Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 5Ol worthy to be chosen by beings who have learned to understand themselves to be in themselves what they are for themselves. As Hobbes put it: man is both the "matter" to be made and the "maker." And it is hard to see how a perceptive reading of the Leviathan would lead anyone to think that Hobbes was flattering us with his account of the indefensible pretensions of the unthinking, and the fatuous eloquence of the private purveyors of disrespect for authority. TIMOTHY FULLER Colorado College Linus J. Thro, s.J., ed. History of Philosophy in the Making. A Symposium of Essays to Honor Professor James D. Collins on his 65th Birthday by his Colleagues and Friends. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1989. Pp ix + 33o. $93.95, cloth; $19.25, paper. This volume is a well organized and rich Festschrift in honor of a distinguished historian of early modern philosophy, Professor James D. Collins of Saint Louis University. Only a few of the essays in the volume are not themselves contributions to the study of earlier philosophers. The wide range of periods covered by these historical essays, namely, the ancient, medieval, Renaissance, and modern, parallels to a certain extent the sweep of Professor Collins's own philosophical interests. Unlike some historians of early modern philosophy, Collins has a familiarity with medieval philosophy that is more than cursory. His doctoral dissertatiion, The Thomistic Philosophy of the Angels, published by The Catholic University of America Press in 1947, merits careful study even today, and it is still cited in the scholarly literature by the cognoscenti. The command of the subject, the clarity of exposition, and the strength of intellect that marked his dissertation would prove to be hints of the quality of his later work. Among his many books, those on Kierkegaard, existentialism, and Descartes 's philosophy of nature are accomplished monographs that have rightfully gained him respect from other scholars. But he has also gained a wide audience for his provocative and thoughtful interpretative books, which range across centuries and schools of philosophy. The limits of this review permit only brief comment on a selection from the seventeen contributed essays. Appropriately enough, the first contribution is "Plato's Dialectic of the Sun" by Leonard J. Eslick. This essay, whose scope is wider than the title would indicate, pursues fundamental issues in Plato's epistemology and metaphysics. Thomas P McTighe, in his crafted and scholarly article, "Eternity and Time in Boethius ," presents a good case for using the notion of complicatio-explicatio as the key to Boethius's metaphysics. He shows the Neoplatonic orientation of this metaphysics by well chosen passages from Proclus and Plotinus. In his "Action as the Self-Revelation of Being: A Central Theme in the Thought of St. Thomas," W. Norris Clarke interprets Thomas's doctrine of participation to involve a striking and important consequence for theory of knowledge, namely, that creatures reflect, though in a lessened degree, the dynamism and self-communication of their Creator. Accordingly, the 502 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 22:4 OCT I984 supposed "gap" between the knower and the "outside" world is overcome by the "self-imaging messages" sent by the external objects. Clarke is careful to point out, however, that Thomas was modest in his claims as to how much the human being does know of essences during this life. Allan B. Wolter, in his "Duns Scotus on Intuition, Memory and Our Knowledge of Individuals," examines a central but thorny problem for any medieval account of cognition. He argues that at first Scotus held to an intellective intuition only in the next life but shifted in his Questions on the Metaphysics to admit its possibility during the present life. Scotus's subsequent discussion of Christ's experiential knowledge and of the contrast between knowledge now and in the hereafter enables Wolter to delineate the connection between memory and intuitive cognition . Wolter rejects Camille B6rub6's characterization of Scotus as a proponent of "immediate realism." John P. Doyle's contribution, "The Suarezian Proof for God's Existence," is a brief but documented statement of Suarez's rejection of a "physical" proof and his elaboration both of...