The problem of good, for all its fundamental importance, has been studied systematically only occasionally in the history of philosophy. The Greeks were concerned with it and so too are the moderns, but it was almost disregarded during the ages of faith. Apparently it is only in periods of moral transition, when there is widespread rejection of traditional standards, that people begin to ask: What, after all, is goodness? What does it mean to call something good? An Enquiry into Goodness (...) is part of the modern discussion of the problem. Its author served for a period with the British Intelligence Corps in Israel where, we are told, “his interest in ethical problems was first aroused by the irreconcilability of conflicting claims.” Professor Sparshott is an Oxford graduate, but his book is, in some respects, pleasantly uncharacteristic of the Oxford Moralist school. In controversial matters he looks for guidance not merely to the moderns, but to the ancients and even the medievals. The definition of good which he proposes is not far removed from the traditional Aristotelian–Thomist one. This is the first time that this concept, or any approximation of it, has been treated seriously by an English moralist. It is, apparently, the first time it has received extensive analysis anywhere. Scholastic textbooks seem to regard its validity as self–evident and content themselves usually with a bald assertion and a confirmatory quotation from St. Thomas. This attitude may have been excusable in the past; in the context of a Christian morality the Aristotelian concept is, I suppose, unquestionable. But it is highly unsatisfactory at present when so many moralists speak from a purely humanist standpoint. (shrink)

The philosophical problem of the existence of God has acquired a pressing importance from the force of contemporary atheism. Some twenty expert thinkers express their personal reflections in the papers presented in April 1960 to the seventh Rencontres doctrinales at the Dominican college of theology at La Sartre in Huy, Belgium. A ten-page annex of critical discussion on the relation between belief and proof, between metaphysical experience and its dialectic towards the explicit affirmation of God reveals a candid appreciation that (...) theological reflection must justify itself in terms of modern epistemology - in Canon Dondeyne’s words. (shrink)

Fifty years ago, after two years of research under Russell and four years’ war service which sharpened their differences, Wittgenstein completed the manuscript of his Tractatus Logco-Philosophicus A German edition appeared in 1921 and the first London edition with a facing English translation was published in 1922. A tightly compressed set of aphoristic statements, numbered decimally in some eighty octavo pages, whose laconic precision captured the post-war mood of scientific positivism, it was welcomed in an Introduction by Russell’s cautious accolade: (...) ‘to have constructed a theory of logic which is not at any point obviously wrong is to have achieved a work of extraordinary difficulty and importance’. In spite of the author’s fear that he had sown a new jargon, Logical Positivism claimed his inspiration; and the work’s success was only equalled by Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, its antidote and inspiration of the supplanting movement of linguistic analysis. Few philosophers have achieved such a brilliant thesis and antithesis, leaving their creative synthesis without hubris to a respectful posterity. (shrink)

Idealism, which gradually dominated nineteenth century philosophy through its insistence upon the superiority of spiritual values above material forces and its sophisticated objections against the immediate instinct of common-sense realism in knowledge, is moribund to-day and difficult to render intelligible to to-day’s down-to-earth student. Yet its problems still constitute a capital part of epistemology, in whose courses it is often presented in a summary and harsh light. Histories of philosophy are not large enough normally to follow systematically one line of (...) development of thought without distraction and tend naturally, like textbooks of epistemology, to aim at topical discussion. Hence a systematic presentation of texts illustrating the movement of Idealist thought from Bishop Berkeley to the contemporary Professor Brand Blanshard is a very practical aid to the epistemological novice, ordering the confusion of his scattered ideas and clarifying a set of influential principles, which have still an important, if indirect influence upon professional philosophizing. Dr. Ewing states its relation to the current English scene thus. (shrink)

From his authority as the co-author of established text-books, notably The Foundations of Physics, Dr. Margenau compares current scientific methodology with some relevant principles of St. Thomas’s epistemology, particularly in the perennial problem of the valid functions of reason and of sense in scientific experience. Since Quantum Theory has removed the possibility of absolute prediction and verification, reason can no longer be considered to offer a mere image of the sense world. Hence “the sensory domain is forever richer than theory (...) since individual sensory events have no direct counterpart in theory, and on the other hand, it is clear that the concepts of reason cannot be directly sensed … in the realm of the atom”. This change, he submits, confirms the reality of an ‘active’ or ‘factive’ intellect in the Aristotelian-Thomist sense. In illustration he cites Eddington’s distinction between the macroscopic desk of ordinary sense experience and the microscopic desk of mathematico-physical science, which produces the dilemma: “The second desk … has ultimate elements which cannot be perceived. He who identifies the two desks is guilty of saying that an object wholly given in sensation can be decomposed by the magic of science into constituents not given in sensation”. Further, he claims that this difference “appears in every careful analysis of all scientific quantities or objects” and ambiguously explains it thus: “the second desk is the product, very largely, of Aquinas’s factive intellect; the first involves mere abstraction, collation of sensory material, performed by what Thomas called the passive [?] intellect “. (shrink)

This is the seventh edition of a compact dictionary–cyclopaedia which has now established itself as an authoritative vade–mecum for German students of philosophy. With an introductory 29–page table of concepts and a concluding 80–page systematic tableau of the history of philosophy and a 20–page index of names, its substance lies in a 400–page collection of succinct articles which bears systematically on every department, historical school of thought, key problem, principle and term of established philosophical thinking. The work was composed under (...) the general editorship of Father Brugger by a team of twenty teaching specialists drawn from the staff of St. Berchman’s Jesuit College at Pullach near Munich and from similar institutions in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the United States. (shrink)

