In this succinct survey of a period four centuries ago, when even papal prelates welcomed the reviving classical humanism as a refreshment from the dull formulas of a hidebound scholasticism, whose best upholders were struggling to rescue its original spirit from established senescence, Father Bouyer directs his sympathy and acumen to evaluate humanist Christianity in its central and most controversial figure, Desiderius Erasmus and in particular to the striking attempt to establish a humanist theology. Unfortunately for English readers his study (...) concentrates upon ‘the spirit and general trend’ of Erasmus, exemplified in the significant Basel years, ‘when “Erasmianism” showed itself clearly as lying between the ultra-conservative Catholicism and the Protestant innovators’, and for this purpose critically expounds the Etudes erasmiennes of the late Professor Renaudet, ‘the examination of which’ he frankly admits ‘will form the core of our work’. Thus this work is mainly a translation of Fr. Bouyer’s Autour d’Érasme which sprang from the French literary scene in 1955 with the addition of an introductory sketch of the chief Renaissance prelates, initially led by Nicholas of Cusa, Vittorino da Feltre and Pico della Mirandola and concluding with ‘its final blossoming in the group of cardinals surrounding Pope Paul III’. (shrink)

The printed proceedings of the 1960 meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association open with two personal testaments: the Presidential Address of Father R. F. Lechner on the professional task of the philosopher to contemplate truth personally, fully and in communication with his fellows and, in reply to his citation for the Aquinas Medal, the address of Dr. Rudolf Allers upon ‘Co-operation and Communication’ in intellectual culture. Next Professor Wilfrid Sellars presents a critical paper, ‘Being and Being Known’ evaluating the (...) ‘over-simplified’ isomorphism of the Thomistic theory of knowing faculty and object in contrast with the ‘radically mistaken’ theories of Descartes and Anglo-Saxon realism. The three other papers concentrate upon current applications of analytic method to philosophical problems. Fr. Ernan McMullin offers a general evaluation of the methods of reductive and linguistic analysts, comparing their insights with their limitations. Fr. Robert Miller analyses in critical detail the theoretical and practical attitudes of the ‘informalist’ group of linguistic analysis to metaphysics, while Fr. W. Norris Clarke more particularly examines their attitude to natural theology. (shrink)

This substantial volume offers research students—chiefly American according to editorial estimate: ‘a fair assumption in view of the results of the bibliography search, that by far the greatest interest in values for the time covered is in the United States’ —a basic bibliographical record of some two thousand entries concerning the literature, in book and article form, upon problems of values during the past forty years. It is the fruit of some ten years’ meticulous team-work, first in the Laboratory of (...) Social Relations, Harvard and then in the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. Written primarily for behavioural scientists, i.e., anthropologists, psychologists and sociologists, the compilers hope it will extend their acquaintance with published works in their complementary sciences and in philosophy. They have found recent studies of values to be ‘increasingly interdisciplinary in character’ but ‘less cumulative than is desirable’—for at least one sad reason that ‘with the partial exception of the philosophical journals, there has been no “obvious” place in which to publish on the subject’. (shrink)

For many years past English moralists have been occupied, almost exclusively, with the analysis of ethical terms. Ethics Since 1900 has the great merit of making this involved and often tedious discussion intelligible to the educated public. Mrs. Warnock begins with Bradley, works her way through the intuitionists, the emotivists and her Oxford colleagues, Urmson, Hare and Nowell-Smith, and ends with a long chapter on Sartre and a concise account of the modern discussion concerning freedom of the will. Since the (...) remainder of this review is taken up with a discussion of the book’s only notable shortcoming, it is well to affirm at once that, as a popular account of recent work in ethics, it is an unqualified success. It is not, of course, as representative as the title suggests; obviously it was first conceived as a work on English ethics, the chapter on Sartre being added as an encouragement to English moralists to follow his unfashionable example and formulate some moral opinions of their own. (shrink)

The Lilly Endowment Research Program in Christianity and Politics is an enviable form of energetic subsidy which implements an American concern for intellectual integrity much more realistically than the lipservice which older and more complacent nations commonly profess. It believes that Christian culture should be brought to bear in detail upon the actual problems of politics and social order and it devotes an annual series of public lectures to this high-minded aim. The published series is inaugurated in this exploratory essay (...) into the possible nature of Christian philosophy itself by a distinguished Harvard professor, the text being developed from his Walter Freeman Whitman Lectures and Lilly Foundation Lectures of 1958. Holding that our anxious century has lost confidence in the self-sufficiency of human reason to establish an evident and closed order in reality, he believes that men are now ready to contemplate the reality of a chastened reason open to the influence of religious ideals. And he claims that the very reception of the term, ‘Christian philosophy’ only recently into common usage is ‘the expression of a noteworthy gap in our intellectual history’. (shrink)

The Royal Octavo format of this massive anthology of essays, culled from the representative writings of some thirty-seven Catholic thinkers, symbolise the richness and variety of content which amply guarantee the editor’s disarming apologia for his selection: ‘Suffice it that the authentic note of the freedom that is bora of faith is everywhere heard in these pages’. The reviewer stipulates at once that the only complaint he can fairly make is a pedantic wail at the absence of any index to (...) facilitate a periodic dip into the comparative treatment of a theme or person in this embarras des richesses—only sustained study can do justice to this select presentation of Catholics in thought during the past thirty years. (shrink)