A few weeks ago I received a copy of the PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES, containing a review of my book John Henry Newman, Our Way to Certitude, written by Fr. Boekraad. It was very unfavourable so that anybody reading it is sure to make up his mind never to buy the book.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:NEWMAN'S PSYCHOLOGICAL DISCOVERY: THE ILLATIVE SENSE (V. Continued) 15. The Universals. A long and vehement dispute once raged about the reality of universals. Are they only mental creations, forged by the human brain, without any reality outside them, or have they some independent existence apart from their mental reality? Anyhow, there was an apparent contradiction between die universal character of our ideas and the individual character of concrete things. (...) The Scholastics solved this problem by drawing clear distinctions. An idea is an abstraction; as soon as it becomes applicable to a number of objects or things in the same sense, it is a universal idea. The "direct universal" (universale directum seu metaphysicum) as such has no existence apart from our minds, because an existing thing is always bound up with concrete, determining, individualizing notes, and it is these very circumstances or accidents which are ignored by the mind as it strips the thing of its individual characteristics. When the mind reflects on this "direct universal," i.e., on the abstract essence of the thing, it sees that this is to be found in many more things and that it is identical in all those things, and in this way the "reflex or logical universal" is formed (universale reflexum seu logicum). This same essence or quiddity is not really different from the thing itself, but the mind makes abstraction of all accidents, and this foundation makes it possible to apply this idea in die same sense to all other beings of the same kind, whether they are actually existing or not. In other words the universal as a universal has only reality in the mind but it has a foundation or a ground in the thing itself. Newman was not so well acquainted with Scholasticism that he knew and mastered the solution of the problem. As a matter of fact he approached it from quite another angle. Hence when scholastically trained minds read some of his statements on universals, they may feel shocked. They sound very curious, they seem incon418 DR. ZENO, O.F.M. CAP.419 sistent with each other, they apparenüy imply a negation of the objective reality of universals. This makes it necessary to compare the texts and to explain his meaning. a. Newman Inconsistent. We should never lose sight of the fact that Newman had no intention at all to enter the province of philosophy in the restricted sense of the word. "I am only contemplating the mind as it moves in fact, by whatever hidden mechanism,"1 that is what could be put as a heading to every page of the Grammar of Assent. And when he virtually deals with metaphysics, he wants us to consider his statements as hypotheses, or as propositions stated only by the way, and in this department he always wishes "to speak under correction." This explains how he could refer to the universale metaphy sicum and the universale directum in a very correct way without realizing he was teaching Scholastic doctrine. As far as I know, it is Professor Walgrave who has first drawn attention to this fact,2 when he dealt with Newman's alleged conceptualism. Newman states that "even one act of cruelty, ingratitude, generosity or justice reveals to us at once intensive the immutable distinction between those qualities and their contraries; that is, in that particular instance and pro bac vice."3 The same holds for the opposites: right and wrong, true and false, just and unjust, beautiful and deformed.4 In one experience, therefore, he sees a thing as an immutable, absolute quiddity, which objectively and in the same sense belongs to all possible things of the same kind, although the mind does not yet explicidy confirm this universal applicability. The contemplated quality remains limited to the particular case; but in its absoluteness it is stripped of all individual, changeable and concrete characteristics. This is the metaphysical universal of the Scholastics. But Newman also mentions the logical universal when he says: "As we form our notion of whiteness from the actual sight of snow, a lily or a cloud, so, after experiencing the sentiment of approbation which arises in us on the sight of certain... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 517 she does on these issues; this is hardly the case. And lastly she fails to discern that some feminist christology does not spring from a love for Jesus and what he has done through his cross and resurrection; rather, Jesus is merely used (and thus abused) to further a theological and political agenda. [Men obviously are not immune from this either.] Despite my disagreements with some (...) of Johnson's arguments and conclusions, and despite my disappointment at the way she addresses the feminist issues, I found this hook to he a basically reliable and clear summary of the christology of the last forty years. Whether it has all been true development, as Johnson maintains, is a debatable question. Nonetheless, this book does elaborate the contemporary issues and possible answers that confront christology today, and for this makes it a book well worth reading. Mother of God Community Washington. D.C. THOMAS WEINANDY, O.F.M. Cap. The Philosophical Theology of John Duns Scotus. By ALLAN B. WOLTER, O.F.M. Ed. Marilyn McCord Adams. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990. Pp. ix+ 356. $47.50. Duns Scotus was a brilliant light that flashed a brief time across the medieval sky hut was destined ultimately to he outshone by other luminaries immediately preceding him (Aquinas) and following him (Ockham). Perhaps no individual in the past half century has done more to illuminate the Subtle Doctor's thought and times than Allan B. Wolter, O.F.M. Both his editing and his translating of primary sources as well as his detailed readings and expositions of Scotus's theories have put medieval scholars in his debt. The present volume is a collection of thirteen essays on particular aspects of Scotus's work, preceded by an introduction. Ten of the essays have been previously published in other sources ranging from.the late 1940s to the present. But as editor Marilyn McCord Adams points out in her forward, many of these can be found only with difficulty in often inaccessible journals and books. Thus the value of this single volume. The essays are grouped under three headings: metaphysics and epistemology, action theory and ethics, and philosophical theology. As is often true with any volume spanning a number of topics and years, the quality of exposition and analysis is uneven. Obviously, in a limited space, I cannot hope to treat all subjects in a volume as comprehensive 518 BOOK REVIEWS as Wolter's. Permit me, however, to begin by making some general comments and then to narrow my remarks to one particular issue. Wolter's introduction to the volume is as clear and concise an overview of Scotus's ideas as one is likely to find anywhere in the literature. In general, the essays in the first part of the book on matters meta· physical and epistemological are quite solid. Here we find explicated many of the concepts which have become identified with Scotus: the formal distinction, univocity of being, the common nature and the hraecceity that constitutes distinct individuals. Wolter does justice to the subtlety and brilliance of Scotus's thinking and allows readers both old and new to Scotus to acknowledge him as a metaphysician for the ages. The author is particularly adept at explicating with helpful analogies some of the Subtle Doctor's most difficult concepts. I benefitted from his thought-provoking comparison between the formal distinction and a spotlight on a stage which can illuminate different and distinguishable aspects of the same reality. The next section on action rtheory and ethics draws in part on Wolter's work which culminated in the 1986 publication of Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality. Wolter has been in the forefront of those who urge that Scotus's description of an innate affection for justice in the will is crucial in understanding the freedom Scotus thought proper to humans. What remains unclear to me is how this strand in Scotus's writing relates to others which clearly imply a libertarian view of free• dom emphasizing the will's utter self-determination. The problem I see is this: if the will truly is self-determining, then an innate affectio justitiae seems to... (shrink)

