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The Human Wisdom of St. Thomas
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$ 11.40
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Item Description...
Product Description
Arranged by Josef Pieper
Josef Pieper has attached no commentary to the texts brought together in this breviary of the philosophy of St. Thomas, preferring that the reader should encounter them, "on his own". His work has been one of selection, in which he has sought to assemble such passages as will provide an introduction to the form and design of the whole Thomistic system.
Yet he has so ordered his texts as to impress upon the reader a special feature of St. Thomas's thought, what he calls its double aspect: St. Thomas sees the whole scheme of reality ordered and penetrable by reason; yet the mystery of Being itself remains: "The effort of human thought has not been able to track down the essence of a single gnat."
Josef Pieper, one of the most highly regarded Thomistic philosophers of the twentieth century, wrote numerous philosophical works including Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Guide to Thomas Aquinas, Only the Lover Sings and many more.
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Item Specifications...
Pages 109
Dimensions: Length: 0.5" Width: 5" Height: 7.25"
Weight: 0.25 lbs.
Binding Softcover
Publisher Ignatius Press
ISBN 0898708915
EAN 9780898708912
UPC 008987089155
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Availability 6 units.
Availability accurate as of May 26, 2012 11:42.
Usually ships within one to two business days from Momence, IL.
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 | Pithy Wisdom Aug 26, 2006 |
Professor of Philosophy Edward T. Oakes S.J. writes of this compendium of quotes of St. Thomas Aquinas:
[In response to someone telling him St. Thomas Aquinas was a great aphorist, a coiner of one line wise sayings] I rejoined that a medieval scribe who became the most famous practitioner of that notoriously hairsplitting method called Scholasticism--and who produced something like eight million words, in the pre-Gutenberg era to boot--could hardly be called an aphorist. But this faithful correspondent then pointed me to Josef Pieper's marvelous collection of Thomistic one-liners called The Human Wisdom of St. Thomas: A Breviary of Philosophy, which taught me otherwise. Until I had read this powerful (but also exhausting!) book, I had not realized how concise, pithy, indeed almost aphoristic, the medievals were forced to be.
Remarkably, Pieper resolutely refused to provide so much as a single line of commentary in his "breviary." All he furnished, arranged in vague topical categories, were the one-line conclusions to Thomas' positions, not the arguments for them. But even standing alone, they have a way of, well, standing on their own. I'll cite a few just to give you an idea:
* Everything eternal is necessary.
* Every creature participates in goodness in the same degree as it participates in being.
* In the universe, only the intellectual nature is sought on its own account, all others on account of it.
* Desire of the knowledge of truth is peculiar to human nature.
* Evil is not caused except by good.
* Everything evil is rooted in some good, and everything false in some truth.
* Evil produces no effect except in virtue of some good.
* However much evil is multiplied, it is never able completely to swallow good.
* Stronger than the evil in wickedness is the good in goodness.
* Good can be realized in purer form than evil. For there is some good in which no evil is mixed, but there is nothing so very evil that no good is mixed in it.
Pieper's collection deals only, as the title says, with Thomas' "human" wisdom, meaning his purely philosophical aphorisms, although it would be hard to think of such allegedly pure "philosophical" clarity coming to Thomas except in the light of his faith.
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