El conocimiento de Dios en Descartes (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 475 albeit for reasons ultimately pastoral, an approach to religion both intellectualist and naturalistic . In the course of the commentary Ficino touches on many of the constants of Renaissance Neoplatonism: the existence of the Ideas, the supremacy of the One and the Good, Beauty as the splendor of the Supreme Good, the chain of being, divine illumination. His fairly daunting treatment of dialectic will be of special interest to historians of philosophical method in the Renaissance. Allen offers us Ficino's work in a rich setting of scholarship. An introduction treats of its historical genesis, provenance, composition, and date, as well as of its motivation and chief ideas. His extended analysis of the intellect-will controversy builds upon and modifies earlier discussions of the same subject in Ficino by Paul Oskar Kristeller, a scholar whose contribution to the present volume the editor generously acknowledges. The text is based on the definitive third version printed in the Commentaria in Platonem, which Ficino saw through the press in 1496. A critical apparatus collates this text with the three extant manuscripts. Facing the Latin is a lucid and remarkably readable English translation, deliberately sprinkled with contracted forms to remind us of the work's origin in public lectures. One can, if pressed, find bones to pick with any translator. Thus, we might quarrel with the rendering of God's foecunditas by "creativity" (pp. 292, 294) in contexts that, though they do not deny the notion of creatio ex nihilo, do not make a point of affirming it. But in the presence of such a sound and useful English version, such carping is unnecessary if not ungrateful. The volume ends in a flurry of appendices, a bibliography, an index, and valuable notes on the ancient, patristic, and medieval sources of Ficino's text. A/together, scholars are indebted to Professor Allen, to the Center for Medieval and Rennaissance Studies under whose auspices the work is published, and to the University of California Press for disclosing this rich and all but unknown country in the realm of Ficino's thought. JAMESA. DEVEREUX,S. J. University of North Carolina El conocimiento de Dios en Descartes. By Jesfls Garcia L6pez. Publicaciones de la Facultad de Filosofia y Letras de la Universidad de Navarra, Coleccion Filosofica, no. 22. (Pamplona : Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 1976. Pp. 147) As the author tells us in his preliminary notes, this book is a reprint, with only minimal alterations, of a portion of an earlier work now out of print. Published in 1955, El conocimiento natural de Dios: Un estudio a traves de Descartes y Santo Thomas aimed at bringing a Thomistic critique to bear upon the main proofs advanced by Descartes for the existence of God. Since the section in that book dealing with St. Thomas has been available during recent years under the title Nuestra sabidurfa racional de Dios (Madrid, 1950), it seemed to Garcia L6pez worthwhile to make available once again this section of his larger work. This book is nicely done. It represents a significant contribution to an understanding of Descartes's proofs for the existence of God, and (perhaps more importantly) to an understanding of the ontological and epistemological presuppositions that undergird them. The book is especially important for those who come to Descartes from the direction of Anglo-American scholarship. There has always been a temptation within this tradition to view Descartes's work through the spectacles given us by Hobbes, Locke, and others who have advanced atomistic epistemologies and nominalistic ontologies. Read in this manner, Descartes appears on the scene sui generis, having effectively "bracketed" the scholastic milieu of which he might otherwise have been a part. Certainly there is an element of truth in this view: where Descartes is viewed as the father of modern idealism he does seem to have achieved such a "bracketing." It has largely been left to those such as Maritain, Gilson, and Garcia L6pez, however, to provide the needed counterbalance to this view. Throughout this book, for example, Garcia 476 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY L6pez shows how the Cartesian epistemology and ontology represent subtle but significant transformations of the then prevailing scholastic views. His discussion of the three characteristics...