_The purpose_ of this study is the reflection on ways of philosophical legitimation for the "Self-made-man" idea in the worldview of the Renaissance and Reformation. _Theoretical basis._ Historical, comparative, and hermeneutic methods became the basis for this. The study is based on the works of Nicholas of Cusa, G. Pico della Mirandola, N. Machiavelli, M. Montaigne, E. Roterodamus, M. Luther, J. Calvin together with modern researchers of this period. _Originality._ The analysis allows us to come to the conclusion that casts (...) doubt on the still widespread belief according to which the emergence of the "Self-made-man" idea is localized by the process of forming the American cultural code and the ideological heritage of Benjamin Franklin. It is highlighted that the formation of this idea is the result of a long process that originated in the ancient world and gains a special impetus in the Renaissance and Reformation. Precisely in the cultural context of the latter, the ancient intention to recognize the individual’s right to self-determination and self-government, which in the depths of Christian theology acquires only a potentially universal character, becomes not only acceptable but also, in the context of Protestantism worldview, the only admissible, in fact, individual’s obligatory life guidelines. _Conclusions._ Humanistic and reformation thoughts quite naturally led to further ideological legitimation of the person’s idea of who is creating oneself. This legitimation was during the complex interaction of numerous factors of culture in the Late Middle Ages, as well as ideas and intentions inherited from Antiquity. Key among them was the gradual formation of a new social order, in essence, indifferent to paternalistic rudiments, together with the ethics of Protestantism corresponding to it. The latter does not only legalize but, de facto, sacralizes the individual’s reorientation from hopes for the synergy of God’s grace and own free will in personal salvation, toward the self-reliance and personal efforts, awareness of personal responsibility for the own fate as key principles of the "Self-made-man" concept. (shrink)

