Rist’s work examines problems not usually treated in depth in books giving a general account of the philosophy of Plotinus: nevertheless a general picture of Plotinus does emerge, and on the whole it is one more consistent with the evidence than the over simplified versions of the rationalist-mystic now too long in vogue. The truth is that as more work is done on Plotinus and Neo-Platonism the sacrosanct simplicities that prevail in all fields of scholarship, will make way for more (...) complex, more plausible interpretations. (shrink)

Newman in his Introductory Discourse on the Idea of a University has many remarkable passages and among them is this: ‘The philosophy of Education is founded on truths in the natural order. Where the sun shines bright, in the warm climate of the south, the natives of the place know little of safeguards against cold and wet. They have, indeed, bleak and piercing blasts; they have chill and pouring rain, but only now and then, for a day or a week; (...) they bear the inconvenience as they best may, but they have not made it an art to repel it; it is not worth their while; the science of calefaction and ventilation is reserved for the north. It is in this way that Catholics stand relatively to Protestants in the science of Education; Protestants depending on human means mainly, are led to make the most of them… It is otherwise with us … we sometimes forget that we shall please Him best, and get most from Him, when, according to the Fable, we “put our shoulder to the wheel,” when we use what we have by nature to the utmost, at the same time that we look out for what is beyond nature in the confidence of faith and hope. However, we are sometimes tempted to let things take their course, as if they would in one way or another turn up right at last for certain; and so we go on, living from hand to mouth, getting into difficulties and getting out of them, succeeding certainly on the whole, but with failure in detail which might be avoided, and with much of imperfection or inferiority in our appointments and plans, and much disappointment, discouragement, and collision of opinion in consequence. If this be in any measure the state of the case, there is certainly so far a reason for availing ourselves of the investigations and experience of those who are not Catholics, when we have to address ourselves to the subject of Liberal Education.’. (shrink)

Furley’s book deals with two disparate, if ultimately relatable, themes: ‘Invisible Magnitudes’ and ‘Aristotle and Epicurus on Voluntary Action’. Both topics feature in Epicureanism. The first is concerned with the minimal parts of atoms and discusses the origins of the notion in, for example, Eleatic puzzles about divisibility, the atomism of Democritus and Aristotle’s continuum. The second topic deals with the familiar problem of free will and the ‘swerve’: here the author in his interpretation parts company with Bailey and Giussani. (...) For him the Epicurean theory on this point is intended to be a correction of Aristotelianism. In brief in relation to both topics the author attempts to show that Epicureanism corrected Aristotle who had corrected the Atomists. The argument is well sustained and impressively documented. (shrink)

Mrs. Krook seems to describe her own religious position in the following words on p. 347 of her book: “the religious Humanist, who has received his first life from the Judaeo–Christian religion and is condemned to nurse his redemptive hope in solitude between the emancipated irreligious on the one side and the orthodox religious on the other …”. It is a pity that she delayed until the last paragraph to make explicit what one gathered only as the book went on. (...) One reader at least for most of the length of the book survived in hope between the desire to put the book away on the one hand and the desire to be kindled at some flame on the other. To him the book really seemed to come alive with the consideration of Messianic Humanism and in particular D. H. Lawrence’s The Man Who Died. One felt that there was something coming earlier on, especially from the discussion of Arnold’s Literature and Dogma, and one was told that one could expect even more from a consideration of Henry James, but the book until then might have seemed little more than a collection of not very well related comments on a series of texts: Plato’s Gorgias, Hobbes’s Leviathan, St. Paul’s First Epistle to the Corinthians, Hume’s Enquiry into the Principles of Morals, J. S. Mill’s Three Essays on Religion, Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma, F. H. Bradley’s Ethical Studies, and then Lawrence’s The Man Who Died. (shrink)