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338 BOOK REVIEWS Esegesi Tomistica. By P. CoRNELIO FABRO, C. S. S. Rome: Libreria Editrice della Pontificia Universita Lateranense, 1969. Pp. 478. This most recent publication by a renowned Italian Thomist is the first of two new volumes containing a collection of selected philosophical essays authored by Father Fabro over the past thirty-four years. As the author states in the forward, the collection of articles represented in this, the first volume, both antedates and synthesizes the analysis made in his now famous work, La nozione metafisica di partecipazione secondo S. Tomaso, which first appeared in 1939 and whose third edition appeared in 1963. The second volume which, to this reviewer's knowledge, has yet to appear, will consist of a further collection of previously published articles which principally contrast the Thomistic with the Hegelian-Heideggerian notions of Being and which, again according to the author, closely parallel the content of his book, Participation et causalite, which first appeared in 1960. The title chosen by the author, Esegesi Tomistica, is indeed apt, since all of the essays deal with some aspect or other of St. Thomas's philosophy. While the essays are of varying length and range over a rather wide spectrum of philosophical problems, the basic themes underlying these studies come through with unmistakeable clarity. For Fabro, Aquinas's distinction between essence and existence (esse), which permits him to view esse as the act of acts and the form of forms, and his concomitant teaching on analogy and participation by which the unconditioned " nature " of esse is philosophically revealed, provide the unique and essential core and methodology of Thomistic metaphysics. Since there are fourteen separate essays comprising this first volume, it will scarcely be feasible to attempt a detailed treatment of each one. Instead, an effort will be made to point out several interesting claims contained in the essays and then briefly to summarize the author's views regarding the " nature " of esse and transcendental participation. The first five chapters of the volume all appeared in various philosophical periodicals before 1940. These essays treat of four separate problems: (a) an analysis of how the principle of causality is known; (b) the Thomistic notion of contingency; (c) the distinction between "quod est" and" quo est"; (d) the path St. Thomas followed in developing his theory of esse as the act of essence. The last of these articles appeared in the Revue de Philosophie in 1938 and is the first of two essays appearing in the volume which are in French. In it the author attempts to reconstruct the path Aquinas followed in arriving at his conviction that the essence of finite being is not its own actuality. It is Fabro's conclusion, and one to which this reviewer is sympathetic, that Aquinas came to recognize the need for a real composition within the very heart of contingent being through the demands placed upon him by the otherwise insoluble problem BOOK REVIEWS 889 of participation. Fabro sees Aquinas's solution to this problem as charting a middle course between Platonism and Aristotelianism, Avicennianism and Averroism. At the same time Fabro feels that the Thomist position regarding essence and existence is in accord with the authentic spirit of Aristotelianism. The next two chapters, five and six, constitute one-third of the total book and are highly polemical in nature. Written in 1939 and 1941 and published in the Italian periodical, Divus Thomas, they present a detailed and rather personal critique of the French Jesuit, Pere Descoqs' interpretation of Aquinas's metaphysics of being. These pages will perhaps interest only those desirous of a first-hand account of one side of one of the Thomist-Suarezian basic encounters which took place during this period. Chapter VII consists of an article entitled " Logic and Metaphysics " which appeared in the Acta Pont. Acad. S. Thomae Aquinatis in 1946. Here the author attempts to clarify the important role logic plays in the development of Thomistic metaphysics, while at the same time defending Thomism from the charge of " exaggerated realism." The author contrasts Thomas's understanding of logic with that of Hegel, whose views he feels are firmly in line with those of Spinoza. For Fabro, authentic...

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