Great Thinkers: Critical Studies of Minds That Shape Us is an academically, biblically, and theologically informed series that explores the leading ideas of seminal thinkers who have shaped the modern world. Writing from a Reformed perspective, the series’ authors identify the most influential cultural features of each great thinker and the most apologetically effective ways to address them.

1. Thomas Aquinas by K. Scott Oliphint

168 pages | $14.99 | Paperback | SAMPLE CHAPTER

ABOUT: Aquinas’s theological system (Thomism) has been widely influential for hundreds of years. Scott Oliphint provides the first consistently Reformed critique, drawing on the works of Geerhardus Vos and Cornelius Van Til. His analysis focuses in particular on Aquinas’s dualistic approach to the natural and revealed knowledge of God and his use of Aristotelian metaphysics—to which Oliphint responds in terms of historic Reformed thought and the doctrines of revelation and Scripture.

2. Karl Marx by William D. Dennison

144 pages | $14.99 | Paperback | SAMPLE CHAPTER

ABOUT: Understanding Karl Marx is essential to understanding post-WWII Europe, American foreign policy, China and North Korea today, and even much of the rhetoric in contemporary politics in the United States. William Dennison’s concise two-part volume highlights the key features of Marx’s worldview, including some common grace insights, before critiquing his political philosophy and its horrifying but predictable results.

3. Jacques Derrida by Christopher Watkin

184 pages | $14.99 | Paperback | SAMPLE CHAPTER

ABOUT: The influential philosopher Jacques Derrida has often been embraced or rejected before being properly understood. Christopher Watkin, a scholar of French literature and philosophy, walks in Derrida’s shoes through the landscape of recent thought and culture, seeking to understand the rationale for Derrida’s philosophical moves in light of his assumptions and commitments in philosophy, literature, ethics, and politics, and to unfold a balanced, biblical response.