A Beginners Guide to Aquinas

Well-written introduction to Aquinas. I liked the recurring comparisons to contemporary Western philosophers, they really helped put his ideas into context and highlight the different assumptions each philosopher makes.

Although I don’t agree with his metaphysics (eww, essentialism), it’s a very elegant system. Basically, everything follows coherently from his metaphysical framework.

Also, I finally read something about the four causes. The four causes can be understood as four different answers to why questions:

• Material Cause: Matter is what allows a thing to change, either accidentally, such as a change in shape, or substantially, such as the death of a living thing, or a compound returning to its elemental parts e.g. the material cause of why a table exist is that its made of wood.
• Formal Cause: It is what something changes into, i.e. what makes a thing what it is. Form is often confused with the whole substance, whereas it is a thing’s essential difference, for example, man is a rational animal, what makes man a man, is his rationality, i.e. what makes him different from other animals e.g. the formal cause of a table is its design.
• Efficient Cause: This consists of things apart from the thing being changed or moved, which interact so as to be an agency of the change or movement. For example, the efficient cause of a table is a carpenter, or a person working as one, and according to Aristotle the efficient cause of a child is a parent.
• Final Cause: his is a change or movement for the sake of a thing to be what it is. For a seed, it might be an adult plant; for a sailboat, it might be sailing; for a ball at the top of a ramp, it might be coming to rest at the bottom e.g. The final cause of the table is that its gonna be used for dining.