In 2003, Dr. Knasas published Being and Some Twentieth-Century Thomists. Its theme is a philosophical assessment of the last century's great revival of interest in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. His reflection uncovered the notion of being as a common object of interest among Thomists. Debates switled around whether being was a posteriori or a priori and around how to basically describe the notion. Some said that to be a being meant to be a possessor of Aristotelian form; others, without denying a role for form, insisted that the decisive addition was the act of existing. What surprised Dr.

Knasas, however, was discovering how central the notion of being was for Aquinas' ethical thinking. In Dr. Knasas' discussion of the varied Thomistic opinions about the self-evidence of the first principle of morality-the good ought to be done-he realized that the subject of the proposition was again the notion of being. But the subject of the first moral principle is not being, bare and simple. More precisely, it is being as understood and intellected by the human. This thinking presents the human as a particularly intense presencing of being among all the other instances of being. Before the human instance understood in this way, we are not necessitated or constrained as the human will's first motion is necessitated when intellectually presented with the good. Neither are we left totally free as we are before any particular instance of the good.

Rather, the object here provokes another reaction. Before the human as a particularly intense presencing of the good through the human's intellection of being, we understand an obligation to exercise our freedom in a respectful and solicitous manner. We apprehend a call to love. Thomism and Tolerance continues this line of thinking and argues that we do not have to wait until we study Aquinas to live the notion of being. Book jacket.