Preface
Preface
Thomas Aquinas’s Quodlibetal Questions have been much neglected by English-speaking readers of Aquinas, and understandably so. It was only in 1996 that a properly critical edition of the Latin text appeared, and there has so far been no complete English translation based on this edition or any other. Also, students of Aquinas have naturally devoted most of their energy to reading and discussing his best-known works, such as the Summa Theologiae and the Summa Contra Gentiles. Yet Aquinas spent a lot of time working on his Quodlibetal Questions, which present his thinking on a huge number of topics, some of which he discusses in other works, but some of which he does not. Indeed, taken overall, the Quodlibetal Questions are unique among Aquinas’s works, since the questions they treat were not of his own choosing; they came directly from audiences at public disputations over which he presided at the University of Paris. In that sense the Quodlibetal Questions tells us not only a great deal about Aquinas but also about the philosophical and theological interests of his contemporaries.
In this volume we present an English translation of Aquinas’s Quodlibetal Questions based on the critical Latin edition produced by the Leonine Commission under the direction of René-Antoine Gauthier. We also present an introduction designed to give readers a sense of what the Quodlibetal Questions are, how they fit into Aquinas’s life and works, and what sorts of things they contain. At the end of the volume we provide a list of passages in Aquinas’s other works that parallel the articles of his Quodlibetal Questions. We also provide a glossary of terms used by Aquinas which may be unfamiliar to some readers, and a glossary of authors and works cited by Aquinas in his Quodlibetal Questions. Our hope is that all students of Aquinas, and of medieval philosophy and theology more generally, will benefit from the present volume, which gives them access to this unique and understudied work.
We are extremely grateful to Adriano Oliva, President of the Leonine Commission, for permitting us to use the critical Latin edition of the Quodlibetal Questions for our translation, and for allowing us to include a selection of the edition’s notes and parallel passages. We wish to thank him for his helpful comments on our introduction, as well. For help and advice of various kinds we also wish to thank Christopher Arroyo, Kelsey Boor, Marta Borgo, Matthew Glaser, Paul Kucharski, Elizabeth Kuhl, Simon Tugwell, and John Wippel. We are also much indebted to Cynthia Read of Oxford University Press for her patience while waiting for us to deliver this volume.