Thursday, January 8, 2026

Review of Gorman

Readers who have access to the journal The Thomist might be interested in my review of Michael Gorman’s terrific book A Contemporary Introduction to Thomistic Metaphysics, which appears in the January 2026 issue.

8 comments:

  1. No access to the world's premier Thomistic journal , The Thomist.

    ReplyDelete
  2. This actually looks really interesting. Shame it's only in paperback.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I bought this book a few months ago, and it's one of the best introductions to Thomistic metaphysics that I've ever read. Gorman's writing style is very accessible, and pretty entertaining at times.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I thought it was excellent. A different flavor from Ed's, who has a stronger interest in engaging with the literature in contemporary analytic philosophy (not that Gorman doesn't do this). But I think as an introductory textbook, Gorman's book is quite exceptional.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Have you blocked my comment? John Ghostley

    ReplyDelete
  6. Here is Dr Gorman talking about his book
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3tmadug030

    ReplyDelete
  7. When I read the book, he seemed to advocate a form of nominalism. I don’t think any form of nominalism is a good way to explain the operations of the human intellect.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Hi Prof

    How are you ?

    I was wondering if you could take one question for me if it's not too much trouble.

    On a different matter rather then politics.

    You wrote in Aristotle's revenge that,

    "Even if we regarded the natural world as a single four-dimensional object, we could distinguish between the world itself as a concrete particular and the universal that it instantiates – a universal which, unlike the natural world itself and qua universal, is abstract rather than concrete, in principle multiply instantiable, causally inert, and so on"

    Would this be one way of explaining the difference between essence (universal) and existence ?

    Cheers

    Hope all is well. I am sorry for being a jerk earlier.

    ReplyDelete