Summa Theologiae
by Thomas Aquinas, The Aquinas Institute · first published 2012
13mentions
2recommended by
12HN commenters
2017–2026first – last mentioned
17% recommend83% neutral
Affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
Summa Theologiae by St Thomas Aquinas
on “Ask HN: Which book helped you understand the world?” ↗…underlying reasoning or take a Bible-only approach which I find to be incredibly incomplete. In case your upbringing didn't include much theological reading, I would strongly recommend Civitas Dei and Summa Theologiae; the latter is less explicitly relevant to its definition but probably a better book overall.
I hope to learn more about the theology and philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas through reading his works, I acquired a complete copy of the Summa Theologiae as well as some of his scriptural commentaries, and reading secondary works by thomists.
on “Ask HN: What are you going to learn in 2023” ↗…judgment of a matter not entrusted to him. For it belongs to God alone to pronounce sentence of death and life, according to Deuteronomy 32:39, "I will kill and I will make to live." ~ St. Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae Secunda Secundae Partis. Q. 64 Art. 5 https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3064.htm#article5
on “People who die by suicide want to stop suffering, not to stop living” ↗…don't have the dates) Well, more than just the dates, it's about the intellectual rigor of people thinking about the theology. There is no serious equivalent in Roman mythology to, for example, Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, which includes grappling with questions such as "Whether the existence of God is self-evident?", "Whether God is the supreme good?", and "Whether sacred doctrine is a matter of argument?". >but what…
on “What if I’m wrong? (2023)” ↗> Well, more than just the dates, it's about the intellectual rigor of people thinking about the theology. There is no serious equivalent in Roman mythology to, for example, Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, which includes grappling with questions such as "Whether the existence of God is self-evident?", "Whether God is the supreme good?", and "Whether sacred doctrine is a matter of argument?". I'm genuinely…
on “What if I’m wrong? (2023)” ↗"It is requisite that a man should arrange the things he wishes to remember in a certain order, so that from one he may come to another: for order is a kind of chain for memory" – Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae. Not ironically I found the passage in my Zettelkasten.
on “We can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds” ↗> The rational soul can be made only by creation. From Aquinas' Summa Theologiae. The argument this article presents does seem very similar. Weirdly, the article itself is very dismissive of religion, while making a similar argument to the one Aquinas made 750 years ago.
on “"AI" will never become conscious” ↗The most obvious one is the "god of the gaps" problem now applied to intelligence. If you look at things like Aquinas' Summa Theologiae [1] you'll see that there are explicit assertions that things like rationality transcend corporeal nature. As such the more examples we have of AI behaving in rational ways, we will be forced to conclude…
on “How I feel about AI” ↗…theist who formulated the theory of the Big Bang. And indeed, theology is filled with questions about the nature of God and how to understand God's relationship with the world. See for example Aquinas's Summa Theologiae, which is nothing more than a list of questions and answers along with possible objections about reason, faith, God, and theology. Not a scientific work of course, but the point is you are certainly allowed…
on “Inside the proton, the ‘most complicated thing you could possibly imagine’” ↗…in order to reveal its meaning. This approach to writing and reading may also shed some light on the horror vacui that may be observed in medieval writing. For an opposite approach we may consider the Summa Theologiae, breaking down the text in structure and form so it provides a quick and easy orientation for where in the text we currently are. This approach brings also some new characters, like "¶" to mark the beginning…
on “The lost letters of the English alphabet” ↗…fasteners, ibuprofen, GPS, voltmeters, extreme ultraviolet lithography, things that you and I can use and rely on daily. I have read pretty much all the major texts of the major traditions, from Mahābhārata to Summa Theologiae, call it intellectual curiosity. If not for the "bragging rights" to say that I know what filioque or bodhipakkhiyādhammā means, I would regret it, wasted time and pointless eye strain. So no, it's not…
on “Language models can explain neurons in language models” ↗…Augustine, Aquinas or Calvin, but it was fairly easy with nuclear physics. Theology isn't "based on nothing", but the convincing power of the quantum physics books happens to be radically different from Summa Theologiae, even if both are just books written by educated people based on a lot of thought and prior work.
on “LLM Inevitabilism” ↗