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BOOK REVIEWS 467 presentation). Feingold's work is an interesting reflection ofthis background: the theological issue being touched upon is treated by recourse to a highly ambitious synthesis of Scholastic and historical methodologies. Interestingly, Feingold has produced what is simultaneously an historical ressourcement of the Thomist Scholastic commentary tradition and a veritable contemporary exercise of the Scholastic speculation which that tradition embodies. Whatever the imperfections of his work, it represents a highly respectable achievement. Dominican House ofStudies Washington, D.C. THOMAS JOSEPH WHITE, 0.P. In Defense of Common Sense: Lorenzo Valla's Humanist Critique of Scholastic Philosophy. By LODINAUTA. ITatti Studies in Italian Renaissance History. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2009. Pp. 401 +xiii. $39.95 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-674-03269-1. From its inception with Georg Voigt's Die Wiederbelebung des klassischen Alterthums oder, das erste jahrhundert des Humanismus (1859) and Jacob Burckhardt's Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860), the modern study of Italian humanism has labored under a curious burden. Straining to find men who were emancipated from traditional religious authorities, the first students of the Italian Renaissance made their subjects into good liberal Protestants. Although scholars as diverse as Giuseppe Toffanin, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Henri de Lubac, and Edgar Wind have repeatedly challenged such prejudices since the 1950s, historians of philosophy have largely ignored their valiant efforts to return the humanists to their native soil. Such historians, like Wilhelm Dilthey and Ernst Cassirer before them, still imagine the chief moral values of the Renaissance to be individualism and secularism. Lodi Nauta's study of Lorenzo Valla's The Pruning ofDialectic and Philosophy (Repastinatio dialectice et philosophie) is a wonderful response to this ongoing prejudice about the philosophical significance of Italian humanism. Drawing upon but surpassing the previous studies of Gianni Zippe!, Charles Trinkaus, Riccardo Fubini, and Scott Blanchard, In Defense of Common Sense is a welcome contribution to our understanding of medieval, Renaissance, and modern philosophy alike. This is no mean feat. Lorenzo Valla (1406-57), perhaps best known as the man who showed the Donation of Constantine to be a forgery, is a bit of a 468 BOOK REVIEWS chameleon, having been linked to a motley crew of philosophers including Francis Bacon, Rene Descartes, David Hume, Martin Heidegger, and the late anti-essentialist Wittgenstein. One need not ponder long to understand why historians of philosophy have placed Valla in such mixed company: they have defined the humanist less by his arguments and more by their shared prejudice against the alleged "essentialism" of Scholasticism. Nauta's work is a healthy corrective to this trend. As he drily remarks, "one must be familiar with the scholastic tradition to evaluate Valla's program, and this understandably is not the forte ofNeo-Latinists and literary historians" (3). Nauta does note, however, that any study of Lorenzo Valla "will likely be viewed with suspicion by not a few of my colleagues in medieval philosophy" (ix). Such scholars-as myself for example-might see Valla's attempted demolition ofAristotelian metaphysics as misguided at best; indeed, they might wish that such a book not be published at all. At the same time, Nauta imagines that many of his colleagues in the field of Renaissance humanism might be similarly suspicious, but for very different reasons. Enamored of the supposed modernity of the Renaissance humanists, they might very well be angered by a book that places Valla "on the philosophical rack"-as Nauta often does. Steering a fine course between these two extremes, In Defense ofCommon Sense steadfastly refuses to divorce Valla from his historical context and place him "on the road of modern rationalist empiricism" (144). In doing so, it subjects Valla to a strong but fair criticism, a task that has often been ignored by humanists who possess only a nodding acquaintance with Scholasticism. Nauta's study is composed of eight chapters in three parts. The first part introduces the reader to Valla's attack on Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysics in three chapters that explore Valla's sometimes enlightening, but often frustrating, criticisms of the Tree of Porphyry, the Scholastic doctrine of transcendental terms, and the Aristotelian categories. The second part introduces Valla's anthropology, with chapters devoted...

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