New Project: Blogging through the Summa
The excellent Maverick Philosopher recently wrote that
The only way properly to assimilate a philosophical text is by writing a summary and a critique of it. The summary is an attempt to understand exactly what the author’s thesis or theses are, and (just as important) what his arguments are. Having done that, one advances to critical evaluation, the attempt to sort out which theses and arguments you consider true/valid and which false/invalid. Blogging can be very useful for this purpose and can lead to worthwhile exchanges and the refinement and testing of one’s ideas.
I’ve decided to adopt this approach for nothing less than the Summa Theologica. My plan is to blog through the work sequentially, article by article. Don’t worry, I don’t expect to finish. I also don’t know how long I’ll last. And I’m sure I’ll frequently expose my ignorance along the way. But no matter how far I get, it’ll be a profitable exercise. This semester, I’ve spent most of my time studying questions that, although fascinating, simply don’t have the same significance that philosophical and theological questions do. Having a thorough knowledge of English phonology or being able to perfectly articulate the failings of pure audiolingualism is well and good, but such things are inherently myopic compared to questions like, “Is there a God?” or “How has he revealed himself to his creatures, if at all?” The latter type, unlike the former, is essential to the intellectual life; and we are intellectual beings before we are language-teaching beings (as it were).
Unfortunately, I cannot read Aquinas’s Latin with any profit, so I’ll have to stick to a translation.
A quick introduction to the structure of the work: the Summa is divided into Parts (highest level), Questions, and Articles (lowest level). Each article consists of a title (in the form of a question), one or more objections to Aquinas’s position, Aquinas’s statement of his position, and then Aquinas’s replies to the objections raised at the beginning of the article.
