The Dissolution of the Medieval Outlook (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 83 dire forte, dove esse non solo dipendono dalla prima categoria, cio~ dalla sostanza, ma possono addirittura essere dedotte a partire dall'essere. Tale soluzione lascia trasparire palesi influssi scolastici (Brentano si rif'a del resto esplicitamente a Tommaso, cap. V, w che emergono con particolare evidenza nella tendenza a concepire l'essere come una specie di genere sommo, come termine ultimo a cui l'analogia degli enti si referisce e a partire dal quale gli altri modi categoriali possono essere dedotti. E' proprio questo l'aspetto della dissertazione di Brentano che colpirh maggiormente l'attenzione del giovane Martin Heidegger (ed ~ questo l'altro motivo per cui essa ~ famosa nella storia della filosofia). Come risulta dalla stessa ricostruzione di Heidegger della propria autobiografia intellettuale, pubblicata col titolo Mein Weg in die Phiinomenologie nel volume Zur Sache des Denkens (Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1969), la dissertazione di Brentano constituf per lui il primo incentivo a porsi, sia pure non ancora esplicitamente, la Seinsfrage che muoverh la sua speculazione successiva: infatti, cost suona il dilemma del giovane Heidegger, se l'essere si dice in molteplici modi, qual'~ il senso unitario che regge e sostiene quella plurivocit~? In questo contesto si pub affermare--~ome ho cercato di dimostrare pit)dettagliatamente nel mio volume Heidegger e Brentano . L' aristotelismo e il problem dell'univociM dell'essere neUaformazione filosofica del giovane Martin Heidegger (Padova: Cedam, 1976), al quale rinvio per ulteriori e pit) precisi ragguagli --che l'ontologia fondamentale heideggeriana nasca raccogliendo l'istanza di riconduzione del molteplice all'unith, presente gi~tnel tentativo di una deduzione sistematica delle categorie operato da Brentano. FRANCOVOLPI UniversiM di Padova Gordon Left. The Dissolution of the Medieval Outlook. New York: New York University Press, 1976. Pp. 154. $7.95. Gordon Left's most recent book serves notice on the scholarly word that he does not subscribe to that caricature of medieval thought so widely publicized by Gilson--one that identifies truth with the synthesis achieved by Thomas Aquinas and regards its fourteenth-century critics as dangerous and destructive skeptics. Nor does he see the fourteenth century as a great intellectual watershed of individualism,freedom of inquiry, or a new scientific attitude. Left emphasizes that it may take centuries for an established outlook to be overturned. At first, difficulties will be dealt with by making minor internal adjustments; and even as problems magnify and multiply, thinkers may lack the intellectual nerve to challenge the basic presuppositions of the prevailing outlook (pp. 146-47). Left believes that "the intellectual change that occurred in the fourteenth century 9 . . was in no sense a wholesale rejection of past assumptions or their transformation into a new postmedieval or quasi-modern outlook; but a rethinking within a common Christian framework of absolute presuppositions, which had been held for over a millennium and were to continue for another two and, in some cases, three hundred years" (p. 31). As in his earlier books, Left finds the fourteenth-century to be characterized by a new epistemology and an increased emphasis on divine freedom and the contingency of creation. These not only brought attacks on the thirteenth-century systems of Aquinas and Bonaventure but "the virtual abandonment" of any new attempts at system-buildingas well (p. 16). On the negative side, he thinks this led ultimately to a divorce between faith and reason and to a more fragmentary coverage of traditional topics in philosophy and theology. On the positive side, it allowed disciplines such as logic and physics to develop independently in fresh directions. In general, Left deplores the tendency of past histories to present fourteenth-century thought as monolithic and hopes to have demonstrated (in Chapters 2 to 4) the pluralism of the period (p. 145). While one may still quarrel with some of Left's generalizations, this new picture of fourteenth-century thought is much saner than the old. It is in 84 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the central chapters, 2 to 4, where Left attempts to document his theses by a close examination of fourteenth-century thinkers, that his project comes to grief. Paul Oskar Kristeller once said, "The history of philosophy is too important to be left to the historians." Behind this humorous, after...