Monsignor Glenn's Philosophy Series: A Complete Course in Scholastic Philosophy

• ELEVEN VOLUMES IN ONE SET – From An Introduction to Philosophy to A Tour of the Summa.
• A CONNECTED COURSE – Logic, nature, the soul, being, ethics, God and society, each volume building on the last.
• THE WHOLE SUMMA – A Tour of the Summa takes the reader through all of St Thomas's great work, from beginning to end.
• WRITTEN TO BE UNDERSTOOD – Composed for college students and the general reader: clear, succinct and rigorous.
• MADE TO LAST – Sewn hardbacks, built for study and rereading.

Anyone who has tried to read St Thomas cold knows the difficulty. The ideas are luminous, but the vocabulary of act and potency, essence and existence, matter and form, assumes a training most of us were never given. For much of the twentieth century, Catholic colleges in America supplied that training with the textbooks of Monsignor Paul J. Glenn. We are delighted to bring eleven of them together as a single set.

The author

Monsignor Paul Joseph Glenn (1893–1957) was a priest, philosopher and teacher. He held doctorates in philosophy and sacred theology, taught philosophy at the College-Seminary of St Charles Borromeo in Columbus, Ohio, and served as its rector from 1945 until his death. Beginning with The History of Philosophy in 1929, he wrote a whole course of textbooks in the Scholastic tradition. He wrote for Catholic college students and the general reading public, and he wrote to be understood.

How the course works

The set opens with An Introduction to Philosophy, which explains what philosophy is and outlines the master sciences that make it up, and The History of Philosophy, which traces the long development of the philosophia perennis. Then come the branches themselves, in an order that makes sense. Dialectics supplies the tools of correct thinking that every other discipline needs. Cosmology studies the material world in its deepest causes and introduces the concepts on which the rest depend. Psychology, the traditional science of the soul rather than the modern clinical kind, treats life, intellect, will and immortality. Ontology, the heart of the whole subject, studies being as being. Ethics and Sociology carry these principles into the moral life of the person, the family, the State and the Church. Theodicy shows what reason can know of God, and Apologetics sets out the reasonableness of the Faith.

A Tour of the Summa

The final volume, published three years after Glenn's death, is the crown of the set. It is neither a translation nor a digest, but a condensed paraphrase of the entire Summa Theologica, arranged so that the reader can turn at once to the matching place in St Thomas. Read on its own, it gives a view of the whole Summa that few people ever obtain. Read alongside the original, it is the best companion we know.

Who it is for

Students and homeschooling families wanting a sound course in philosophy; seminarians and priests who want to revisit their manuals; and any reader who has been told that Catholic thought rests on St Thomas and would like, at last, to see why.

Our edition

All eleven volumes are sewn hardbacks, made to be studied, annotated and kept. The set is available now to pre-order, with free shipping included. Pre-order it here.