Thomistic Papers IV ed. by Leonard A. Kennedy (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 371 his contemporaries one can find implicare or implicatio used to mean contradiction without a complementary " contradictionem " or " contradictionis ." For example, cf. Suarez: Disputationes metaphysicae, disp. 30, sect. 17, nn. 12, 14, 17 (?), 19, and 20 (ed. Vives: Vol. 26, pp. 209-213); in the last of these places Suarez even uses the expression : "implicatio in adjecto." For the same usage, cf. G. Reeb, SJ., Thesaurus philosophorum seu distinctiones et axiomata philosophica, Brixinae, 1871 (original edition at Ingolstadt in 1629), pp. 306-307; "... implicare idem est, quod involvere et importare contradictionem; adeoque idem simul esse et non esse, esse tale et non esse tale: et sic dicimus, id quod implicat, nee divina virtute fieri posse." But once again, my demurral is very mild. Freddoso is much more familiar with Molina's style than I am, and his interpolation may well be on target. Summing up, I think Professor Freddoso's accurate and readable volume, which is completed by a moderately good bibliography, an index of names, and a subject index, is a fine addition to an ever growing body of medieval texts in translation. I would like to see it read in numerous graduate courses, as well as in upper-division undergraduate courses, populated by students eager to know something of the exquisitely deep and subtle thoughts of later Catholic scholastics such as Luis de Molina. JOHN P. DOYLE St. Louis University St. Louis, Missouri Thomistic Papers IV. Ed. by LEONARD A. KENNEDY. Houston: Center for Thomistic Studies, 1988. Pp. 207. Polemic against a polemic: that is the way Henry Veatch, in the opening essay, characterizes Thomistic Papers IV. And too often the volume has precisely that unwelcome flavor. However, tone aside, the seven contributors to the volume have two converging agendas. One is to show that Alvin Plantinga and Nicholas Wolterstor:ff, in their Faith and Rationality (Notre Dame, 1983), have badly misunderstood and misinterpreted Thomas Aquinas. The other is to show that these authors' project of Reformed epistemology is either inadequate or mistaken. The first theme recurs frequently in the volume. Several of the authors (Veatch, Henri DuLac, Thomas Russman) contend that Plantinga and Wolterstorff have misinterpreted Thomas's view of the relation of faith and reason, and that this has led to their (mistaken) charge that 37~ BOOK REVIEWS Thomas is an evidentialist (though to my knowledge Plantinga never claims and Wolterstorff expressly denies that Thomas is an evidentialist ) or a narrow foundationalist [one who holds that" all (non-foundational ) knowledge must be derivable from ... foundational knowledge by strictly logical operations" (189) ]. For Thomas, since faith is a way of knowing, it is rational to believe things on faith, and even though external evidence is relevant to showing that the sources of faith-knowledge (revelation) are reliable, the evidence is not used demonstratively. A second contention is that, though Thomas, like Plantinga and Wolterstorff, admits that there are self-evident truths, his concept of per se nota truths is much broader than mere analyticity (Veatch, Joseph Boyle). Per se nota truths are informative about the world and hence can provide a richer base for evidencing other truths. A third contention is that the Thomistic relation between basic beliefs and derived beliefs is not narrowly or strictly deductive, but inductive and often probabilistic (Veatch, Russman), often accompanied by a logically irreducible component (what Russman calls insight). Plantinga has (wrongly) taken Aristotle's Posterior Analytics as the sole model of scientia. The upshot of all this is that Plantinga might have better followed Wolterstorff's lead and left Thomas out of the foundationalist discussion , concentrating instead on Locke and the Enlightenment view of reason. This would not have altered Plantinga's thesis but might have given Thomists less occasion to take such a defensive posture. The second theme-that Plantinga and Wolterstorff's own project of Reformed epistemology is either inadequate or mistaken-is broached in several ways. Veatch and Boyle contend that both of Plantinga's two arguments against classical foundationalism founder. Plantinga's first argument-that foundationalism cannot account for much of what we hold it is reasonable to helieve-is unsuccessful for several reasons. For one thing, it fails to recognize that many per...