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146 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 26:1 JANUARY 1988 In addition to these major issues, several secondary themes are notable. "Galileo and the Principle of Inertia," a previously unpublished paper, includes a concise summary of the changing historiography from Whewell through Stillman Drake, marked by a concern for the continuist position that is nevertheless objective in its evaluation of opposing views. For example, Weisheipl displays great respect here and elsewhere for the scholarship of Anneliese Maier, even though she concluded that there was no possible connection between medieval and "modern" science. Perhaps the strongest, and possibly the most familiar of Weisheipl's essays on motion is "The Principle Orane quodmoveturab alio movetur in Medieval Physics," which argues that the standard interpretation of this famous thesis derives from Averroes, a conclusion supported in following essays. The two concluding papers, "The Evolution of Scientific Method," and "Medieval Natural Philosophy and Modern Science," are effective statements of Weisheipl's major theses, the continuity of scientific thought and the importance of natural philosophy as an independent discipline. Both depend heavily on a distinction between the "mechanical" philosophy, based on abstraction of quantities from the world of nature, and the more inclusive consideration of the "real" that takes into account principles not susceptible to numerical representation. Many readers will reject a view considered outdated, but many others may find here a new affirmation of the rewards inherent in rediscovering a "natural philosophy" unbounded by the abstract rigors of mathematical physics and independent of the model-builders whose "mechanical" theories of motion represent a departure from the continuum of inquiry into the nature of Nature. The book is well edited and attractively presented, with a useful introduction and a moving "In Memoriam" by William E. Carroll. Of potential interest to all scholars of medieval thought, this final contribution by an outstanding contemporary Thomist is important even when not fully convincing. We will miss Weisheipl's voice in years to come. NADINE F. GEORGE Kenyon College Tractatus de Signis. The SemioticofJohn Poinsot. Interpretative Arrangement by John N. Deely in consultation with Ralph Austin Powell, from the 193o Reiser edition (emended second impression) of the Ars Logica,itself comprising the first two parts of the five part Cursus Philosophicus,of 1631--1635, by the same author. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985. Pp. x + 6o7. $7o.oo. John Herman Randall, Jr. has called the period of the late Middle Ages into the seventeenth century "the least known period in the history of Western philosophy." Thus, despite the efforts of Paul Oskar Kristeller and a series of Columbia University dissertations, the work of later Aristotelians such as Capreolus, Ferrara, Vitoria, Banez, Thomas de vio Cajetan, and Suarez is not generally appreciated by historians of philosophy . Their work is important, but it has not generally been made available so that its importance can be recognized. BOOK REVIEWS 147 John Deely's edition of John Poinsot's Treatiseon Signs makes available in an English translation a work which he argues convincingly has great relevance for the history of philosophy and significance for contemporary semiotics. Poinsot 0589-1644), better known to those with a Thomistic background as the famous seventeenth-century commentator on Aquinas,John of St. Thomas, O.P., is rated by Deely as a neglected figure in the history of semiotics. Thus while a contemporary of Hobbes, Galileo and Descartes , Poinsot in Spain was outside what was to become the mainstream in the development of European philosophy. John Locke in 1690, in a late part of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, writing about the "Division of the Sciences," called for a branch of science "to consider the nature of signs, the mind makes use of for the understanding of things or conveying its knowledge to others." This study Locke named Semiotika.Some fifty-nine years earlier, unknown to Locke, Poinsot had published just such a Tractatus de Signis as a special part of his Ars Logica, the beginning part of his course in Philosophy, the Cursus Philosophicus. Poinsot was also the author of a multi-volumed Cursus Theologicus in which he commented upon the Summa Theologiaeof his mentor and brother in religious life, Thomas Aquinas...

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