Thomas Aquinas in 90 Minutes (Philosophers in 90 Minutes)

In Thomas Aquinas in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern offers a concise, expert account of Aquinas's life and ideas, and explains their influence on man's struggle to understand his existence in the world. The book also includes selections from Aquinas's writings; a brief list of suggested reading for those who wish to push further; and chronologies that place Aquinas within his own age and in the broader scheme of philosophy.

In yet another of his popular books explaining the ideas of the great philosophers in accessible language, Paul Strathern takes on "a shadowy figure amongst the incense clouds of theology," who also happens to be "the finest philosophical mind in Europe for a thousand years (since St. Augustine)," St. Thomas Aquinas. Strathern applies his trademark humor to the Summa Theologica ("Christianity's answer to the Talmud") and the Summa Contra Gentiles, whose "imaginary reader is generally reckoned to be an intellectual Arab. After being subjected to hundreds of pages demonstrating the incontrovertible truth of the Christian religion, it is assumed that he has no alternative but to forswear Islam and embrace Christianity. How many intellectual Arabs subjected themselves to this grueling experience and reached the same conclusion is unknown." Underneath the gags, however, you'll gain a reasonable summation of Aquinas's impact on the scholasticism of his era and the validity of his continued, if somewhat diminished, relevance to present-day philosophy.