Abstract

"This is an exciting book - at least it should be to those who already know something about the Thomistic metaphysics of essence and existence and who are interested in the basic seminal ideas in philosophy." W. Norris Clark, editor of the 'International Philosophical Quarterly,' thus describes Professor Carlo's book in the Preface. He adds that this interpretation of existence would provide metaphysics with the most powerfully unified vision of the world in the whole of Western thought. Impressive in its research and breadth of vision, this study searches into controversies which have plagued the meaning and function of existence from the time of Parmenides. The author is both provocative and controversial, forcing the reader by cogency of argument alone to rethink much of what he already knows and to modify his basic understanding of the problem.Continuing and advancing the thought of Gilson and Maritain, Professor Carlo reduces essence to a model of existence, and matter itself - Merleau-Ponty's "weakness at the heart of being" and Heidegger's "horizon of being" - to a deficiency of being. In a brilliant exposition, touched with grace, skill, and scrupulous fairness, Professor Carlo breaks down the stubborn tradition of Scholasticism's disregard of Aquinas' revolutionary understanding of existence by disentangling fact from fiction and setting the record straight. The author states that the primacy of existence demands as a logical and natural corollary, the subordination of essence to existence, since not only the very existence of essence but all its perfection comes from existence, including that last cherished inheritance of which no one ever thought it could be dispossessed, the very knowability and intelligibility of essence itself. The role of essence as an Aristotelian reciprocal cause or as the extrinsic principle of limitation is revolutionized by the author. Instead, essence arises out of the flood of existence, as a 'mode of existence,' as the 'intrinsic limitation of existence.' Thus the doctrine of the primacy of existence, historically, has served as a "halfway house" to the doctrine of the 'ultimate reducibility of essence to existence."--From cover flaps.