By this book, Burrell wants to correct the reading of the most familiar of Aquinas’s texts, particularly those concerning God, esse, and actus. His corrective depends on the assertion that Aquinas has and uses a "philosophical grammar." Examples of devices from this grammar are the distinctions between concrete and abstract terms, between existential and predicative uses of "to be," and between the thing signified and the mode of its signification. With these and other "maneuvers," Aquinas is able to fulfill the (...) "theological task he sets himself: to elucidate the parameters of responsible discourse about God". It is only by insisting that the texts in the prima pars of the Summa, Qq. 3-11, are not a doctrine of God that we may be faithful to Aquinas’s apophatic injunction: we can know of God only what he is not. What the Scholastics wanted to make into a tractatus de Deo is in fact only "a series of restrictions on what we might appropriately say". (shrink)

Moreau sketches here with enthusiasm the large features of Aquinas’s epistemology. He is not, as he makes clear, a Thomist either by training or by avowal. The book is not, then, a specialist’s monograph or dogmatic treatise. It is Moreau’s attempt to hear what Aquinas will say to the great questions. The attempt is largely successful in attending to Aquinas’s remarks, though it does not catch their ambiguities.

The core of Lescoe’s new book is a critical edition of the first treatise of book 4 from Ulrich of Strasbourg’s Summa de bono. After Aquinas, Ulrich is Albert the Great’s best known disciple; he was certainly the more faithful. Ulrich’s Summa is, indeed, an enormous treatise built along Albertinian lines, mirroring in its eclecticism and its extent the range of Albert’s own concerns. "It is very apparent," Lescoe writes, "... that Ulrich depended on his master for much of his (...) doctrinal and even literal inspiration. His merit lies not so much in his originality of thought as in the work of synthesis and organization". Perhaps partly because of this, and given the ascendancy of Thomism among the Dominicans from an early date, the Summa de bono lies mostly unedited. A critical edition of book 1 was published in 1930 by Daguillon and a few other sections have been transcribed in unpublished dissertations and theses. But even with Lescoe’s present contribution, three-quarters of the Summa remains untranscribed and almost ninety-five percent of the work remains unprinted. (shrink)

This "little brochure," as Gilson himself imagined it, belongs to a book, The Philosophical Constants of Being, which he had in draft at his death. Gouhier has followed Gilson's suggestions in detaching these two chapters from the draft in order to publish them as Difficult Atheism. The first chapter, which carries the same title, is a much revised version of an essay which appeared in The Great Ideas Today. The second chapter, entitled "On Behalf of the Handmaid," is the French (...) translation of a piece read before a theological conference in 1967. A brochure containing occasional pieces might not seem to promise much. But Gilson does think seriously in these two essays about the converse questions, whether atheism is philosophically tenable and whether believing philosophers can appropriately be asked to combat it with proofs. (shrink)