ABSTRACT

One reason why Aquinas rises to the level of a great philosopher is the sophisticated way in which he weaves together disparate elements from multiple sources and traditions to establish his conclusions. This chapter focuses on three such cases: Aquinas’s argument for the unicity of substantial form, his use of Aristotelian virtue theory as a foundation for an account of Christian virtue, and finally the pedagogical project that serves to unify the whole of Aquinas’s wide-ranging Summa theologiae.