The Good of Thomas Aquinas

Aquinas’s thought was recognized as brilliant and insightful from his own time onwards, and there is a resurgence of interest in it today not only among Catholics and other Christians but among contemporary humanistic philosophers also, as a quick review of bibliographic sources will evince. Nonetheless, with many pressing problems in the world, with growing secularization of society, and with rising recognition of the need for multicultural studies, people may wonder why anyone would want to study the thought of a thirteenth-century European Catholic. People may think, what good is Aquinas now? This small essay is an attempt to give a short answer to that question. Our essay has two parts. The first part focuses on Aquinas’s metaphysics. It shows the way in which both the preceding Jewish and Hellenistic traditions are brought together in Aquinas’s work to yield a metaphysics that can handle well complicated philosophical issues still discussed today. The second part focuses on Aquinas’s ethics. It shows the way in which Aquinas’s version of virtue ethics incorporates the significance of the second-personal in human flourishing to yield a decidedly non-Aristotelian ethics.