Amazon Review...

Summa Philosophica by Peter Kreeft.

As always, go here and give me a "helpful" vote.

Peter Kreeft manages to recapture the form and spirit of St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica. Kreeft approaches the perennial philosophical topics by breaking the questions down into their essential propositions, and, then, sharpening the engagement by following the Scholastic approach of posing objections to the proposition, an argument supporting the proposition and answers to the objections. Anyone familiar with the Summa Theologica will immediately recognize the style.

Kreeft breaks his Summa into ten subject areas - Logic and Methodology, Metaphysics, Natural Theology, Cosmology, Philosophical Anthropology, Epistemology, General Ethics, Applied Ethics, Political Philosophy and Aesthetics. He then breaks these areas down into specific questions covering the great controversies in each area, usually going from general to specific, as he lays the foundation for a later question in a prior answer. In the area of Logic, for example, Kreeft starts with whether philosophy is "still rightly defined as the love of wisdom" and ends with "whether symbolic logic is superior to Aristotelian logic for philosophizing?"

The great thing about Kreeft's book is that it is pure philosophy. What Kreeft provides are the "naked" arguments on the key questions of the important topics. Rather than offering a historical retrospective, which follows the evolution of a controversy through time and which relies on tying particular positions to particular philosophers, Kreeft goes directly to the arguments. There is no historical retrospective here; very few philosophers are identified by name, except in passing. Instead the focus is on the clash of ideas, which, for beginners, and for apologists, and lovers of wisdom, is where philosophy ought to begin.

The philosophical positions staked out are very much those of Peter Kreeft. Consequently, we get very pragmatic answers to pragmatically phrased questions. For example, in responding to the argument that the order in the cosmos is not teleological since "simpler explanations are to be preferred to more complex ones," i.e., Occam's Razor or the principle of parsimony (Q.IV, a.1), Kreeft writes: "Ockham's Razor is a good methodological principle for modern science, but it is not a good ontological principle; for the real universe, as distinct from scientific explanations, is much fuller than it needs to be. There is no need for ostriches. Yet they exist." (Q. IV, a.1.)

Badda-boom, badda-bing.

Perfect Kreeft - simple, succinct and with a startling zing.

Kreeft's Summa is decidedly not academic; there are no footnotes and few references. But it does provide a way of entering into the key philosophical topics from Kreeft's Thomistic perspective. It makes for good, casual reading that one can dip into on specific topics, and is a pretty good manual for a survey of the arguments for and against a broad variety of positions. I think that it would make for a good discussion starting tool, whether in the school or a philosophy club. (Or for that matter, for anyone who wants a good source for pragmatic, Thomistic apologetic arguments.)

Clearly, the reader's satisfaction with the substance of Kreeft's arguments may vary depending on how much they "buy into" Kreeft's pragmatic, Thomistic approach to philosophy. However, I don't think that Kreeft's philosophical perspective should dissuade anyone from reading or using the book. Rather, it ought to challenge them to respond to Kreeft's arguments in as rational, logical and lucid a way as that which Kreeft used to make his argument.