EXISTENCE EXISTS. I imagine that this statement will seem to many people to be either meaningless or false or pointless. In what follows I shall try to show that the statement is meaningful, true, important.

DR JOSEPH BOBIK’S article The First Part of the Third Way is a notable contribution to the literature on the subject. Anybody who has wrestled with the text itself—a text as profound and disconcerting as anything St Thomas has written—will be grateful for the many fine elucidations the article provides, and will be grateful especially for the fact that he has kept to the text itself as given in Summa Theologiae I, q 2, a 3 and has not read into (...) it some argument of his own. This method is particularly helpful and fruitful when there is question of pointing to a flaw in the argument. Against Kant and against most critics of the argument no defence is possible, for no real effort has been made to understand the argument in its own terms, within its own ‘thought-world’—one can of course insist that the attack is misdirected, but this kind of non-discussion scarcely serves the common pursuit of truth and will never enlarge anybody’s horizons. Dr Bobik, on the other hand, is able to point to the exact proposition in the text which he finds faulty and he is in a position to situate this proposition in the general context of Thomist metaphysics. In such circumstances there is everything to be gained by a further examination of the proposition and its context. (shrink)

PATHOS is not the same thing as suffering, though, of course, it is bound up with suffering, just as it is bound up with contingency and loneliness. We suffer when somebody dies whom we loved, but pathos makes its appearance only when we turn up a letter and find in it some characteristic turn of expression, brave and cheerful perhaps in face of pain or disappointment, or an old jacket, or a pipe, or things arranged in a certain way in (...) a bedroom or kitchen. Not that pathos has to wait on death: the boy in John McGahern’s novel The Dark sits by the fire at night after his father has gone to bed, and his mood of enmity and disgust is disturbed and broken by the sight of the heavy country shoes his father had thrown carelessly aside—he meets pathos for the first time, and is deeply changed by it, even though the external father-son relationship seems to remain unchanged.…What has happened in this case is that the boy’s personality has been extended in the direction of manhood; suffering was nothing new to him but this was something new, a new dimension, new horizons of the spirit. (shrink)

This is a follow-up to The Future of Belief, and it resumes and develops all the main themes of that very controversial book: the dehellenisation of philosophy and theology, the rejection of the correspondence theory of truth, the identification of man and consciousness, the radical mutability of dogma, the assertion that God does not exist since He is beyond being, and the attendant distinction between being and reality. There is, in fact, little or nothing that is new in the way (...) of thesis or conclusion; Professor Dewart is concerned rather with re-examining and strengthening the foundations of his position. The Future of Belief was a kind of manifesto addressed to the world at large; the present book is more technical, and seems to be addressed to philosophers and theologians: at least it is doubtful whether anybody else will have the patience and mental equipment to read it through. Even at that the book is heavy going, and the task of reading it is not sufficiently lightened by the realisation that something important is being said. This, however, is a personal judgment : a very competent Catholic scholar has already hailed the Foundations as the book that will dominate Christian thinking for the next decade or so. (shrink)

This book is part of the series The Herder History of Dogma edited by Michael Schmaus and Aloys Grillmeier. This context helps to define the nature and limits of the work: it is not a philosophical but a theological work, and it is not so much concerned with creation and providence as with what various theologians have said about them. In a study that ranges from Genesis to Scheeben there can be no question of a full exploration of any particular (...) writer or period, but the author has mastered most of the secondary source material, and the result is a comprehensive and balanced work of historical scholarship. (shrink)

This is a statement and defence of an ethical and social philosophy which the author terms ‘critical humanism’, which may be described in very general terms as the view of life and human problems which one finds in The Guardian and the London ‘quality Sundays’. Freedom is a good thing; all men are equal; poverty and distress must be relieved as far as possible; democracy is the best system of government. Other good things are : divorce, contraception, euthanasia, abortion. Dr (...) Milne makes one addition to the list : suicide. And he would allow criminals to choose suicide as an alternative to life imprisonment. (shrink)

In this closely argued book Professor Flew of Keele University examines the philosophical arguments in favour of theism and Christianity, and finds them inadequate. He begins by analysing the notion of ‘God’, goes on to evaluate the more usual arguments for God’s existence and, finally, takes up the question of miracles as evidence for the truth of Christianity.

This book is a sustained and powerful exercise of reflection on reflection—leading to the conclusion announced in the subtitle.

