Thomistic Common Sense: The Philosophy of Being and the Development of Doctrine

Despite living in an "information age," we are confronted by the clash of ideologies and a crisis of universal knowledge. The Church is not unaffected by the world's weariness and similarly faces what Fr. Mauro Gagliardi describes as "the lack of truth, or perhaps better, the disinterest in it." Today's philosophical and doctrinal decline are the results of the loss of first principles and a relativistic view of doctrinal development.

This first-time English translation of Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange's Le sens commun: La philosophie de l' être et les formules dogmatiques by the acclaimed translator Matthew Minerd couldn't come at a better time. This book sees the great Dominican master address a variety of fundamental topics that we need to return to and relearn in our day: the relationship between common sense and both philosophy and faith; the proper defense for philosophical realism; the subordination and coordination of philosophical first principles; our natural capacity for knowing God's existence; and, at length, the problem of dogmatic development.

Although originally written during the Catholic Modernist crisis at the turn of the twentieth century, Thomistic Common Sense is no mere relic of past controversies. Jacques Maritain, for example, while reflecting on his formation as a Thomist, cited it as particularly influential. In our own time, this book serves as a foundational textbook of Thomistic philosophy, communicating its wisdom with clarity, power, and perennial resonance.

Réginald Marie Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. (1877–1964), was a French Catholic theologian and leading Thomist of the twentieth century who taught at the Dominican Pontifical University of St. Thomas Aquinas, the Angelicum, in Rome from 1909 to 1960.

Matthew K. Minerd, PhD, is a Ruthenian Catholic, husband, and father, serving as a professor of philosophy and moral theology at the Byzantine Catholic Seminary of Saints Cyril and Methodius in Pittsburgh, PA. He has been published in Nova et Vetera, The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, The Review of Metaphysics, Études Maritainiennes, Downside Review, and Homiletic and Pastoral Review. He has also served as a translator or editor for volumes published by Emmaus Academic, Cluny Media, and The Catholic University of America Press.