Elementary Philosophy - On Logic, Psychology, and Ideology, Volume I - Zephyrinus Gonzalez

Elementary Philosophy, Volume I, presents González's introductory course in philosophy structured for academic and ecclesiastical students within the Thomistic tradition of the Order of Preachers. It covers the three foundational disciplines that prepare the mind for higher philosophical and theological inquiry.

The volume opens with logic, treating it as the science of correct reasoning ordered to truth. González examines the nature of concepts, judgments, and syllogistic inference, establishing the objective laws of thought as grounded in reality rather than mere mental convention.

It then proceeds to psychology, understood as philosophical anthropology, where González analyzes the nature of the human soul and its faculties of intellect, will, and sensory cognition. Following Aquinas, he presents the soul as an immaterial substantial form united to the body, the principle of human knowledge and voluntary action.

The volume closes with ideology, the theory of knowledge, in which González defends a realist epistemology against idealist and skeptical positions. He argues that the human intellect is naturally ordered to know being as it exists in reality, and that genuine certitude is attainable through the proper exercise of reason.