Heirs and Ancestors ed. by John K. Ryan (review)

156 BOOK REVIEWS tence to be taken literally or figuratively. This is an especially crucial question for religious language. When someone I encounter on the street says" Jesus lives!", what am I to make of it? I really have to know what sense he is giving to " live." And, of course, I can ask him. The intentions of the Gospel writers are vastly more difficult to establish. (3) Even given knowledge of the meaning of the sentence, it happens that a particular utterance can be used to perform more than one illocutionary act at a time. Someone who says" Jesus is Lord" can be asserting something about Jesus a;nd announcing his personal allegiance to Christianity and "... commending a particular way of seeing the world. . .." Only the speaker could confirm which acts were being performed. Besides these problems peculiar to illocutionary interpretation, van Buren has a difficulty that arises for any investigator of the use of religious terms: if use is to be the datum, whose use is the correct use? His answer in The Edge8 of Language is that of"... educated Christians in the West in this last third of the twentieth century." (p. 1) In so delineating his user-group he is in obvious danger of " fixing " the result of his enquiry. Perhaps the motive behind the book is exposed in this passage: "... if 'God' is conceived of as a word uttered when one wants desperately to say the most that is possible . . . then the categories of coherence employed to attack the theist simply do not apply...." (p. 133) " God," apparently, is not a concept in the center ground of language ". . , in which concepts can be used coherently and incoherently ... ," (p. 141) and as such is safe from philosophical attack. The project has been one of securing a safe place for Christian discourse. But van Buren does not seem to notice that a " concept " for which there is no contrast between its coherent and incoherent uses is not a concept at all! St. Thomas Fredericton, New Bruwwick Canada WAYNE GRENNAN Heir8 and Ancegtor8. Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy. Volume Six. Edited by JoHN K. RYAN. Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1973. Pp. Q91. $15.00. These ten essays range from Plotinus through Augustine, to Hume, Sartre, and Frankl. The editor himself contributes a study of Vital de Blois' Latin comedy Gita. Adding to this richness, B. M. Bonansea traces the history of the ontological argument at the 'hands of both proponents and opponents until the present day in a sixty-page survey and critique. This width of vision is offset by sharply focused studies of Hume's notion BOOK REVIEWS 157 of personal identity by John Driscoll and of interiority in Plotinus by John Kelly. The editor does not indicate any unifying theme beyond that suggested in the title of this sixth volume in the series: each generation of thinkers is simultaneously heir and ancestor to other ages. Although he does not suggest a nomenclature for our present generation of humanistic philosophers , if this collection is typical we could describe it as concerned with the valuing self, and this in a sense crossing the lines of ethics and epistemology . In his exploration of the nature of philosophy in Ortega, Felix Alluntis reveals his own concern as much as Ortega's in observing: "... a man philosophizes when he has a living past and in view of a critical situation he has reached." (p. 71) Alluntis claims that Aquinas too admitted this but could not bring himself existentially to the moment of doubt. Perhaps this cohesiveness in the atmosphere of medieval consciousness is the very factor that motivates our present generation of thinkers to look back towards thinkers who do proceed from the underminding moment, some intuition of dissolution in the moment of need. In a sketch of Frankl's stress upon the uniqueness of the human spirit, M. G. Schneider says as much: Frankl's anthropology is not solely the product of his professional work; it is " a personal conviction, deeply felt and unceasingly defended as the most decisive truth of our age." (p. 61) According to Thomas Flynn, Sartre's almost un-noticed...