Abstract

This book is a revised version of the author's doctoral dissertation at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. It notes that modern writers on Aquinas, unlike those on other philosophers, seldom disagree with him, and that especially he has to be set free from the prejudices of the later textbook Thomism institutionalized by the encyclical Aeterni Patris. Accordingly the book proposes to meet this situation by following the lead of the fifteenth-century Peter of Bergamo and the work of E.-H. Wéber in emphasizing the overt fact that the thought of Aquinas does not have the systematic unity traditionally attributed to it. Centering on its notion of principles, Kuhn aims to show that even in its fundamental tenets Aquinas' philosophy cannot be harmonised.