Book Notes

BOOK REVIEWS 369 BOOK NOTES John McGinley. Commentary on Parmenides. (No publisher listed.) 1976.2 vols. Pp. 48, 62. The secondary literature on Plato is voluminous. In general, Plato has been well served by it. Some secondary works are masterpieces (e.g., Cornford's commentaries); almost all are careful, workmanlike examples of scholarship that exhibit high standards of exposition and argument. This book is an exception . Even the title is misleading; the book is not about Parmenides' poem, but about Plato's Parmenides. The author's basic thesis is that the second part of the dialogue presents the heart of Plato's metaphysics and solves the problems of the first part. There is nothing novel about this view, though many Plato scholars would reject it. What distinguishes this book from others similar in thesis is the author's presentation. McGinley neither explains nor argues. His attempts at exegesis are at least as obscure as the text itself. The commentary overflows with sweeping, unsubstantiated generalizations. A large part of it consists of intemperate, tasteless, ad hominem remarks about many of the great philosophers of the Western intellectual tradition. Some passages are obscene. The author virtually ignores contemporary scholarship. His own scholarship is shoddy. He misidentitles characters in the dialogue and ignores grammatical distinctions in discussing Greek terms. Typographical errors are too numerous to mention. The "footnotes" in Volume I correlate to no references in the text. There is no table of contents, bibliography, or index. In short, this is a most inadequate effort by someone ill-equipped in scholarship and philosophical acumen for the task he undertook. Plato scholars could use a commentary on this dialogue that would incorporate the scholarship of the forty years since Cornford's Plato and Parmenides. This is not it. --WILLIAM J. PRIOR Robert W. Shahan and Francis J. Kovach, eds. Bonaventure and Aquinas: Enduring Philosophers. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 1976. Pp. x + 194. $9.95. According to the editors, this commemorative anthology, occasioned by the septemcentennial anniversary of the deaths of the doctor seraphicus and doctor angelicus in 1274, contains "a kind of treasuretrove of significant and refreshing reflections upon Bonaventure and Aquinas" (p. vi). The series of eight studies is fittingly introduced by E. Cousins's useful piece, "St. Bonaventure, St. Thomas, and the Movement of Thought in the 13th Century," which considers Bonaventure's and Thomas's philosophical-historical setting by means of the ideas of (i) knowledge through subjectivity, (ii) God as dynamic, and (iii) the Islamic problematic. The remaining essays examine, sometimes comparatively , various issues in the two thinkers: "The Moral Philosophy of St. Bonaventure" (John F. Quinn); "St. Bonaventure's Doctrine of Illumination: Reactions Medieval and Modern" (Ignatius Brady); "Aquinas: 'Darkness of Ignorance' in the Most Refined Notion of God" (Joseph Owens); "Virtue and Law in Aquinas: Some Modern Implications" (Robert J. Kreyche); "The Continuing Significance of St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas" (Ralph 1. Mclnerny; actually this essay is on their conceptions of knowing and believing); "Bonaventure and Aquinas on the Divine Being as Infinite" (Leo Sweeney); and "The Question of the Eternity of the World in St. Bonaventure and St. Thomas: A Critical Analysis" (Francis J. Kovach). These essays do not as a whole make for bedtime reading, but for the same reason they do provide a good resource for reflection and research on some specific topics in, as the editors say, "two of the most outstanding representatives of philosophia perennis" (p. vii). Seven of the articles were originally published in the July 1974 issue of the Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, itself a commemorative issue. The present volume makes these articles accessible to a larger audience. -ED. L. MILLER 370 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Adam Smith. Lectureson Jurisprudence. Edited by R. L. Meek, D. D. Raphael and P. G. Stem. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. $49.00. This is in many ways the most interesting volume of the excellent "Glasgow" edition of Smith's complete works, at present being produced by a team of leading Smith scholars to mark the bicentenary of the publication of The Wealth of Nations. This is so because it publishes for the first time since their discovery in the 1950s by the late Professor...