ABSTRACT
Why should anyone wish to study the philosophy or psychology of St Thomas Aquinas? He was an Italian friar of the thirteenth century, writing in low Latin encumbered with antiquated jargon, subservient to the teaching authority of the medieval church. Why should a secular English reader in the twentieth century expect to learn anything of philosophical value as a reward for the labour of working through the text of the Summa Theologiae? Surely, one may think, the progress of psychology in the centuries that have passed will have rendered obsolete everything Aquinas wrote about the nature of the mind.
