Thomistic Psychology

Catholic University of America Press has just published another book in the field of so called “Thomistic psychology”: The Human Person: A Beginner’s Thomistic Psychology by Steven J. Jensen (after clicking “Look inside” over the book cover you may find the table of contents and excerpt from the book; some parts are also available at Google Books). As the author notes in the introduction,

Aquinas is sometimes called the angelic doctor because he wrote so much on the nature of angels. He wrote far more, however, about human beings. With him as our guide, we can set off on the path of rediscovery. We will attempt to discover human nature by examining what human beings do. From human activity, we come to understand human powers or capacities, and by understanding our powers we come to understand the nature that underlines them (p. 4).

Steven J. Jensen is a professor of philosophy at the University of St. Thomas (Houston) and the head of the Center for Thomistic Studies. A few months ago he published another book in the Thomistic psychology, devoted precisely to the concept of sin: Sin: A Thomistic Psychology (we briefly disccused the book at our webpage).

Of course, the topic of Thomistic psychology has been undertaken by researchers for decades. For example, not long ago a reedition of a 1941 book by Robert Edward Brennan, Thomistic Psychology: A Philosophic Analysis of the Nature of Man (Cluny Media 2016) was published.