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BOOK REVIEWS 157 Reading the Cosmos: Nature, Science, and Wisdom. Edited by GIUSEPPE BUTERA. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011. Pp. 280. $25.00 (paper). ISBN: 978-0-9827119-1-0. There is no doubt that the philosophy of nature is absolutely necessary for achieving a proper understanding of nature and its activities, and the contributors to this volume offer a very good defense of its worth and utility. All of the arguments present in this volume in favor of the validity of philosophy of nature are guided and inspired by the philosophical works and ideas of Jacques Maritain, who, as an ubiquitous figure, allows authors to use his words and to express their own. In a proper Scholastic fashion, the editor has ordered the chapters to follow a classic structure of knowledge: the first part deals with modern science and the philosophy of nature; the second part studies the relation that the philosophy of nature has with metaphysics; the third part discusses issues pertaining to what it means to be a human being; and the last part examines human action from the perspective of the philosophy of nature. The editor sets the tone of the volume in the introduction. After acknowledging the fruitfulness of Thomistic thought—in particular the realism guiding its engagement with nature, and the temptation of our age to suppose that there is nothing real to know (that there cannot be any objective knowledge of reality)—he presents an apologia pro opera in the form of a Pascalian wager: it is more rational to bet that we can know reality, that we can achieve objective and truthful knowledge, than to do otherwise, because this would mean to put our bet on nothing at all. This is the “natural faith” (x) in our intellectual capacities that characterizes the spirit of the chapters to follow. Michael Augros opens the discussion about the relationship between modern science and the philosophy of nature by asking why scientists seem to agree while philosophers tend to disagree on their conclusions. His answer is somewhat puzzling: given that philosophical principles are more certain than scientific statements, it is only expected that philosophical principles will awake more disagreement about themselves, while scientific statements, due to the amount of evidence required to hold them, would lead to general acceptance and consensus. The argument seems to suggest that the more difficult a statement is to prove, the less certain it will be, but the more consensus it will achieve. The following two chapters discuss the issue of Maritain’s understanding of modern science and, in particular, his position regarding the question of scientific realism. This question seems to be the most important one posed in the volume since it models the framework for all subsequent discussion. Examining Maritain’s understanding of Aquinas’s commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate in The Degrees of Knowledge, Jennifer Rosato argues that Maritain’s position is to be characterised as a “highly restricted scientific realism” (29) because it is not a mere holistic Duhemian position, nor is it a robust scientific realism relying on logical positivism. In Rosato’s interpretation of Maritain’s position, modern science attains some knowledge of natures by reaching the empirical phenomena (even though theoretical systematizations cannot be 158 BOOK REVIEWS determined by the essences of the beings studied by those phenomena). By contrast, Matthew S. Pugh asserts that Maritain’s position on scientific realism is something closer to a “qualified instrumentalism” (55). After a detailed presentation of scientific instrumentalism, Pugh stresses the fact that Maritain’s position was that modern science deals with empirical phenomena without reaching the essences of natural things, a step reserved for the philosophy of nature. Nevertheless, even though “mathematical physics cannot give us knowledge of essences or causes” (ibid.) because it rests upon infrascientific experience, it can never go too far away from reality. Thus Maritain’s instrumentalism requires the character of being “qualified.” This qualification means that natural sciences open the door to a different kind of knowledge of nature, that is, the philosophy of nature, which in Maritain’s view (as explained by Rosato and Pugh) is the only natural knowledge that can attain...

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