Review of Metaphysics, The

Absolutul Astazi. Teologia Si Filosofia Lui Joseph Ratzinger

[...] Ratzinger did not aim at creating a "system" and any attempt to reorganize his work as such must remain less than totally successful. [...] Marga repeatedly tries to place Ratzinger in the vaguely defined family of great 2O* century theologians.

Announcements

Conference Announcement and Call for Papers The MA Philosophy Program at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio invites the submission of abstracts for papers on any topic related to the Munich and Göttingen circles of Early Phenomenology. If you want to participate without presenting a paper, i.e. chair a session, evaluate papers to be included in the conference proceedings or books, contribute to the editing, or any other offer to help please send an email to Dr. Gregory T. Papani...

Au Coeur de La Philosophie de Saint Thomas D'Aquin

Consistently, whenever he asserts that St. Thomas thinks this or that, or that his thought entails this or that conclusion, Father Elders cites in support of his assertion, and includes in a footnote, a full sentence or two in the original Latin from the works of the Angelic Doctor himself. [...] this volume, in effect, provides a useful kind of subject index of Thomistic propositions in Latin on the wide range of topics that are covered in the various chapters. According to the Index Nomin...

Avicenna

Given the soul's immaterial being, he infers that it is capable of existing apart from the body. [...] with the introduction of immaterial intellect, Avicenna has moved beyond the science of physics and into the realm of metaphysics.

Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, Volume Ii, Part 2: Economic, Social, and Cultural History

Influenced by the gravitational pull of Byzantium in its tripartite structure of Romanitas, Hellenism, and Christianity, they created a unique and mature Christian culture in the Diocese of Oriens in the shadow of the Roman Empire, a culture which, Shahîd reminds his reader, obtained only once in Arab history. The wars that the Ghassânids were called upon to fight became spiritualized and became more meaningful by being harnessed to the ideals of their religious faith as they undertook relig...

Dante and the Blessed Virgin

Why is it called a comedy? [...] Dante explains, tragedy ends in bitter defeat, whereas comedy has a happy ending.

Discours Des Méthode. The Methods of Philosophy and Realist Phenomenology

First of all, there is, as Seifert sees it, the intellectual vision of the necessary essence of such realities as being itself, personhood, freedom, knowledge, substance, number, or time. [...] there is the knowledge of necessary laws or states of affairs, such as the principle of causality, or the "law" that color presupposes spatial extension, or that moral values presuppose freedom of the agent.

Enjoyment: The Moral Significance of Styles of Life

Kekes makes extensive use of literary sources to illustrate what makes a particular style of life deficient, unrealistic, or inappropriate versus one that is realistic, coherent, and admirable. [...] as one develops a style of life, personal evaluation - drawing on both internal and external sources for help - is necessary to determine the adequacy of one's style of life.

Images of Thought: Philosophical Interpretations of Carlos Estévez's Art

Paper, $21.95 - Especially well-known for his studies of the principium individuation's, ethnic and national identity, and the interpretation of literary texts, Jorge Gracia has brought out a handsome book on the interpretation of the visual arts. Given these differences, and guarding against the impulse to ignore them and collapse philosophy and art into each other, Gracia argues that a clear account of interpretation shows that philosophy and art can be connected relationally, that is, in ...

Interpreting Plato's Dialogues

Here he cites Socrates's open-mindedness, courage, and persistence at inquiry, plus his sincerity and epistemic humility, as features of "a common search for knowledge and wisdom" that reads nothing in the dialogues as Plato's own beliefs, but everything as an invitation to dialogue and philosophic thought. In the larger scheme of things, readers of all sorts can continue to learn from every intelligent discussion of Plato's texts whether interpreters believe in the mouthpiece view or not (t...

Kant's (Seamless) Refutation of Idealism

[...] if that had been Kant's intention, he surely would have located the argument somewhere in Chapter II of the Analytic of Concepts. [...] in light of the sustained attention given to the challenge of idealism in the Fourth Paralogism and elsewhere, there is added reason to accept Kant's claim that the treatment in the second edition is necessary, unique, and original.

Maurice Blondel: A Philosophical Life

According to Blondel, the phenomenon of action necessarily requires a theandric orientation to "the presence of something supernatural which could not be defined philosophically but had to be affirmed in its necessity as a principle of being for action." According to theologians, he was an unwelcome intruder upon sacred ground.

Muhammad and the Believers: At the Origins of Islam

The story of Islam, as Donner constructs it, begins with Muhammad's consolidation of political power over Medina, his justification of raiding parties, his conquest and occupation of Mecca and the town of Ta'rf in western Arabia, and his organized military expeditions in the north against the Tabuk. Like Ignaz Goldziher's classic work Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law written a century ago, this book has the ring of truth where so many of the volumes recently published by university p...

Negation and Being*

Not surprisingly, negation also plays a central role in scientific reasoning in the form of counterfactuals. [...] even if we reject the notion that an absence signaled by a negation could be a cause, we have to contend with the fact that standard analyses of causation are forced to have recourse to negation inasmuch as they suppose that a process or fact can only be a cause if it is not the same as its effect.6 So construed, causation requires a real distinction that is the counterpart of a...

Negation and Truth

Just, however, as determinate being becomes determinate in form, containing both the being and nonbeing of quality, so reality and negation themselves have determinate being. Since being and nothing are immediately one another, the being of quality comprising reality is just as much the nonbeing of quality, just as negation as the nonbeing of quality is just as much the being of quality.\n The mediation must be kept selfmediating, so that individuality excludes determination and negation by ...

