Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 135 Negatively, she wants to show that the dilemma itself is flawed. One flaw is its claim that accidental necessity removes freedom of choice; it cannot because our choice is causally independent of God's foreknowledge. Rather, God's foreknowledge modally overdetermines the choice. The critical question here is the extent to which human choice is independent. Clearly, it is independent in that God's knowledge is not a causal condition of the choice being made; it is less clear that the choice is epistemically independent of God's knowledge. A second flaw is the dilemma's invocation of the transfer of necessity principles, to which she proposes counterexamples. Positively, she rejects Ockhamist solutions because they assume that God's mental states are like ours. Instead she follows Thomas in maintaining that what God knows is his own essence; he knows all else secondarily through the exemplars in his essence. At least two problems plague this solution. One concerns how this view, which she terms an Ockhamist solution but which in effect makes God and his knowledge independent of time, is consistent with the view that God is a temporal being. Second, the divine epistemology here invoked is quite obscure. The heart of her contention is that there is no reason to think that the relation between God's knowledge and human existence must wholly accord with human models of knowing. In this regard, she creates an intriguing analogy adapted from Abbott's Flatland, suggesting the possibility that God's knowledge encompasses a fourth dimension , from which perspective the changes we perceive are actually enduring properties. What is puzzling, however, is that this invokes the very B-theory of time she rejected earlier in the book. Significantly, though, this denial of the requirement that God's knowledge proceeds as ours reopens the very possibility Zagzebski rejects out of hand throughout her discussion, namely, that our future actions have a causal bearing on God's knowledge of them, a view which gives us an actual power over the past in ways analogous to the power we already have to bring about past relational properties and which might have much more plausibility than the Thomistic epistemology she proposes. BRUCE R. REICHENBACH Augsburg College John T. Harwood, editor. The Early Essays and Ethics of Robert Boyle. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. Pp. lxix + 33o. Cloth, $39.95. Now, for the first time, Robert Boyle's early ethical writings are available to scholars unable to travel to the Boyle archives at the Royal Society in London. The publication of these essays ("The Aretology," "Of Sin," "Of Piety," "The Doctrine of Thinking," "The Dayly Reflection," "Of Time and Idleness," and "Joseph's Mistresse") not only sheds light on the breadth of Boyle's theological concerns, but also shows the priority of theological concerns in the thought of the young Boyle. Out of twenty-six essays inventoried by Boyle on his twenty-third birthday in x65o, only nine, as Harwood puts it, "are more clearly related to natural philosophy than to moral philosophy" (xviii). Harwood has done a masterful job of annotating Boyle's work and has docu- i36 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3 ~:1 JANUARY 199 3 mented a wider range of influences on Boyle's thought than scholars have previously noted. He has traced Boyle's major ethical points and illustrations to the writings of the ancients (including Epicurus, Aristotle, Cicero, and Seneca), Renaissance humanists (including Erasmus, Ficino, and Mirandola), and Protestant reformers (such as Luther, Calvin, and Melancthon). Harwood has also demonstrated that in most cases Boyle could have derived his knowledge of these sources from Joann Alsted's Enclop~edia (1630). Alsted, who has not been noted previously by scholars as one of Boyle's sources, was professor of philosophy and theology at Herborn and was the teacher of Jan Comenius, a member of the Hartlib circle with which Boyle was associated in the late 164os. Contemporary and near-contemporary seventeenth-century English writers were another significant influence on Boyle's ethical thought. Thomas Wright's Passions of the Minde (16ol), for example, was probably the source of Boyle's discussion of the passions as well...