Hexaëmeron (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 427 Thomas Aquinas and William Ockham later, saw them as challenges. In another sense, philosophy is equivalent to the analysis of our most general or most central concepts. In this sense, philosophy is a kind of applied logic. Thus philosophical advances often proceed pari passu with advances in logic. But philosophy is always philosophy---of. Philosophy needs a subject matter: philosophy of science, philosophy of psychology, philosophy of art, etc. The characteristic subject matter for medieval philosophers was theology: that is, propositions about God or things in relation to God. As philosophers, medieval thinkers developed logic to use in reasoning about theological propositions. If this view of the age is taken, then all sorts of apparent oddities disappear. For example, Marenbon says, "In a work like the Periphyseon, dedicated to proposing a metaphysical, theological system, it is surprising to find, especially in the first book, so evident a preoccupation with logic" (65). This is no more surprising that finding a carpenter preoccupied with his tools. Etienne Gilson once said that the only thing that belongs in the history of philosophy is philosophy. The second major flaw in this book is that it is mostly history. Marenbon does not present enough medieval arguments with sufficient rigor or detail to satisfy contemporary standards of philosophy. He discusses the problem of tuture contingents without discussing scope ambiguities or the possibly different senses of modal terms. When discussing Peter Damian's view that God can restore the virginity of a fallen woman, Marenbon correctly says that Damian holds that "God could restore her maidenhead, but that he would not choose to do so unless it accorded with justice" (92). Marenbon, like Damian, ignores the relevantly logical sense in which God cannot restore virginity. These are just two of many examples that could be cited. In short, Marenbon's book is historically strong and philosophically weak. A. P. MARTINICH University of Texas at Austin Robert Grosseteste. Hexa~meron. Edited by Richard C. Dales and Servus Gieben. Auctores Britannici Medii Aevi, VI. London: Published for the British Academy by the Oxford University Press, 198~. Pp. xxix + 371. s With the nearly coincident publication by Dales and Gieben of Robert Grosseteste's Hexa~meron and the appearance in 198 ~ of Pietro Rossi's edition of Grosseteste's Commentary on the Posterior Analytics (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1981 ), the critical study of this great thirteenth-century English scholastic has received a recent boost. Both works are products of Grosseteste's mature years at Oxford, composed in the period just before he stopped teaching to become bishop of Lincoln. If the Commentary on the Posterior Analytics, written in its final form sometime around 1~28, should be taken as the summation of Grosseteste's ideas on the theoretical underpinnings of science, then the Hexa~meron represents the capstone of his thinking about our actual knowledge of the natural sciences. Composed between ~232 and ~235, the Hexa~meron summarizes the results of Grosseteste's scientific investigations since the beginning of his scholarly 428 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23:3 JULY 1985 career. Together, the two works show us in clear relief the wide interests and scholarly acumen of one of the pivotal figures in the formative years of medieval scholasticism. Yet the Hexa~meron provided Grosseteste with more than an opportunity to display his scientific learning. The genre of commentaries on the Biblical account of Creation had an ancient history in the Christian tradition. Grosseteste was acutely aware of this solemn past, and he recognized that in writing his own commentary he had to employ not only the curiosity of a philosopher but also the circumspection of a theologian. Although modern readers will most likely be more interested in what this book tells us about the natural science of the early thirteenth century, we must remember that it was also a work of theology. Grosseteste relied on the standard four levels of Biblical interpretation--literal, allegorical, moral, and anagogical--and although he gave little time to the last level in this work and more than its share to the first, he made sure to cover the allegorical and moral levels with care. Indeed, it would seem...