Norman Kretzmann, Susan Linn Sage Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Cornell University, New York, completed this book at the beginning of 1998, and died in the summer of that year. He taught philosophy at Cornell for more than thirty years, and also held appointments at Bryn Mawr College, Ohio State University, and the University of Illinois, and visiting positions at Wayne State University and the Universities of Minnesota, Arizona, and Oxford.
This is the follow-up to Professor Kretzmann's 1997 Clarendon Press volume The Metaphysics of Theism: Aquinas's Natural Theology in Summa contra gentiles I. He also published scholarly editions of various medieval texts (by William of Sherwood, William of Ockham, Paul of Venice, and Richard Kilvington), many learned articles and essays, and a number of edited collections. He was the principal editor of The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (1982), and co-editor with Eleonore Stump of The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (1993).