This book is the joint work of a moralist, a sociologist and a psychologist arguing, as the sub-title indicates, for the abolition of capital punishment. Fr Tidmarsh’s essay provides the ‘Theoretical Framework’ of the discussion. He examines the notion of punishment as retributive, reformative and deterrent. He refuses to be drawn into the kind of detailed discussion that finds its place in the two essays that follow; but what he says is clarifying and indispensable. He points the difficulty of formulating (...) a ‘pure’ retributive theory of punishment; and the fact that ‘considerations of retribution may yield negative criteria—they may prevent our punishing the innocent and they may prevent our allowing considerations of expediency from too easily outweighing the general rule that the guilty are to be punished—but they have little, if any, positive contribution to make to the assessment of just punishments’. He remarks the different meanings given to reformation; does it mean the actual betterment of the offender’s frame of mind, or merely the fact that he refrains from crime in the future? And how, in fact, does punishment operate reform? And there is the paradox of the deterrent view of punishment—‘those crimes ought to be the more heavily punished that are the more difficult to refrain from committing, since it needs a greater motive for fear to restrain those tempted to them than is needed from those temptations more easily resisted. Passion, provocation, inadvertence, become not extenuating but exacerbating circumstances... ‘. (shrink)

The sixteenth century ‘Silver Age’ of scholasticism in Spain has been studied less than one would expect, particularly in English. There are a number of reasons for this comparative neglect - the lack of studies of the considerable manuscript and archival sources of Spanish economic, administrative and colonial history, the fact that Spain was almost untouched by the Reformation and by the scientific and industrial revolutions and, so, cast back upon her medieval heritage more than other nations; these, with some (...) other minor factors, are mentioned by Miss Hamilton. All the more reason, then, for her pioneering work in studying the political thought of four outstanding representatives of Spanish sixteenth-century political thinking. Not that there have not been monographs and studies - her bibliography is a good summary guide to the literature - but there is little, in English at least, with the range Miss Hamilton sets herself. (shrink)

It is a commonplace to observe that the idea of natural law has polarised contemporary legal philosophy; jurists who are not for it are against it. More than once in its long history, going back to the very origins of philosophy in Western Europe, the natural law has been in eclipse, but it has invariably survived and, as one of its severest critics, Bergbohm, was forced to admit, the funeral orations pronounced over it have proved to be premature. In the (...) nineteenth century Benthamite utilitarianism, Comtist positivism and the historical jurisprudence of von Savigny made a lean period for the natural law. But the twentieth century saw the revival. In 1910 appeared J. Charmont’s Renaissance du droit nature!; the 1920’s saw the first of Jacques Leclercq’s Lefons de droit nature!; in 1930 Charles Grove Haines studied the natural law in contemporary jurisprudence in The Revival of Natural Law Concepts; and in 1936 appeared the first edition of Heinrich Rommen’s Die ewige Wiederkehr des Naturrechts. The movement towards the natural law, of which these books are only some of the indications, was greatly accelerated when men discovered the need for a defence against the excesses of totalitarian power; and, after the war, the Nuremberg trials proceeded upon what amounted to a basis of natural law. Not all, of course, are prepared to admit that the natural law is the only alternative to positivism and relativism in legal philosophy or even that the concept possesses vitality: the contemporary interest in the natural law, Norberto Bobbio has observed rather sourly, is rather like the interest of anatomists in a cadaver. (shrink)

This book shows Dr. Pieper’s conciseness of style and exposition to excellent advantage; with all its brevity it is more informative than many works two or three times its size.

Francisco Suarez published, at Coimbra in 1612, five years before his death, what is undoubtedly one of the greatest contributions to scholastic moral and legal philosophy, his Tractatus de legibus et legislatore Deo. It was part of his commentary on the Prima-Secundae of St. Thomas’s Summa. The complementary study of justice, commenting upon the Secunda-Secundae, never appeared, not even in the posthumous volumes edited by Balthasar Alvarez from the notes and lectures of Suarez. The omission is all the more remarkable (...) when one recalls the innumerable treatises De iustitia et iure that began with Suarez’s own predecessors and contemporaries—Soto, Molina, Lessius and the rest. This omission is now in part repaired by the happy recovery of some Disputationes on justice from Suarez’s sojourn at the Collegium Romanum between 1580 and 1585. They probably belong to the year 1584. The manuscript, a reportatio of whose authenticity there can be no doubt, begins about two-thirds of the way through the second Disputatio and goes on to the end of the fourth. The lost first Disputatio was probably on the object of justice; the second, of which we are now given qq. 11-16, is on ownership; the third, comprising only two questions, is inscribed De actibus iustitiae in genere; and the fourth, of eight questions, De habitu iustitiae. (shrink)