_Purpose._ The article aims to analyse the consciousness of masses in the communication system of the 20th century projecting the individual level onto the social one. _Theoretical basis._ In the fields of philosophy and other humanities since the middle of the last century there has dominated an opinion that the category of mass and its communication are second-rate and non-elitist phenomena. Condensing the experience of human history (especially – the nineteenth century – the time of the bourgeois revolutions and the (...) two world wars), such parameters were set by the creators of social psychology Gustave Le Bon and Sigmund Freud in their basic research "The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind", "Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego". Since ancient times the masses have really resembled immoral emotional neoformations, which minimized the individual qualities of the components of the whole and showed the features of a predominantly animal nature. It is no coincidence that those masses were called emotional, or just a crowd, regardless of the topos of existence: streets and squares, or the infospace of the first mass media (newspapers, radio, cinema, television). However, analysing the crowd, the scientists noted that this is only an extreme modification of the mass, and, in addition to it, there may be others – quite the opposite in their nature. With the advent of the World Wide Web, the situation has changed: scientists and futurists have been talking about the mass of intellectuals, which seems to be formed and combined in the field of information technology. And it surpasses the traditional elite in many respects. _Originality._ Having analysed the works of classic and modern researchers, we came to the conclusion that in fact the masses, like individuals (according to C. G. Jung), are divided into four types. Correspondingly, each of them has its own behaviour, psychology, philosophy etc. This article focuses on beliefs and ideological positions as the basis for the functioning of emotional, sensory, intuitive and rational masses in the context of 20th century philosophy. The object of our analysis was the philosophical schools of neo-positivism, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, existentialism, pragmatism, anthropology, phenomenology, and others. _Conclusions._ According to our assumption, regardless of the type of mass and direction of modern philosophy as a field of its implementation, rationalism comes to the fore everywhere (as a primary source and theoretical basis or motivation). Thus, it can be concluded that the rational mass now dominates, not emotional (which was thoroughly described by Le Bon and Freud). And this is quite natural in the age of digital technology. (shrink)

This paper studies a class of infinite-valued predicate logics. A sufficient condition for axiomatizability of logics from that class is given.

_Purpose._ The article aims to define the philosophical narratives about the "beautiful human" of Greek antiquity in the coordinates of the triad of "natural", "social" and "cultural" body. _Theoretical basis._ When achieving this purpose, the author based on the conceptual provisions of the philosophical anthropology of Н. Plessner, in particular, concerning the attitude of a limited body to its limit as an empirical comprehension of a human him/herself and the world. Developing the position of the body as a socio-cultural phenomenon (...) and proceeding from the definition of corporeality as a "transformed human body under the influence of social and cultural factors, which has socio-cultural meanings and performs certain socio-cultural functions" (I. Bykhovskaya) (transl. by O. G.), the triad of "natural", "social" and "cultural" body was used as a methodological basis to analyse the research object. _Originality_ lies in the explication of the peculiarities of aesthetic and anthropological discourse in Ancient Greek philosophy, not only through the prism of the dichotomy of "soul" and "body", but also through the prism of the triad "natural", "social" and "cultural" body, allowing rethinking of the narratives concerning the "beautiful human" of the formation period of the European anthropological aesthetics in Antiquity. _Conclusions._ The anthropological aesthetics of Greek Antiquity is masculine aesthetics, the aesthetics of the male "cultural body". If a man is an epistemological subject, he is able, despite the ugliness and abomination of his natural body, to reach the level of the cultural body, the level of "personal existence of corporeality". As for the female corporeality, since the Ancient Greek philosophy does not provide the status of an epistemological subject for a woman, she remains at the level of "social body". (shrink)

The article is devoted to the philosophical consideration of anthropological crisis in the risk society in his historical transformation. The research is aimed to anthropological analysis of the risk society in order to identify its new features in the modern era. As a methodological principle of research, the author defines the distinction between anthropological and cosmological approaches in philosophy. It is about their complex relationships and contradictions in the development of the civilizational process. The anthropological crisis becomes apparent when society (...) becomes a “society of risk” in the modern era. The article reveals the cause of the anthropological crisis in the risk society: the social production of wealth becomes the production of risks. In the XXI century there is a “world society of risk”, which is associated with the process of globalization. The risk research methodology suggests the need to anticipate unpredictable. The main difficulty in risk analysis is that the risk is between certainty and uncertainty, between rational and irrational. Two main trends - the reflexivity of the unknown and the cosmopolitan moment - point to a global change in the society in the 21st century, whose priority is security. In the historical and social philosophical perspective, security is understood as a concept that encompasses integrity, inviolability, inviolability with respect to corporeality, life and property. In the context of the modern anthropological crisis, security has become the main value concept of the social political language. The logic of uniqueness gives way to the logic of ambiguity, which finds its expression in the connection of the risk society with the cosmopolitism. The “cosmopolitan moment” of the world risk society presupposes recognition of the uniqueness of the Other as an opportunity to overcome the anthropological crisis. (shrink)