The New Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy)

This new Companion to Aquinas features entirely new chapters written by internationally recognized experts in the field. It shows the power of Aquinas's philosophical thought and transmits the worldview which he inherited, developed, altered, and argued for, while at the same time revealing to contemporary philosophers the strong connections which there are between Aquinas's interests and views and their own. Its five sections cover the life and works of Aquinas; his metaphysics, including his understanding of the ultimate foundations of reality; his metaethics and ethics, including his virtue ethics; his account of human nature; his theory of the afterlife; his epistemology and his theory of the intellectual virtues; his view of the nature of free will and the relation of grace to free will; and finally some key components of his philosophical theology, including the incarnation and atonement, Christology, and the nature of original sin.No cover page "The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, edited by Eleonore Stump and her friend and former teacher Norman Kretzmann (1998), appeared almost thirty years ago. In the time since the publication of that volume, an enormous amount of research on Aquinas's thought has appeared. The time is right, then, for a redoing of that Companion volume. But because so much time has elapsed since the first Companion volume appeared, it was not feasible just to revise it and reissue it as a second edition. Instead, it was necessary to start over completely. With the exception of Eleonore Stump, all the contributors to The New Cambridge Companion to Aquinas are new and have written original papers for this volume; and even Stump's paper in the first Companion volume has been replaced by an entirely fresh essay."-- Provided by publisher A welcome resource for a new generation of readers studying Aquinas, this entirely new Companion explores his philosophical thought in relation to the worldview he inherited, developed, altered, and argued for. To contemporary philosophers, the book reveals the strong connections between Aquinas's interests and views and their own.