This is a corrected second impression of the original bilingual critical edition of Poinsot's work on signs completed in 1632. New materials include a new "Foreword" by the translator and a full table of correlations between the independent Tractatus edition and the original Cursus Philo-sophicus from which that edition was established. The Cursus Philosophicus was one of the two great syntheses of Latin thought made in the lifetime of Descartes. Yet only that of Francis Suarez in 1597, the Disputationes Metaphysicae, was destined to be read by the early moderns. This is a work of immense erudition that synthesizes the matter of signs philosophy from Aristotle and his successors in Greece and Rome to the pre-eminent St. Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages and so on through the leading schools of Renaissance thought. Poinsot was instrumental in the twentieth-century revival of Thomism led by Jacques Maritain. His seminal Introduction to the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas (St. Augustine's Press, 2004)

John of St. Thomas (John Poinsot) lived from 1584 to 1644 and was one of the luminaries of the Second Scholasticism, which flourished on the Iberian Peninsula at a time when, on the continent, Thomism was virtually eclipsed. In his Cursus Philosophicus, John of St. Thomas provides a remarkable precis of the philosophy that is presupposed by theology. His Cursus Theologicus is a commentary on the Summa Theologiae in the manner of the Master's exposition of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, that is, the pursuit of the main questions raised by the text rather than a textual commentary. Included in modern editions of the Cursus Theologicus are a number of preliminary studies, among them a remarkable analysis of the Summa, part by part, treatise by treatise, in which the exquisite architecture of this masterpiece of Thomas Aquinas is magisterially displayed. This may be read as the explicatio textus, essential for reading the Cursus Theologicus. Readers of Jacques and Raissa Maritain are aware of the central role John of St. Thomas played in their grasp of Aquinas. Indeed, this was true of most of those involved in the Thomistic Revival inaugurated by Leo XIII. This translation of John of St. Thomas's Introduction as it appears in the Solesmes edition makes available to a new generation of students of Thomas a precious handbook and guide to the Summa.