For students enrolled at Marquette University:
Aristotle: Two links to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: (i) General Principles of His Philosophy, (ii) Principles of His Philosophical Psychology, (iii) J. Barnes, Aristotle. A Very Short Introduction (available online via Marqcat Raynor Library)
Thomas Aquinas: It is difficult to recommend short works on the thought of Aquinas for our course since we will be intensively focused on the philosophical issues discussed in his works of theology. While there are books on his philosophical writings, it is difficult for authors genuinely to abstract with proper care and precision purely philosophical teachings from their theological setting. We will be doing that but it must be done thoughtfully and with precision. Hence, while he was first and foremost a theologian, he was also a brilliant and insightful philosophical thinker, a leading mind of the Middle Ages in the interpretation of psychology and metaphysics of the Aristotelian Traditions. Like other brilliant thinkers of that broad period such as al-Fārābī, Ibn Sīnā / Avicenna, Ibn Rushd / Averroes, Albert the Great and others, his insights and explanations of complex teachings advanced the traditions in new directions in setting out the nature of human being. While recognizing his brilliance and influence as a Christian theologian, something reflected in the many very good introductions to his thought available today, we need to be aware that there is no work which we find to be a particularly adequate short introduction to the development of his philosophical theology and his philosophical conception of human nature, our main foci in this course. Still, our course is on the philosophical character of his thought while still properly recognizing him as theologian. Here we recommend to you only one short piece from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and a very important book length study on his development as explicated by Pasquale Porro, an insightful philosophical thinker today at the University of Torino, Italy. Both these recommended works are available online, this latter by Porro through Marqcat.
(i) Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Thomas Aquinas, (ii) Thomas Aquinas: A Historical and Philosophical Profile