A collection of essays that deals with Thomas Aquinas's metaphysical thought. The volume begins with a presentation and critical evaluation of 20th-century attempts to describe his philosophical thought, and goes on to explain the interrelationship between philosophy and the sciences.

This volume gathers studies by prominent scholars and philosophers about the question: how have major figures from the history of philosophy, and some contemporary philosophers, addressed the ultimate why question: why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever? The authors take this question seriously, striving to go beyond accounting for the present state of reality as distinguished from a prior or subsequent state, to the more profound question of discerning why anything whatsoever exists.

This volume contains eleven articles and book chapters written by John Wippel since the publication of his Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas in 1984. Many of them have also been published since the completion of his The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being. It is intended to serve as a complement to but not as a substitute for those volumes.
The essays considered in this volume range widely over many different topics such as the possibility of a Christian philosophy from a Thomistic perspective, the Latin Avicenna as a source for Aquinas's...