Work, Society and Culture by Yves R. Simon (review)

186 BOOK REVIEWS The book concludes with several chapters on Augustine's completion of the Christian synthesis. While much of what the author writes has been said before, he puts it together very neatly and clearly, adding his own interesting reflections. His analyses of philosophical and religious thought are, with very few exceptions, penetrating and thorough, and they are admirably presented to the reader. Some of his ideas may be controversial and some of his conclusions debatable, but they merit our attention. The Catholic University of America Washington, D. C. GEORGE T. DENNIS, s.J. Work, Society and Culture. By YVEs R. SIMON. Edited by Vukan Kuic. New York: Fordham University Press, 1971. Pp. ~50. (Appendix Simon Bibliography). $7.50. Yves Simon was at once a precisionist and a comprehensive and depth student in philosophy, a profound Catholic in his life and thought, and among American Catholics by far the most creative philosopher. He knew how to work and enjoyed it. Two events will indicate his determination to work. When at the age of fifty-eight he was terminally sick, he insisted on being carried onto the stage to deliver from a stretcher a promised lecture on "Jacques Maritain: The Growth of a Christian Philosopher," and when I once asked this sick man whether he was working, he replied: " Good Lord, man, if I wasn't, I'd be dead." In the present study, the sixth posthumous book, he remarks (p. 41) that " if philosophers are good for anything, it should be for analyzing and clarifying concepts which, no matter how vague, convey something of great significance." For example, the concept of joy, love, hope, and of course the concept of " work " which is a constant phenomenon in the life of persons and society. Is work merely manual labor and limited to servants or even to slaves? Are philosophers, research teams, bankers, poets, and prophets to be considered among the world's workers? In his earliest essays on "work" (Trois let;ons sur le travail, 1938), Simon was over influenced by a Grecian and long-perduring aristocratic idea of work, the idea that the manual and servant worker was not merely the prototype of the one doing work but the only one. In the present treatise Simon repeatedly retracts that narrow view (pp. 4, 17, 55-58) and notes that it was criticized by many friends. Not only his habits of thorough and comprehensive study but his charism of seeing that philosophy takes up problems as they are here and now given drive him to consider " work " in the context of modem industrial work BOOK REVIEWS 187 and as linked with the total society and culture, and bring him to consider work, society, and culture in the invaluable light thrown on these realities and concepts by giants who have struggled with them, e. g., Fourier, Comte, Marx, Durkheim and Veblen. He keeps making one well-ordered thought of the problems and of fragmentary solutions in moderns and ancients. I hope Vukan Kuic and others go on editing these important studies and that the editors and Mrs. Simon and son Anthony are working on a biography. An extensive Yves Simon bibliography by Anthony 0. Simon is appended to the present volume. University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana LEO R. WARD Santiago Ramirez O.P., Su Vida Su Obra. By VICENTE MARRERO. Madrid: Consejo Superior de lnvestigationes Cientificas, 1971. Pp. 334. $3.50. Very few Americans, even among those who are familiar with the current philosophical and theological periodicals, know Father Santiago Ramirez's writings. This phenomenon is even more remarkable when one considers the world popularity attained by some of the theologians of the recent Council, such as Congar, Raimer, Kling, and others. Father Ramirez, however , as history will tell, is superior to all of them. As the best theologian of the twentieth century and the foremost commentator on St. Thomas, he surpasses Cajetan, John of St. Thomas, Bafiez, Vitoria, etc., both in quality and in quantity. The theological stature of Father Ramirez, however, is not unknown in Europe. He was professor at the Angelicum in Rome for three years and at the University of Fribourg for twenty-five. The...