 Most of Aquinas’s central texts are written in the distinctive scholastic style of the disputed question, in which the topic to be discussed is posed at the start as a question. The dispute begins with a series of arguments on one side. These, however, almost always represent the opposite of Aquinas’s own position, and so, after the initial arguments, one or more arguments are posed to the contrary (sed contra), and then Aquinas makes his own main reply in the body (corpus) of the article, and finally he responds to the initial arguments (ad 1, ad 2, etc.). This structure is based on actual classroom procedures, even if Aquinas’s carefully composed works are never a literal record of an actual classroom debate. It is a method that lends itself to argumentative rigor, but often is best digested by reading the text in something other than the order in which it appears on the page. (I myself like to begin with the main reply.)