This slender volume presents a lucid English translation of a short but dense treatise, published in Paris in 1947 by the French ambassador to the Vatican, in which M. Maritain drew upon the capital of his metaphysical works to analyse the intellectual problems posed by fashionable Existentialism. While admitting that certain forgotten truths have been illuminated since Kierkegaard, he claims the existence of authentic Existentialism by prior right in the Thomist synthesis and exemplifies its wisdom in his acute evaluation of (...) some modern themes. Denying that this is a rejuvenation by verbal artifice of a staid tradition, he states his pure allegiance with blunt intransigence: “I should be ashamed to… trick out Thomas Aquinas in a costume fashionable to our day…. I am not a neo-Thomist. All in all, I would rather be a paleo-Thomist than a neo-Thomist. I am, or at least I hope I am, a Thomist”. (shrink)

These are two agreeable volumes of a paperback series of six which offer a convenient introduction at a modest price to the history of Western philosophy. Selecting basic texts from the main philosophers with a succinct scholarly commentary, they present the beginner with the mainly epistemological problems of the 17th and 18th centuries. The seventeenth century Age of Reason saw the publication of secular philosophy in the vernacular and with dependence upon the new physical sciences rather than theology. Its dominant (...) rationalism is firmly expounded from Hobbes to Leibniz, with special references to Pascal and Bacon as well as Galileo, Descartes and Spinoza. One expects a notable chapter on Spinoza from Mr Hampshire but his anti-metaphysical interpretation of Descartes’ Cogito, in terms either of mere psychology or formal logic, ignores the basic epistemology of its existential experience as fact. Sir Isaiah Berlin skilfully analyses the eighteenth century Age of Enlightenment, contrasting the main British empirical movement of thought from Locke and Berkeley to Hume with its French allies, Voltaire and Condillac and its German critics, Hamann and Lichtenberg. (shrink)

Professor Hirschberger’s two–volume History of Philosophy has in a few years established itself as a general text–book for the European undergraduate student—only an expert can simplify the whole course of European thinking without distortion and expound it comprehensively in its main principles and systematic developments without cramming the reader with indigestible facts and without failing to stimulate his intelligent communion with the past. The Bruce Publishing Company display their customary enterprise in publishing an English edition very soon and in securing (...) an easy, simple version from Father Fuerst which conveys unmistakably the personal tang of the German original. (shrink)

For all its originality and traditional wisdom the metaphysics of a thirteenth century Aristotelian Christian comes in a remote idiom to the current secularist mind, even though this be conscious or semi-conscious of the ambiguous epistemological and ethical presuppositions respectively of its scientific method and practical living. The problem of presenting its achievement in appealing contemporary guise remains acute and fluid. The usual, direct solution is adopted here in personal fashion by Father Reith, who states his modest terms of reference (...) as follows: “It is not my intention to write an apology for the metaphysics of St. Thomas. His philosophy is its own best apology…. The present book is an attempt to restate as accurately as possible, in the manner and sequence found in the writings of St. Thomas, those metaphysical principles that have become the natural foundations upon which our contemporary Christian philosophy has been built”. If this system of thought seems formidably doctrinal to the rootless positivist, its questions refuse to leave him in peace: those human questions which concern ultimate truth in reality as a whole, in particular man’s own social and physical order in the universe—his origin, value and destiny, the reality of the laws, moral and positive, which his practice implicitly accepts—whose roots should be critically inspected and explained by some one at some time, for his own speculative benefit and for that of others. (shrink)

In 1931 Father D’Arcy, then also a don at Oxford, published the first comprehensive exposition and critical evaluation in England of John Henry Newman’s sole philosophical work, the Essay on Assent—if one excepts the contemporary set of censorious articles published by his pedantic confrère, Father Thomas Harper, in The Month and later edited for private circulation. Father D’Arcy’s philosophic humanism and lifelong interest in the apologetics of belief make him a particularly sympathetic commentator and his work has done much to (...) illuminate both the problem of belief and his illustrious predecessor. It is pleasant to welcome his urbane wisdom back to print in a new edition, whose Introduction concisely notes the current modest evaluation of certitude in science and whose revision includes a trenchant chapter on the shallowness of contemporary logical positivism and analysis. This latter has become more puzzled than sceptical about a certitude, which springs neither from direct observation nor from formal logic, and yet is commonly accepted in history and geography concerning matters of fact which are now either past or absent, and so apparently is beyond decisive rational verification. Nevertheless no one in practice reasonably denies the contingent existence of Mr. Krushchev or of China, even though he has never visited either. Religious belief is thus no more paradoxical than secular daily belief, whose certitude equally demands explanation and justification. (shrink)

Harper’s paperback series is rapidly forming an invaluable collection of established modern texts and studies for the university student. The present elegant two-volume edition of a comprehensive set of twenty-one expert analyses of the main themes of Earl Russell’s philosophy, with his personal introduction and replies, reprints a 1944 American publication whose distinguished contributors included Reichenbach, Gödel, Moore and Einstein under the genial prompting of Professor Schilpp. It remains a lucidly authoritative guide to a public sage, whose sixty years of (...) writing have coloured the spectrum from impersonal geometry to the militant leadership of a Ban-the-Bomb movement, and to a seminal force in the past half-century’s logical empiricism whose ‘fateful “fear of metaphysics”’ is gently deprecated by Einstein. (shrink)