Aristotle’s Gradations of Being in “Metaphysics” E-Z by Joseph Owens, C.Ss.R. (review)

160 BOOK REVIEWS slave, son, or wife. Still, the advantages of the Lexicon far outweigh any quibbles one might have about this or that rendering. Deferrari's was the first general lexicon of Aquinas's works to appear in any language, but one may wonder, is it still relevant today given Rev. Roberto Busa's Index Thomisticus, now available online (corpusthomisticum.org)? An answer may be conjectured by comparing the merits of the two aids. The Index's extraordinary strength is also its weakness: its breathtaking thoroughness sometimes acts as a deterrent rather than an incentive to lexicological inquiry. Even if it were possible, does one really want to spend the remaining hours of one's life scrutinizing all 80,048 instances of a/ab/abs in the works of St. Thomas? How much more fruitful a starting point (should questions over Aquinas's employment of the preposition arise) is Deferrari's four simple definitions and handful of examples. Further, the Index Thomisticus does not provide contextual information. Its tagging of the name "Consentius" is exhaustive (unlike the Lexicon), but it does not tell its user that Consentius "was a lay theologian of the time of Augustine, who lived on certain islands, probably the Balearic. In Epistle 205 Augustine answers some questions raised by Consentius on the nature of the risen body" (Lexicon, 213b). By contrast, the Lexicon's weakness is also its strength, namely, that it is the creation of critical human minds rather than muscular computer software. While it cannot claim the Index's unparalleled breadth of information and instantaneousness of access to the primary texts, its English definitions of key terms are the result of thoughtful and synthetic ruminations on the meanings of passages. This makes the Lexicon an indispensable complement to the Index-and, for that matter, vice versa. In their original foreword, Deferarri and his collaborators expressed the hope of a "systematic continuation" oftheir work so that one day "a Lexicon of St. Thomas of Aquin complete for all his works will have appeared" (viii). That day has not yet dawned, but with Deferrari's Lexicon and Busa's Index together, we are significantly closer. Baylor University Waco, Texas MICHAEL P. FOLEY Aristotle's Gradations ofBeing in "Metaphysics" E-Z. By JOSEPH OWENS, C.Ss.R. Edited with a preface by LLOYD P. GERSON, South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine's Press, 2007. Pp. 256. $40.00 (cloth). ISBN978-1-58731-0287 . This is the last book of the eminent scholar of Aristotelian and Thomistic metaphysics, Joseph Owens, who died in 2005. The manuscript of the book was BOOK REVIEWS 161 found among his papers by his colleagues and religious brothers in the late 1990s, when he ceased scholarly work. His academic colleagues knew that he was writing this book. The posthumous editing was slight, because the book was largely finished. Proof-reading of the published version was, unfortunately, also slight. There are a few glaring typographical errors and omissions in publication information of cited scholarship. Placed at the beginning of the book is a very valuable bibliography of Owens's work that includes reviews of his books. As Lloyd Gerson indicates in his preface, the book would have included more references to contemporary secondary material on Aristotle's Metaphysics had Fr. Owens been able to complete it. It is clear that Owens's account here of Aristotle's metaphysics is in dialogue with ongoing research of the 1980s and 1990s, and there are references to Miles Burnyeat, Mary Louise Gill, and others. The only noticeable sign of the work being unfinished is an occasional repetitiveness in the text over the course of five or ten pages, something that would have been eliminated by closer editing done by the author himself. Some sentences are repeated verbatim or nearly so, and a few summaries or conclusions are repeated two or three times when once would do. As the book comes to us, however, its structure is well laid out initially and executed with the clarity of a master of Aristotelian metaphysics. Owens begins with the disparity between Metaphysics books Epsilon and Zeta in their approaches to gradations of being. Book Epsilon begins with the subject matters of...