On the Amphibolous Character of Existence: Matter and Its Negation in the Thought of George Santayana

The Scholastics employed their negative method in speaking of God, medieval Arabic philosophers observed their tanzih, and Hegel his dialectic, but to say that Santayana has a method, even acknowledging his unfading naturalistic reduction, may be to overstate the case. Empedocles had put forward the theory that existing animal species with all the apparent adaptation of their parts are simply the result of natural selection by the survival of the fittest; that nature had produced an enormous...

On Translating the Republic

Sachs does not find much fault with it as far as accuracy is concerned: it is, he says, "by far the most accurate available." Since nearly forty years have elapsed since its publication, the time may be right, Sachs says, to try to offer a worthy alternative.

Philosophers of the Renaissance

[...] I have my doubts about the philosophical qualifications of figures such as Valla, Ramus, or Vives, but I admit that honest disagreement is possible in thencases, the more so as their contemporaries held them in high regard as philosophers. [...] there is of course the great Jesuit Francisco Suarez (1548-1617), who closes the age of Scholasticism, while also acting as an important Renaissance thinker.

Poetry Is More Philosophical Than History: Aristotle On Mimêsis and Form

For this reason they are on a level between abstraction and common sense experience and are present in poems as implicit 'embodied' properties . . . not explicit, let alone propositional, elements.'' James Redfield writes that the plot is the story conceived ... in terms of relations between . . . causes and consequences; for this reason it shows us the internal logic of the events represented and conveys some universal pattern of human probability or necessity. The philosopher starts with w...

Realism in Religion: A Pragmatist's Perspective

The book is divided into three separate sections having to do with conceptions of religious truth, the connections between realism and pragmatism, and finally application of the pragmatist's theory of truth to philosophy of religion. Tillich, by contrast, thinks the believer must be actively engaged in the interpretations of religious symbols, adding his own elements to the epistemic process.

Recovering Reason: Essays in Honor of Thomas L. Pangle

[...] Part Five presents essays that address contemporary issues of significant philosophical import, and in such a way that they emphasize the need for a recovery of Classical political and philosophic themes. Thomas Pangle is a shining example of what it is to be committed to the recovery of that invaluable civic and philosophic health, and this collection of essays is a testament to his influence in the field of political philosophy. -

Rescuing Dewey: Essays in Pragmatic Naturalism

Disagreeing with the claim that Dewey was not radical enough, this "right-wing" aspect of Dewey scholarship did not join the rush toward linguistic relativism, could not endorse Rorty's conversational pragmatism, and would not help with multicultural political correctness. Manicas's chapters on Dewey's roles in American psychology and American social science are valuable reminders about pragmatism's role as the original American cognitive science.

Roman Philosophy and the Good Life

[...] Belliotti captures the major philosophical currents of the ancient Roman world in action. [...] while the book does not advance the field of ancient philosophy, it does manifest Belliotti's skill in depicting Greek philosophy in action, especially in terms of character formation and attaining the good life.

Speaking of God: Theology, Language, and Truth

[...] he addresses the relationship between faith and reason in the second chapter. [...] in the fifth chapter, Long treats the political implications of his argument that truth is intimately associated with God's revelation through Christ.

Speculative Philosophy

According to Verene, Kant is the successor of this Cartesian emphasis on doing critical philosophy. Taking a hint from Vico, Verene argues that myth "is the necessary precursor and beginning point for philosophy." [...] the architectonic of this inquiry suggests that "myth precedes metaphysics."

The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza's Ethics

Here, however, is the editor's comment on these words, "Spinoza is articulating the basic idea of his theory of the good, which rejects invoking any ontologically preeminent final causes in explaining human behavior." [...] he will find nuanced attempts to make sense of Spinoza's arguments, but no awareness of the fact that Spinoza may have intended some readers to pierce the veil of his unusual argumentation. -

The Emotional Construction of Morals

[...] constructive sentimentalism is a form of sensibility theory according to which moral facts are products or [sic] our moral rules, moral rules are constituted by sentiments, and sentiments are established through biocultural interactions." Taken literally, '"evolutionary ethics is a myth." [...] no evolved norms qualify as moral norms, so, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as an evolutionary ethics.

The Ethiopian Campaign and French Political Thought

Paper, $25.00 - This commentary on the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 by the distinguished French philosopher Yves R. Simon (1903-1961) who, after coming to America, was a professor at both the University of Notre Dame and the University of Chicago, was not offered to the reader as a work of contemporary history, but rather as an application of philosophical analysis to an event that was one of the burning political issues in the crucial decade of the 1930s leading up to the outbreak of...

The Minds of the Moderns: Rationalism, Empiricism, and Philosophy of Mind

The author's attempts to apply contemporary arguments from the philosophy of mind to the claims of her sextet of Modem philosophers is, frequently, very interesting, but it sometimes cries out for additional explanation. [...] in considering the possibility of mental causation of physical events, she appeals to arguments that presume the causal closure of the physical - that is, that presume that every physical event can be explained fully by prior physical events.

The Struggle Against Dogmatism: Wittgenstein and the Concept of Philosophy

[...] achieving total peace in philosophy cannot happen all at once; the goal of Wittgensteinian therapy is to treat philosophical illnesses as they arise, so as to release us from the uncomfortable grip of the misleading conceptions of language use that we have adopted, or from the "thoughtcramps" that prevent us from obtaining the clarity in thought and language that we desire.