Perhaps, as Professor Battaglia remarks in his Introduction, the German people has the philosophical vocation: Si può persino dire, con una certa enfasi, che il popolo tedesco ha ‘la’ vocazione filosofica. Certainly it was a happy idea to invite distinguished German and Austrian philosophers to explain each his philosophical standpoint. The project was successfully carried out by the Institute of Philosophy in the University of Bologna. The list of contributors speaks for itself: Theodor W Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Leo Gabriel, Hans (...) G Gadamer, Romano Guardini, Dietrich von Hildebrand, Helmut Kuhn, Ludwig Landgrebe, Johannes Baptista Lotz, Karl Löwith, Friedrich Max Müller, Josef Pieper, Helmut Plessner, Fritz-Joachim von Rintelen, Amadeo Silva-Tarouca, Ernst Topitsch, and Carl F von Weizsäcker. The page or two of biography that precedes each essay is helpful; there are as many contrasts here as there are between the different philosophical perspectives outlined by the contributors; and there is one striking similarity in the interruption of the careers of so many of these men—all now in their sixties or older—by the Nazi period. Professor Felice Battaglia’s Introduzione deserves to stand with the other contributions; it is a summary that weaves together with considerable skill the strands of German philosophy represented by writers as various as Bloch and Guardini or Pieper and Plessner. German philosophy, he points out, has come a long way from the gnoseological problems of Kant or the absolutism of Hegel; it has unexpectedly found its way, via phenomenology and existentialism, back to a situation in which one can say: Teologia non spaventa molti pensatori tedeschi. (shrink)

Josef Fuchs’s Droit naturel is a French translation of the German Lex Naturae—Zur Theologie des Naturrechts. The author has taken the opportunity of making some minor alterations and of adding a new chapter on the relation between the natural law and Christian social teaching. Otherwise the work is unchanged. It is divided into two parts. In the first the author studies the natural law in revelation, which, of course, takes him outside the scope of philosophy. What he says is, however, (...) indirectly of interest to philosophy. Christians are sometimes tempted to think of the natural law as, in practice, almost a special preserve of the Catholic Church which has the mission of interpreting it. It is therefore interesting to discover that the term is almost impossible to find in documents of the magisterium before the pontificates of Pius IX and Leo XIII. Fuchs finds only the synod of Aries in 475, echoing St. Paul’s doctrine of Romans. On the other hand Fuchs points out that St. Paul’s reference to the natural law, while by far the most explicit, is not the only one in Sacred Scripture. This is a useful corrective of the view sometimes met with that the natural law is unknown in the Bible; and it is also a corrective of Flückiger’s exegesis of St. Paul. (shrink)

One is tempted to dismiss this book as having little or no philosophical content. It consists of three parts—two series of aphorisms separated by a short reportage, ‘Journey from Sharpeville to Selma’, on a human rights manifestation. The aphorisms of Part I, ‘Journey Toward Fidelity’ and Part III, To Limbo and Back: A Latin-American Journey’ range from the pithy and paradoxical to a paragraph or a page that develops an insight. It is dedicated, committed writing, the expression of a saeva (...) indignatio; but it is not a connected whole. If asked to what philosophical category this writing belongs one would have to put it with the Pensées of Pascal or the ‘Diapsalmata’ that make up the first part of Kierkegaard’s Either/or, or even Niezsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra! It is, indeed, possible that the modern world prefers its philosophy so. But how review Pascal, or Kierkegaard or Nietzsche? (shrink)

The philosophy of history is still a comparative stranger in the family of the philosophical disciplines. It is perhaps because its status has not yet been settled satisfactorily that it continues to attract some of the best contemporary minds. Toynbee, Maritain, Marrou, Pieper, Collingwood, Tillich, C. S. Lewis and others—following in the steps of Vico, Herder and Hegel—make a distinguished company which Fr. D’Arcy joins with his present book.

The fact that this well-known work has gone into a paperback edition almost twenty years after its first appearance in 1949 says more for it than a reviewer can, given the usual limitations of time and space. It is a pleasure, however, to add a brief voice to the general commendation, and to recommend this work for its gathering together of a wealth of information not otherwise easily accessible.