This collection, in the genre of a Festschrift presented in honor of Elizabeth G. Salmon by her colleagues at Fordham University, comprises twelve scholarly essays of uniform excellence, all of them original to this volume. They range rather broadly over the whole history of Western man’s grappling with the question of God—from Plato’s hesitancy to give ultimacy to the Forms to Dewey’s discerning a role for God in the search for human meaning. In between is Avicenna’s understanding of intellect, Descartes’ (...) Cogito, Hegel’s critique of Kant, Marcel’s intuition of being as mystery, the Transcendental Thomists: Rahner’s and Lonergan’s metaphysics of spirit and Maréchal’s argument for God, and Peirce’s neglected argument from Erkenntnislehre as instinct more basic than reasoning. Unification comes from the fact that these are all exercises in the philosophy of God, an activity viewed here as retaining a certain contiguity with theology and religious history. No one school of philosophical thought serves to unify the essays; nearly all are represented, with the exception of any explicit use of Process Thought or of the new natural theology believed to be deriving from Analytical Philosophy, beyond Flew and MacIntyre. (shrink)

There are fresh currents running through this volume, subtitled "An Essay on Truth," which dispel some accumulated but unexamined theories: e.g., that St. Paul took literally the three-story picture of the world; that nature can be subsumed under the category of history so that all meaning is historical; that there is a genuine dilemma between absolutism and relativism in morality. The author argues that the clue to reality is "story" for the simple reason that reality itself is story: a dramatic (...) conflict between persons, ambiguous at its core. The real then is grasped as story, rather than in terms of philosophical Weltanschauung, or scientific Weltbild, or history which in furnishing elements to the story distinguishes it from myth. Beyond emotive propositions, verbal propositions, and descriptive propositions lies a fourth kind of statement proper to story. Unfortunate oversimplifications compromise the book’s thesis: e.g. that Logos, Substance, and Life-Process are concepts whose use is metaphorical as is that of causality; that Aquinas taught grace is a supernatural substance; that Aristotle viewed reality as ideal rather than actual; that to conceive of evil as non-being is to deny it reality, to view it as illusory. At work here is a decided antipathy to the narrowings of rational discourse that rules out anything that might undergird the author’s "story" and give it ontological density. (shrink)