In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:140 BOOK REVIEWS The Church: The Universal Sacrament of Salvation. By JoHANN AUER. Translated from the German by Michael Waldstein. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1993. Pp. 541. $24.95 (paper). The Church, Community of Salvation: An Ecumenical Ecclesiology. By GEORGE H. TAVARD. Collegeville, Minnesota: The Liturgical Press, 1992. Pp. 264. $18.95 (paper). These two works represent two recent and very different attempts by contemporary Catholic ecclesiologists (...) to present a comprehensive or systematic theology of the church. I shall deal with the specifics of each work separately. Johann Auer (1910-1989) was professor of dogmatics and the history of dogma at the University of Bonn when in 1983 he first published his Die Kirche: Das allgemeine Heilssakrament. This present work is an English translation of that German text which was Volume VIII in a comprehensive, nine-part, dogmatic survey, with volumes addressing the traditional dogmatic themes: God, Creation, Christ, Grace, Eucharist, Sacraments, Church and Eschatology. Joseph Ratzinger was co-editor with Auer of the original series. And while Auer authored the first eight volumes, Ratzinger authored the final volume on eschatology. We have seen this kind of dogmatic survey in English before in the comparable six-volume work of Michael Schmaus called Dogma (1968). As with Schmaus's work, this dogmatic survey is intended as a series of textbooks for theology students and thus its method is to survey each dogmatic theme focusing upon three elements, the biblical foundation for the theme, the historical development of this theme, and finally its systematic inner coherence or integral rational development. In this volume, Auer accomplishes all three tasks in exemplary fashion and with a depth of treatment Schmaus never aimed at approaching. Auer's The Church is divided into eighteen chapters organized into four thematic sections bearing the titles, " Pathways towards the Proper Understanding of the Church," " Pathways towards a Theological Concept of the Church taken from Biblical Images," "Manifestations of the Church's Being, Life and Activity in the Light of its Sacramental Structure," and "The Church's Tasks and Its Ways to Self-Realization in the World." Under these titles are treated all the traditional themes expected of a comprehensive ecclesiology: the origin and authority of the church, its mission and ministries, biblical images, organizational BOOK REVIEWS 141 models and dogmatic marks of the church, ecumenism, the place of the Blessed Virgin Mary among the People of God, relations between church and state. Auer's consideration of each of these themes is marked by his thorough knowledge of the sources and his skillful handling of these materials. Even so, Auer's work is hardly beyond criticism. For example, arguably the heart of the book is the author's 213-page treatment of the history and theology of the ministries which comprises Part III, "Manifestations of the Church's Being, Life and Activity...." I want to call this section masterful because of the vastness of the enterprise (the development of the ministries over almost two thousand years) and the wealth of careful distinctions Auer brings to his treatment of so much material. To choose among the riches here one might single out Auer's treatment of the two principles of democracy and hierarchy and the numerous collegial forms for participative governance and administration that have been created or once existed in the church and have been revived since Vatican II (pp. 157-173). This is a stimulating but balanced discussion, blending historical material with more immediate and urgent concerns. But there are also some serious weaknesses in the larger section. For example, while extended attention is given to the offices of bishop and pope (almost a hundred pages on the papal office alone), comparatively little attention is given to the role of presbyters (four pages) and the laity. As for the latter, though Auer considers "The Question of the Secular Office of the Laity," he never addresses the question of the religious office of the laity, that is, their ministry in the church and not just to the world. He broaches this theme in his section on " Vocations or Charisms, Ministries and Offices or Commissionings " (pp. 179-194), but all too quickly he concludes this section... (shrink)

A philosophical essay under this title faces severe rhetorical challenges. New accounts of the good life regularly and rapidly turn out to be variations of old ones, subject to a predictable range of decisive objections. Attempts to meet those objections with improved accounts regularly and rapidly lead to a familiar impasse — that while a life of contemplation, or epicurean contentment, or stoic indifference, or religious ecstasy, or creative rebellion, or self-actualization, or many another thing might count as a good (...) life, none of them can plausibly be identified with the good life, or the best life. Given the long history of that impasse, it seems futile to offer yet another candidate for the genus “good life” as if that candidate might be new, or philosophically defensible. And given the weariness, irony, and self-deprecation expected of a philosopher in such an impasse, it is difficult for any substantive proposal on this topic to avoid seeming pretentious. (shrink)

The question addressed by this book is what, if anything, stoic ethics would be like today if stoicism had had a continuous history to the present day as a plausible and coherent set of philosophical commitments and methods. The book answers that question by arguing that most of the ancient doctrines of Stoic ethics remain defensible today, at least when ancient Stoicism's cosmological commitments are replaced by modern scientific ones.

