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650 BOOK REVIEWS The Specification ofHuman Actions in St. Thomas Aquinas. By JOSEPH PILSNER. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 273. £55.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-19-928605-1. In Aquinas's ethics, the moral character of an action depends above all on what kind of action it is. "Specific kinds of human actions must be pursued to achieve certain specific ends in the moral life" (29). This fundamental characteristic of Aquinas's teaching distinguishes his ethics from any consequentialist or utilitarian ethics and from an ethics of intention: if the action is evil in kind, it does not become good if it has good consequences or if it is done with a good intention. Aquinas's account of the specification of human, that is, moral actions is one of the most ingenious and difficult aspects of his moral writings. The locus classicus, questions 18-21 of the Prima Secundae, frequently leaves the reader puzzled. The difficulty of interpretation is due to Aquinas's nonuniform terminology, his elliptical writing style, and his parsimonious use of examples. The best way to achieve clarity is to read this key text in the context of the entire corpus ofAquinas's writings, above all the Secunda Secundae, where he discusses his moral principles in connection with concrete situations or specific virtues and vices. Just this sort of study is what Pilsner has provided: his discussions are never kept within the narrow bounds of a specific text, but take all of Aquinas's works into account. Pilsner intends to show that Aquinas's account of specification, despite contrary appearances, is fundamentally coherent (6). Before summarizing parts of this fine book, I will briefly mention a few points of minor criticism. Regretfully, Pilsner does not pay sufficient attention to previous medieval debates, in light of which Aquinas's personal achievement would appear more clearly. A further complaint regards a certain lack of attention to using the latest critical text. The Latin texts Pilsner uses are taken from Roberto Busa's CD-ROM, which provides the best texts that were available during the course of the creation of this database, yet are not always the best texts today. Also, when citingAristotle's Ethica Nicomachea in Latin translation, Pilsner does not recur to the critical editions by Rene Gauthier, but simply cites it from a nineteenth-century edition and refers to it as "old Latin translation" (179, 225). This label obscures the fact that Aquinas used not only the complete translation by Robert Grosseteste, but also the earlier, partial translations called Ethica vetus and Ethica nova. These minor issues do not diminish the value of Pilsner's book. The study is divided into ten chapters, including an introduction and a conclusion. In addition to the introduction, chapters 2 and 3 have introductory value, providing a summary of Aquinas's ethics (ch. 2) and discussing specification generally in natural things and natural motions (ch. 3). Six chapters examine the five specifying factors of human actions: end, object, matter, circumstance, motive (chs. 4-9). In what follows I will concentrate on chapters 4-6 and 9, where Pilsner discusses the most important specifying factors: end, object, and matter. BOOK REVIEWS 651 What Aquinas refers to as end (finis) is either "what one wants" or "why one wants something." Only when a thing is willed for its own sake do these two coincide. Otherwise, proximate and remote end are distinct. If I want money to buy a house, then "what I want" are both the house and money, and the remote end, the house, is "why I want" the proximate end, money. Pilsner explores the relationship between proximate and remote end in chapter 9. In chapter 4, Pilsner examines the role of the end apart from the distinction of proximate and remote end. The end is what constitutes a human action: if one does not pursue an end, one does not act at all (51). An analogy illustrates the fundamental specifying role of the end for human action: what the substantial form is with regard to a corporeal substance, giving it its being and determining its species, is what the end is to a human action (48-51; cf. 30...

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