Form and Being: Studies in Thomistic Metaphysics by Lawrence Dewan, O.P. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 323 quagmires of Scholasticism as reflective of more existential questions. The arguments to support this thesis which her book has put forth certainly whet our appetite to reread them all closely. WILLEMIEN OTTEN Utrecht University Utrecht, The Netherlands Form and Being: Studies in Thomistic Metaphysics. By LAWRENCE DEWAN, O.P. Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy 45. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006. Pp.265. $59.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8132-1461-0. It is a pleasure to spend time with Lawrence Dewan in the pages of this book. His mastery of Aquinas, eagerness to teach, zeal for philosophical truth, critical intellect, and gentle humor illumine every chapter. The book is a collection of thirteen of his essays on the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas published between 1980 and 2004. As the title indicates, they are centered on the notion of formal causality, a focus he sees as distinguishing him from such philosophers as Joseph Owens and Etienne Gilson, with their emphasis on the act of being (esse) (xii). The essays range from general discussions of the nature of metaphysics to treatments of specific topics such as causality, the immortality ofthe human soul, the notion of substance, the principle of individuation, and the real distinction between the formal cause and the act of existing (esse). They often have the flavor of disputed questions, with Dewan taking the part of the master and many of the great Thomistic thinkers of twentieth century serving as objectors, including Joseph Owens, Etienne Gilson, Ralph Mcinerny, Cornelio Fabro, Jacques Maritain, and James Weisheipl. Dewan's method always involves a close reading of Aquinas's texts combined with his own insights, including his emphasis on the importance of formal causality and on the "continuity of thought between Aristotle and Thomas, even as to the doctrine of the act of being" (xii). The first article considers the fundamental challenge ofmetaphysical thinking, an enterprise not for the faint of heart or intellect. Dewan's conviction of the continuity between Aristotle and Aquinas surfaces in his assertion that Aristotle's first cause is "one being which is both final cause and efficient cause of all [sic]" (8). This view is quite different from that of Gilson, who saw Aquinas's God as both a final and efficient cause, but Aristotle's first principle as a final cause only. Dewan provides a reference to support his assertion (Metaphys. 12.10.107Sb 341076a 4), but admits that "I am very far from thinking that what I say here jumps right out from this text" (8 n. 43). The essay concludes with an addendum on the 324 BOOK REVIEWS "Big Bang," in which Dewan rightly points out that the discussion of creation belongs not to physics but to metaphysics. The Big Bang cannot be identified scientifically with the moment of creation since "from a strictly physical perspective" some previous event is always "presupposed by any posited 'first event"' (10). It is "a principle needed for the existence of any experimental science" that "an event occurs if and only if the appropriate conditions obtain" (11). (It would be interesting to see how Dewan would apply this principle to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, where quantum events are understood as having no cause.) The task of metaphysics is examined in the second article. Its work is something like constructing a "spiritual trampoline or launching pad" to lead the philosopher from the consideration ofcontingent, sensible, material things to the highest cause or first principle (ix, 7). In establishing what it means to study being as being, Dewan reviews Aquinas's presentation of the four "modes" of being: "(1) negations and privations, (2) generations and corruptions and movements, (3) inhering accidents, and (4) substances" (17). The last are the special concern of metaphysics since "to be" is "used in the unqualified, we might say 'uninhibited,' 'full blast,' way when it is said with reference to the thing's very substantiality" (19). The third and fourth essays are concerned with the starting point of metaphysics, the knowledge of being. Noting the "undeserved abuse" that the notion of abstraction has suffered "in recent decades" (39) and responding to the views...