The tendency to reciprocate – to return good for good and evil for evil – is a potent force in human life, and the concept of reciprocity is closely connected to fundamental notions of ‘justice’, ‘obligation’ or ‘duty’, ‘gratitude’ and ‘equality’. In _Reciprocity_, first published in 1986,_ _Lawrence Becker presents a sustained argument about reciprocity, beginning with the strategy for developing a moral theory of the virtues. He considers the concept of reciprocity in detail, contending that it is a basic (...) virtue that provides the basis for parental authority, obligations to future generations, and obedience to law. Throughout the first two parts of the book, Becker intersperses short pieces of his own narrative fiction to enrich reflection on the philosophical arguments. The final part is devoted to extensive bibliographical essays, ranging over anthropology, psychology, political theory and law, as well as the relevant ethics and political philosophy. (shrink)

When philosophers speak of the inconclusiveness of arguments for the existence of God, they often do so as if they were talking about a matter of principle—as if it were in principle impossible to prove God's existence, that every proof was in principle inconclusive. Of course, rebutals of the cosmological, ontological, and teleological arguments are usually designed to show that these types of arguments are in principle inconclusive. But one supposes that religious experience arguments are not all in such difficulties. (...) That is, one supposes, for example, that an encounter with the deity would provide a proof of his existence which is at least as conclusive as proofs for the existence of an ‘external world’. And thus it would be false to maintain in an unqualified way that ‘Reason cannot prove the existence of God’. The most one would be able to say would be that at present , or in terms of the currently available evidence, no one can prove God's existence. Further, whether or not sufficient evidence has ever been available in the past would be seen as an historical question— a matter of contingencies, not logical possibilities. (shrink)

This paper argues for an ordinal account of the unity of the virtues in the following way: (1) by showing the importance of a neglected class of questions about coherence - questions referred to here as coincidence problems; (2) by organizing conventional accounts of the unity of the virtues in a perspicuous way, and showing that they fail to solve coincidence problems; and (3) by describing the sorts of ordinal accounts that are available, sketching the outlines of one organized around (...) practical wisdom, and indicating how it would handle coherence questions of all sorts, including those of coincidence. (shrink)

_Property Rights: Philosophic Foundations,_ first published in 1977, comprehensively examines the general justifications for systems of private property rights, and discusses with great clarity the major arguments as to the rights and responsibilities of property ownership. In particular, the arguments that hold that there are natural rights derived from first occupancy, labour, utility, liberty and virtue are considered, as are the standard anti-property arguments based on disutility, virtue and inequality, and the belief that justice in distribution must take precedence over (...) private ownership. Lawrence Becker goes on to contend that there are four sound lines of argument for private property that, together with what is sound in the anti-property arguments, must be co-ordinated to form the foundations of a new theory. He therefore expounds a concise but sophisticated theory of property that is relevant to the modern world, and concludes by indicating some of the implications of his theory. (shrink)

Francis Robin Houssemayne Du Boulay, historian of England and Germany in the later Middle Ages, is remembered with admiration and affection by his colleagues as a fine scholar, and as a witty, charitable, and sometimes mercurial companion. Many professors of history and writers in Britain and the USA can testify to Boulay's inspiring gifts as a teacher. His unique historical vision, which is most powerfully communicated in his books on England in the later middle ages and Piers Plowman, offers his (...) readers a richly documented understanding of the lives and mentalities of medieval people, informed by sympathy and a deep charity. This is a valuable gift from a historian to a society in danger of losing its identity through forgetfulness of its past. (shrink)

This book argues for adopting a new account of the circumstances of justice ("the habilitation framework") for philosophical theories of basic justice. It proposes a concept of basic health as a metric for such theories, and healthy agency as a target for them. It does not, however, propose a specific distributive rule or set of distributive principles. Nor does it propose a specific type of theory to pursue (e.g., utilitarian, contractarian, etc.). The book is thus meant to be largely theory-independent (...) respect to standard normative theories. (shrink)

Continuation of the discussion of the author's paper "Foreknowledge and Predestination." Mind 81 (1972): 138-41.

Some ambiguities in the verb ‘to know’ are analyzed, and it is argued that “undefeatably justified true belief” is the meaning of most philosophical interest with respect to specifying truth conditions for ‘S knows that p’. Two general conditions for an adequate definition of ‘S knows that p’ are discussed. Then a proposal for a quasi-causal theory of knowledge is introduced and defended.