' many works and has collected them together in snippets varying from a paragraph to two to three pages in length. This results in great repetition, and the beauty of the sweeping logical development which is presumably present in the original, is lost.

A word of warning to anyone who would approach Aquinas: read your Aristotle first.

This book suffered from three weaknesses, the first of which may be idiosyncratic. 1. A "reader," I presumed, would be an introduction to Acquinas, one I could read without attending a class. Not so. This book assumed a lot of familiarity with Acquinas's terminology and intellectual heritage. 2. The book is organized by topics, with brief excerpts from Thomas's works yanked out of context to fit the editor's topic selection. A sequential selection from Thomas's principal writings would have better preserved the integrity of the works and allowed the reader better to follow Thomas's reasoning. 3. Finally, the editor needed an editor. Her writing is cumbersome. She seems to have forgotten how to write a simple declarative sentence.

I find Moses Maimonides no more approachable than Thomas Acquinas, but Isadore Twersky's "A Maimonides Reader" is far more approachable than Mary Clark's Acquinas reader.

I have just finished this book. I just took five minutes to tell the customers of Amazon that it is very interesting. It is well presented by Mary Clark with very interesting introductions to the five chapters. This presentation really makes St Thomas Aquinas very readable today. What the Saint focuses on is so important and so relevant to our understanding of our modern world and yet he wrote in the 13th century. When I read the book I tried to always think about how it applies to my life today. Don't be put off by reviews that sound a little bit over the top and too harsh.

Mary Clark's revision of the Aquinas reader offers the most up to date and comprehensive selection of Aquinas' texts currently available. Especially notable is the way this revision includes principal texts from Aquinas' writings on participation, the centrality of which is now accepted in Continental Thomist studies and is increasingly understood here in the North America (cf. Norris Clarke, John Wippel, et. al.). Highly recommended.

And despite what a previous reviewer said, Mary Clark's introductions and explications are wonderful.

I've been using Mary Clark's Aquinas Reader for the last several days, doing research for a paper on Aquinas' use of Aristotle's Ethics. On the one hand, the book has been very, very useful: it's directed me to some key passages, scattered across a wide range of Aquinas' works, that I would never have found on my own: I would have restricted my readings to the Summa, and as it turns out, that would have been a big mistake. I owe some substantial "thanks" to Mary Clark for her work in assembling this wide-ranging summary of Aquinas' thought.

At the same time, I found several points where Mary Clark's work seemed troublingly sloppy. In one passage, she accidentally failed to translate a key sentence: with this sentence absent, it appeared as if Aquinas was badly misinterpreting Aristotle. I had to track down Aquinas' original Latin to figure out what was going on. In another, she mistakenly attributed a given passage to one of Thomas' works (Commentary on the Soul), when it actually came from another (Commentary on the Sentences). (Ask me how long it took to track THAT down.) And these were just in the few passages that I happened to check.

In other words, if you're willing to put up with some hard slogging (which is sort of inherent in reading Aquinas), this is a good introduction. But I'd recommend that you look elsewhere if you're trying to do an academic paper.

This reader is aimed for the graduate student or seminarian studying Philosophy of the Human Person.

This particular edition (maroon cover) is slightly different from the edition with the green cover. Section one on Reality is an historical study of St. Thomas's thought on ESSE. When 'An Aquinas Reader' was originally published (1972) that question of what St. Thomas meant by ESSE was a big deal in Thomsitic circles. Sr. Mary discovered that most college metaphysics professors were not interested in following St. Thomas's thought on ESSE as his life and work progressed, but simply on he topics of 'What is metaphysics?' and other foundational stuff. So she changed section one. Sections 2-5 are virtually unchanged.

The entire book enjoys coherence. Sr. Mary uses headings for each section and gives the source, so that if one so desires, one can go back to the original text and read it in its entirety. In fact, she would encourage anyone and everyone to read the original. The Reader is really a sourcebook to help students understand Thomas and introduce us to a wide range of his works.