Aquinas's Method
(according to Br. Dennis Beach, who may not know much about it, but thinks this makes sense anyway).

• Asks a general Question that is then "articulated" into specific articles.
• Each Article begins with several Objections. This may seem very odd to us, until we stop to think that "Ob-jections" literally are things "thrown at" the question. They're not (yet) objections to Thomas's own point of view, but "ideas thrown out" or "up" to address the article's question. (Actually "Objections" is the traditional English translation, but the Latin in which Thomas wrote just says "To proceed, at first (is said) thus 1); ...moreover 2)...."
• Then Thomas gives an On the contrary... or On the other hand... by citing some wise guy (sorry, don't know of any article where he cites a woman, although he may) of the past. This could be a philosopher, a saint, a church father, the Bible, Jesus himself, etc.
• He follows this with "I answer [literally, respond] that..." This is not a disagreement with what he's just quoted. The key to understanding this process is that he by first quoting an authority and then giving in answer or response his pledge (Latin: sponsa) to this. So he's really saying, "A wise person has said X, and I give in pledge of such idea the following reasons...."
• Finally, the Replies to the Objections are simply stated in Latin: "To the first thing said, I answer that.... To the second, ..., etc."
• Thus, the original Latin is less an argument than the following structure: 1) A question; 2) things that could be (and have been) said to it; 3) the opinion of an authority; 4) Aquinas's pledge of that authority's reasonableness; and finally, 5) better explanations that clear up what might have been mistaken or mis-applied in the first things said.

Finally, an explanation of the meaning of the philosophical category of "subject":

• A "Subject" is literally the thing or entity that "contains" various qualities. In Greek, whence this word came, the term was hypokeimenon or "underlying substrate," that is, the "base (hypo=sub) + layer (keimenon, mistranslated by Aquinas's translator as "-ject"). (Aquinas didn't know Greek, so he had someone translate all the Greek texts he studied exactly word-by-word into Latin.) So think "Base-Layer" of an entity for "subject."
• But the meaning of Subject is easier to grasp than all this. Let's take a white table or white walls. Where is this whiteness? It's not "in" itself, but always in something that "underlies it"--the plaster of the wall, the formica of the table, etc. Thus the table is the subject in which there is the quality of whiteness. There can't ever just be "white" but always a "white something," and this something is the underlying subject.
• We have kept this use of subject in grammar. For example, the subject of a sentence might be "the horse." Most anything we say ("predicate") about this horse is somehow a quality or an activity or a location or something that is either "in" or "pertains" to the horse that's the subject of the sentence. "The horse is a coal-black stallion" says that coal-black is a color "in" the horse. All the "predicates" are "in" the "subject" and therefore can be expressed in sentences about the subject.