Abstract

Deely’s book will not be of great interest to anyone who is not overly interested in Scholastic thought. It will specifically appeal to the Thomistic philosophers who sense an affinity between Aquinas’s philosophy of being with its emphasis upon esse and the Heideggerian Seinsdenken. Its main thesis is curious. The Heideggerian Sein is indeed comparable to the Scholastic esse but on grounds hitherto overlooked. Heidegger’s experience of Being is profoundly phenomenological and hence, for Heidegger, Being always means the source of manifestness or unconcealment. For Heidegger, Aquinas’s esse is a matter of simple "reality" or what in Being and Time is called existentia. Hence Deely contends the real affinity between Heidegger and the Scholastic tradition lies in what the Schoolmen called esse intentionale, being inasmuch as it is known or exists in the mind. One offshoot of this thesis is that Heidegger’s phenomenology of Being is closer to the pristine sense of intentionality than is either Brentano’s or Husserl’s. Thus Heidegger’s claim to have carried phenomenology back into its ultimate roots and to offer the more authentic phenomenology is thereby vindicated. The book follows a strange tact which is filled with difficulties, not the least of which is pointed out by Richardson’s observation that it is difficult to see how esse intentionale has anything to do with the historical character of Heidegger’s Sein. In a word: what can esse intentionale possibly have to do with Ereignis?—J. D. C.