The title of this book is too modest. In his Disputationes on the text of the Summa of St. Thomas, Gabriel Vazquez draws upon a very wide reading of the theological literature of his own and previous ages. His conclusions present a synthesis, not without originality, of the speculation of the 15th and 16th centuries. The problem here considered, that of the obligation of civil law, raises the great issues of civil obedience and the limits of human authority. The book, (...) then, is more than a monograph on a single author; it is an important study in the history of moral philosophy and theology. (shrink)

The need for the critical edition of texts was not ended by the advent of printing. If anyone were naif enough to think so he could hardly be better instructed than by having his attention drawn to the cautionary tale of Locke’s Treatises Admittedly there were special circumstances affecting the printed text, notably Locke’s ‘determined anonymity’, understandable in the conditions of the time and given the drift of the work, but taken by Locke to the extremes of dealing with his (...) printer through an intermediary and of using a code-name for the work in his own private lists. Yet when allowance is made for these circumstances the fact remains that the text of Locke’s Treatises currently used is a gravely defective one. It is not that the variants are individually important or substantially affect the sense in more than a tiny minority of cases; it is rather that there are so very many of them that, cumulatively, they undermine confidence. As Mr Laslett points out there is a strong case for applying the canons of criticism, traditionally applied to the classics of the Ancient World and of modern literature, to documents of modern political theory. The resulting changes may not be great; and most are of the order of the abandonment of the solecisms Two Treatises of Civil Government and Second Treatise of Civil Government where Locke wrote Two Treatises of Government and Essay concerning the True Original, Extent, and End of Civil Government But scholarship owes it to Locke to use all its resources to ascertain his text. (shrink)

This work appeared in 1964. That it remains a significant contribution to this fast-moving controversy of our times is an index of its value; for not many defences of the natural law prohibition of contraception have survived the documents of the Second Vatican Council and John T Noonan’s magisterial history of contraception.

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)

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)

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)

Flückiger’s study of the history of the natural law from the standpoint of evangelical theology and Fuchs’ handling of the natural law in the context of Catholic theology provide a striking contrast to Ross’s book. Fluckiger’s book is the first, and so far the only one to appear, of a three-volume work. Study of ecclesiastical social ethics, and in particular of the theological basis of civil authority and law, convinced the author, so he tells us in his Preface, of the (...) need for a history of the natural law that would explore the neglected relationship of that concept with theology. This standpoint, as the author perfectly well recognises gives only a partial view of the western tradition of the natural law. The book falls into five sections—pre-history, beginnings, late antiquity, the Fathers and the early Middle Ages—but it is only in the fourth, that dealing with the Fathers, that the theological preoccupation becomes prominent. (shrink)

The third volume of Fr. Copleston’s monumental History of Philosophy is the first to appear in a French translation. This is a deserved tribute to what must bid fair to become a classic account of the philosophy of the Renaissance. The contents were described by the present reviewer in Philosophical Studies, Vol. IV, pp. 100-103.

This book is a study of an important revolution in the history of thought, a break-through on the twin fronts of law and history in which the outstanding campaigner, on both fronts, was Jean Bodin. Roman law was, from its revival in the eleventh down to the beginning of the sixteenth century, studied and interpreted in a very literal and textual fashion; it was assumed that the Codification of Justinian included all the legal wisdom there was and that the function (...) of the glossator was simply to show it forth. The sixteenth century philologists, led by Budé, raised serious doubts. And by the middle of the same century there was not merely a demand for a proper philological study of the texts but for a systematization of the vast mass of legal disposition that constituted the Corpus Iuris Civilis—jus in artem redigere. The result was an undermining of the authority of Roman law and a realisation that, while it might be an incomparable store of legal wisdom, there was no good reason for thinking that it was the only, or the best, system for actual conditions in sixteenth-century France. French customary law, which by now had been written down, was clearly adapted to the needs of the time in a way that Roman law never could be. This may seem obvious; but the realization of the obvious took time. And Bodin’s importance lies in his working out of a three-pronged comparative approach in his exposition of jus gentium, his comparative jurisprudence and his sociological theory of legal history. The stages in this revolution are fully documented by Professor Franklin in the first part of his book. (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)

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.

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)

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)

English ethical writing between the wars was dominated by the controversy about the right and the good. The controversy was not just a period-piece, for the protagonists on either side crystallised attitudes almost as old as moral philosophy itself. The quarrel between the deontologists and the axiologists takes one back to the very foundations of ethics, the foundations that, as is becoming increasingly apparent, have successfully resisted the erosion of post-war logical positivism and analysis.

Gabriel Marcel is, deliberately and professedly, the most unsystematic of philosophers. The chemin sinueux of his thought is not an easy one to follow; and the attempt would involve an acquaintance with M Marcel’s considerable literary and artistic output of half a century. As a practical measure some introduction to his thought is necessary; and in the case of this book one is reassured by M Marcel’s blessing on the venture. It is, perhaps, slightly disturbing that Mr Gallagher should, on (...) at least one point, disagree with the interpretation proposed by Père Troisfontaines. But in general one can be confident that, in so far as Marcel’s thought can be summarised at all, the summary here offered is as little misleading as possible. (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 aim of this book is to lay an ontological foundation for ethics. For this it must at least be assumed that human beings exist and are aware of desires. Desire is defined as “a provoking idea which demands of an individual a state different from the one he is presently experiencing”. Desires occur at three levels, physical, social and cosmological. Cosmological desires, those “which call upon idea-concepts that make ultimate statements about life and reality”, are the most important. A (...) successful cosmological idea is one that satisfies man’s questionings about his life and destiny. A successful idea may, however, in changed circumstances prove no longer adequate. The cosmologies of the Greeks or the physics of the schoolmen have had their day; their radical inadequacy, here called their “furtive factor”, has been called into the open. “The storehouse of history is filled with literally millions of discarded ideas and idea-tools which have been discarded because the furtive factor they contained, so well hidden at the time of their utilization as ‘true’ ideas, has been exposed to view”. (shrink)