Brian Davies

Brian Davies OP (b. 1951) is an English Dominican friar and philosopher of religion, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University and formerly Regent of Blackfriars, Oxford. Trained in the analytic tradition, he has become one of the most prominent contemporary expositors of Thomas Aquinas's philosophical theology in the Anglophone world. His widely-used textbook 'An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion' (1982; multiple editions) and 'The Thought of Thomas Aquinas' (1992) shaped a generation of students. Davies is best known for defending classical theism—God as ipsum esse subsistens, simple, immutable, and not a member of any genus—against what he calls 'theistic personalism,' the conception (associated with Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, and much analytic theology) of God as the greatest person among possible persons. This polemic structures his books on the problem of evil, where he rejects standard free-will defenses and soul-making theodicies as resting on an anthropomorphized deity, arguing instead with Aquinas that God cannot be a moral agent in the human sense and so is not blameworthy for evil. Critics including Eleonore Stump, Richard Swinburne, and Brian Leftow have contested both his reading of Aquinas and his rejection of theodicy. Davies edits Oxford University Press's series on Aquinas and has produced influential commentaries on the Summa Theologiae and Aquinas's De ente.