Thomistic Considerations

This collection of essays considers a variety of themes in philosophy, theology, and poetry, three ways of thinking that share a certain openness and comprehensiveness. The essays show how philosophy, theology, and poetry are ways of thinking in the medium of words—in large part in the medium of written words—against the background of all things and from the point of view of all of human life. As the essays make clear, philosophy, theology, and poetry are special ways of thinking and speaking, but they are the contrary of specializations.

Many of the themes are perennial preoccupations in philosophy: being, time, number, friendship, pleasure, purpose, choice, reason, and order. Others are particular concerns of theology and poetry, such as the divine presence and absence in the world, and poetic form.

The volume is divided into two parts: a first part consisting of eight essays on themes in Aquinas’s work, and a second part consisting of five essays on other authors whose thought, in one way or another, has an affinity with the thought of Aquinas: Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, Dante, T. S. Eliot, and Robert Sokolowski. The volume’s title pays homage to Aquinas’s use of the Latin word consideratio, a favorite term of the scholastics that could refer toany careful attending to what one knows. The essays illustrate ways in which considerations undertaken in philosophy, theology, and poetry provide points of survey from which to take in, to the extent we can, the great panorama of the whole of things.

Kevin White is ordinary professor in Philosophy at The Catholic University of America.