"Cognition" is a basic introductory text for college courses in the philosophy of knowledge. Joseph Owens here expands the narrowly metaphysical treatment of knowledge given in his earlier book, "An Elementary Christian Metaphysics" into a fully-fledged epistemology. This text utilises the traditions of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to reacquaint students of philosophy with a number of insights which are basic to a philosophic understanding of knowledge. These insights into the nature of abstraction, truth, the ground of certitude, and other major concerns of epistemology are intended to help students clarify the approaches of contemporary philosophies.

Throughout the long centuries of western metaphysics the problem of the infinite has kept surfacing in different but important ways. It had confronted Greek philosophical speculation from earliest times. It appeared in the definition of the divine attributed to Thales in Diogenes Laertius (I, 36) under the description "that which has neither beginning nor end. " It was presented on the scroll of Anaximander with enough precision to allow doxographers to transmit it in the technical terminology of the unlimited (apeiron) and the indeterminate (aoriston). The respective quanti tative and qualitative implications of these terms could hardly avoid causing trouble. The formation of the words, moreover, was clearly negative or privative in bearing. Yet in the philosophical framework the notion in its earliest use meant something highly positive, signifying fruitful content for the first principle of all the things that have positive status in the universe. These tensions could not help but make themselves felt through the course of later Greek thought. In one extreme the notion of the infinite was refined in a way that left it appropriated to the Aristotelian category of quantity. In Aristotle (Phys. III 6-8) it came to appear as essentially re quiring imperfection and lack. It meant the capacity for never-ending increase. It was always potential, never completely actualized."

Cognition is a basic introductory text for college courses in the philosophy of knowledge. Joseph Owens here expands the narrowly metaphysical treatment of knowledge given in his earlier book, An Elementary Christian Metaphysics into a fully-fledged epistemology. This text utilises the traditions of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas to reacquaint students of philosophy with a number of insights which are basic to a philosophic understanding of knowledge. These insights into the nature of abstraction, truth, the ground of certitude, and other major concerns of epistemology are intended to help students clarify the approaches of contemporary philosophies.

Joseph Owens presents an introduction to metaphysics designed to develop in the reader a habitus of thinking. Using original Thomistic texts and Etienne Gilson's interpretation of St. Thomas Aquinas, Owens examines the application of metaphysical principles to the issues that arise in a specifically Christian environment. From a starting point of external, sensible, non-human beings, An Elementary Christian Metaphysics focuses in the questions of existence and the nature of revealed truths. Following his historical introduction to metaphysics, Owens provides a general investigation of the first principles and causes of being, and a study of knowledge and of the divine nature and attributes in light of natural reason.

Brings together a lifetime of work on the problems presented by the notion of a Christian philosophy, debates whether a Christian philosophy is possible, and outlines the steps for its development.