Ancient and Medieval Memories (review)

u96 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32:2 APRIL t994 will prove the existence of derivative entities from their definitions and the existence claims. As McKirahan realizes, this entails that Aristotle recognized a modernsounding distinction between basic and derived entities analogous to that between basic and derived truths. It also requires some fancy logical footwork. If the definition of a derived entity is used to prove its existence, then the definition is logically prior to the existence claim: thus, we would be able to know something's definition without knowing that it exists, a view Aristotle often seems to deny. McKirahan's response is not one I think Aristotle could easily accept: before the demonstration, the definition of the derived entity merely says what a word signifies, but afterwards "the significance of the word becomes the essence of the thing" (194) . Chapter XVII tries to determine in exactly what sense the premises of a demonstration can give the cause or explanation of its conclusion. McKirahan argues that the principles must be both ratio essendi and ratio cognoscendi: to have scientific knowledge that p, I must know the reason why p is true, and I must have this knowledge in virtue of knowing the reason why. Grasping a demonstration in the way that an "expert" grasps it is just what constitutes scientific knowledge. All this is, in my opinion, exactly right, as is McKirahan's discussion of the ways in which an Aristotelian ettCgctdiffers from a Humean cause or a covering-law explanation. These lead him to various complaints (some old and some new) against 'cause' and 'explanation' as translations of ctt~ct. But McKirahan's alternative translation 'grounds' is hardly an improvement: by my lights, 'grounds' in ordinary English can only be used of decisions or actions of an agent. The final chapter (XVIII) develops an account of the cognition of indemonstrable principles, drawing primarily on the notoriously intractable An. Post. II. 19- McKirahan takes a moderate "empiricist" line and develops a credible account of how perception and induction might lead us to comprehend first principles (though I found the absence of any discussion of Modrak's views disappointing). His suggestions about the role dialectic might play in finding the principles are intriguing but stand in need of further development. On the whole, this excellent chapter is one of the most sensible discussions of II. ]9 in existence. The book is excellently produced and virtually free of errors--astonishingly so, by recent standards (though the order of terms in diagrams of demonstrations is sometimes reversed, e.g., 21o, 299 n. i3). But shame on publishers who, in this day of computers, print footnotes at the back of the book, and on editors who allow footnotes containing nothing but a three-word citation! ROBIN SMITH Kansas State University Janet Coleman. Ancient and Medieval Memories. New York: Cambridge University Press. 199~. Pp. xx + 646. Cloth, $85.oo. Memory is mostly an afterthought for philosophers today. Its primordial status for the major tradition traced in the present volume is clearest in Augustine, whose construal BOOK REVIEWS 297 of the human mind as the image of God links memory with the Creator/first person of the Christian Trinity, with understanding and will completing the model as analogues of eternal Word and Spirit. The "spacious palaces" of Augustinian memory house both images from one's own life and intelligible realities not derivable from mundane sources. This Christian Platonic view of memory occupies much of the "series of interrelated studies" in which Janet Coleman attempts "to give an account of the range of views on memory and its uses during the Middle Ages." The main contrasting view comes from Aristotle, who places memory on a level with sensation and attributes it to some of the other animals besides us. Aristotelians do, however, make reminiscence--logical searching for memories--a distinctively human capacity, and, as Coleman makes especially clear in her exposition of Aquinas, in this tradition our understanding of what we sense or remember can be sharply differentiated from the sensing or remembering. So far, then, there is no understanding of the past aspast in either tradition. For the Platonists there is understanding of the...