Magia e ragione: Una polemica sulle streghe in Italia intorno al 1750 (review)

98 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY treatment of the innateness of mathematical ideas, render the book eminently serviceable as a basis for seminar use--permitting a satisfying cumulative development through a range of subtopics .) Perhaps the richest part of this chapter is the discussion of the multiplicity of senses of innateness that may be applied to metaphysical and mathematical concepts. McRae identifies an apparent conflict between the conceptions of metaphysical ideas as innate by origin and innate by function (as indeed constitutive of the mind), but he indicates the consistency of the two views by attributing to Leibniz the belief that it is the exercise of the apperceptive faculty (in obtaining those ideas from reflection on the ego) that is constitutive of the mind, properly speaking. McRae finds a third sense of innateness for mathematical concepts and exploits Descartes 's views to express his reading of those of Leibniz. The halfway house that the mathematical has between the sensible and the intelligible is, effectively, the admixture of an "adventitious " idea of extension, generally conceived, with the understanding's derivative conception of the unlimited possibilities contained in the divisibility of extension. McRae concludes the volume with an attractive flourish. The essential question that Leibniz 's theory of expression faces is, Which "world" do monads express in their perception? On the one hand, the account seems to suggest that monads "with no situation with respect to each other" are reflected, whereas on the other hand, Leibniz seems to talk of the "aggregate" world -- a world, one presumes, of no more than ideal standing. Out of this tension and using a Kantian eyeglass McRae draws for Leibniz the inevitabilityof a special epistemological role for preestablished harmony in bringing about an otherwise puzzling congruence of sense and understanding--an ironical conclusion given the general subservience of Leibniz's theory of knowledge to his metaphysics. In the end, McRae turns the tables on Leibniz. JOHN M. NICHOLAS University of Western Ontario Luciano Parinetto. Magia e ragione: Una polemica sulle streghe in Italia intorno al 1750. Publicazioni della facolt/L di lettere e filosofia dell'universit/l di Milano, 72. Florence: La Nuova Italia Editrice, 1974. Pp. xiv + 353. L.6200. Girolamo Tartarotti of Rovereto (1706-61) published his Dei Congresso notturno deile laramie libri tre in 1749. The book quickly became the centerpiece of a lively and complex debate on the reality of witchcraft. The polemics provoked by the Congresso will interest not only students of the Italian Enlightenment but anyone who wishes to understand a significant step in the West's passage to modernity-the decline of the authority and respectability of beliefs in witchcraft, demonic power, magic, and other occultist notions. The origins of the Congresso, its contents, and the controversies surrounding it are the subjects of Parinetto's study, a revision of his tesi di iaurea under Mario Dal Pra. Parinetto's interests are not biographical , so we learn little of the man Tartarotti but much of his books and their fortunes. Magia e ragione is essentially an analysis of texts. Despite occasional nods to Marx and Engels, the book is a rather standard work of intellectual history, not an attempt at a thoroughgoing Marxist study of ideas about witchcraft. Ludovico Muratori, Bartolomeo Melchiori, and Giuseppi Gorini-Corio were Tartarotti's immediate predecesors in the witchcraft debate. The neo-Jansenist Gorini-Corio was anxious to demonstrate the powerlessness of the devil, especially since the coming of Christ, and thus to limit the range of phenomena attributable to supernatural agency. Melchiori was interested in the juridical status of the crime of witchcraft, and eventually he concluded that witchcraft cannot properly be considered a crime since claims about its supernatural character render it insusceptible to the empirical tests required to establish criminal charges. In writings subsequent to the Congresso, both Melchiori and Gorini-Corio came to be less cautious of dogmatic error and more critical of witchcraft. Muratori, however, had little chance to revise his views; BOOK REVIEWS 99 he died soon after the Congresso appeared. The great historian had done much to set witchcraft beliefs in their cultural and chronological contexts and to advance the use of historical criticism in the analysis of claims about...