This book is a collection of articles on philosophical and theological topics which have already appeared in the Revue Thomiste, the Revue Philosophique de Louvain and Lumiàre et Vie. There are articles on L’àtre and articles on aspects of La Conscience Morale, but the et of the title does no more than tie the two bundles together, and the reader who expects a discussion on the metaphysical basis of morality will be disappointed. And I think M Corvez is somewhat unfair (...) to himself in using a title which arouses this kind of expectation, which can only yield to irritation as it becomes clear that the promise is not going to be fulfilled. It is in fact necessary to put the title out of one’s mind to give any fair idea of the contents and value of the book. (shrink)

The scope of this book is accurately stated in the title and subtitle. It provides a clear outline of the main Marxist concepts and theses grouping them around the central concept of the ideal of the authentic man—the working man in a worker’s state freed from the alienations and estrangements of ‘capitalist’ society. Dr Koren is neither Marxist nor anti-Marxist, and he rounds off each chapter with some critical reflexions. The criticism is well-balanced, erudite, unpolemical. The author knows his texts (...) too well to accuse Marx of attacking private property or of defending a crude materialism. He presses gently but firmly on the weak points of the Marxist system: its inherent tendency towards oligarchy and dictatorship, its oversimplification of the class struggle, its assumption that human development cannot advance beyond Communism. (shrink)

This book is a putting together of articles published in Louvain philosophical and theological journals over the past few years. The collection has more unity and continuity of theme than is usual in this kind of book, and one has the impression that Canon Van Riet had the book in mind when he wrote the articles. Although it is a series of studies rather than a continuous treatise, it is, in the judgement of the present reviewer, the best book that (...) has appeared in recent years on the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

The tension between the physical space-time world and the metaphysical ‘intelligible’ world is as old as philosophy, and must always present a point of challenge and decision for every philosophical system. It is true that extreme positivism, on the one hand, and extreme idealism, on the other, avoid the tension and the challenge by ignoring one of its terms, but the mind is not long satisfied with either of these positions: as Browning’s Bishop Bloughram argues, the ‘other’ comes back to (...) demand its place no matter how energetically we try to exclude it. (shrink)

The nineteenth century historian Hauréau dismissed St Anselm’s logical treatise De Grammatico as a mere ‘agreeable exercise’ and a contemporary historian such as Gilson can write a comprehensive study of the ‘father of Scholasticism’ without mentioning it even once. Nevertheless the medieval tradition took Anselm the logician very seriously, so much so that it is as a logician that he is honoured in Dante’s Paradiso There is, in fact, not a little concerning logic in the philosophical and theological treatises which, (...) moreover, evidence throughout a very subtle use of logic. There is, therefore, some grounds for hoping that an examination of St Anselm’s thought from the standpoint of the neglected De Grammatico might produce some interesting results. This is the task that Dr Henry has undertaken and the results are more than interesting. They are quite amazing. (shrink)

In the first of these two lectures Professor Hart is concerned with certain controversies and changes of attitude towards the question of moral guilt—mens rea,’ the guilty mind’—in criminal proceedings according to English law. There is, on the one hand and at one extreme, the attitude of the McNaughten Rules which excludes guilt only in the case of a ‘defect of reason’; at the other extreme there is the modern position, represented by Lady Wootton according to which the conception of (...) metis rea should be dropped altogether—criminal proceedings are concerned with ‘social hygiene’ and have nothing to do with responsibility: the question of responsibility comes up only after a verdict has been reached in estimating what steps are likely to have the best consequences for the ‘criminal’ and for society. Between these extremes Professor Hart takes a kind of middle course, what he calls ‘a moderate form of the new doctrine’: ‘Under this scheme mens rea would continue to be a necessary condition of liability to be investigated and settled before conviction except so far as it relates to mental abnormality. The innovation would be that the accused person would not be able to adduce any form of mental abnormality as a bar to conviction. The question of his mental abnormality would under this scheme be investigated only after conviction and would primarily be concerned with his present rather than his past mental state’. He admits that there are some practical difficulties against this view, but he does not consider the theoretical difficulty that the theory does away with the principle that criminal conviction must be based on guilt and responsibility. (shrink)

Miss Murdoch finds that ‘true morality’ has its source in ‘an austere…love of the Good’. Good is the image which unites all moral striving, even though we may never quite attain to it in its purity. Philosophers who argue that Good is a mere ‘value tag of the choosing will’ are brushed aside. ‘The proper and serious use of the term refers us to a perfection which is perhaps never exemplified in the world we know…and which carries with it the (...) ideas of hierarchy and transcendence’. (shrink)