Nature and Scientific Method ed. by Daniel O. Dahlstrom (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 351 raise questions for his thesis. Casey seems to want to suggest that our moral responses that do not fit well with the tradition of the virtues are simply the last remnants of a particular religion. But his own men· tion of the Stoics as one important source for the ' Christian ' tradition suggests that the commitments that Casey traces to Christianity-for example, to some version of equality-may be more deeply rooted in the wider Western culture than he allows. And on the other hand, it is not obvious that everything that he associates with ' pagan ' virtues is necessarily incompatible with Christianity; after all, Aquinas, in addition to his extensive appropriation of the framework of the cardinal virtues, also argues that self-love is the first injunction of charity, after love of God (Summa theologiae 11-11, 26, 4). Even so, Casey's work raises important questions for contemporary moral theory. He succeeds in challenging too easy an appropriation of the tradition of the virtues by Christian ethics, and his challenge must he answered by anyone who would attempt to defend a contemporary Christian theory of the virtues. Moreover, by calling attention to the complexity and inner tensions that characterize our moral reflection, Casey reminds us that the category of ' the moral ' is not as straightforward as we sometimes take it to be. His book deserves to be widely read and carefully debated. University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana JEAN PORTER Nature and Scientific Method. Edited By DANIEL 0. DAHLSTROM. Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, vol. 22. Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1991. Pp. 328. $48.95. William A. Wallace is a careful scholar and clear teacher of the history and philosophy of science. This volume is dedicated to him; the sixteen contributors were chosen because they have all been influenced by him, directly or indirectly. A comprehensive chronological list of Father Wallace's works, provided at the end of the book, reveals his two primary interests: contemporary issues in the philosophy of science and studies in the history of science. To reflect this, the first part of this book consists of seven essays on various contemporary issues in the philosophy of science; the second part is nine historical studies. This review will address each part in turn. Part I, "Contemporary Issues," suffers from a notable lack of unity. 352 BOOK REVIEWS Some authors directly and appropriately acknowledge the influence or inspiration of Wallace upon their contributions, the sole factor that might provide cohesion to the book as a whole. Other contributions are surprisingly devoid of any explicit connection to Wallace, save a tangential one. Wallace has provided the scholarly community with consistent and well-grounded work in the philosophy of science from a realist perspective . This realist position is shared by Rom Harre, the author of the opening essay, "Causality and Reality." Harre argues that the classical concept of causality, at least in part, survives as an ineliminable element of contemporary physics. To accomplish this, Harre distin· guishes weak from strong causality, the former as the expression of a causal mechanism, the latter as that connection stimulated by an event. This distinction is central to his Varieties of Realism. Realism is of two kinds: that which can be defined in terms of truth and falsity, and that which he terms " policy realism," which remains open to unlimited revisability of concepts, while preserving ontological categories. Having argued for these distinctions, Harre uses quantum field theory in his pursuit of a post-Humean conception of causality that transcends strict event ontology. Laudable as this pursuit may be, I wonder whether it can be achieved without reference to any conception of nature (s), a concept lamentably absent in Harre's more recent work. The realist theme is admirably pursued in Robert Sokolowski's " Explaining ." Sokolowski argues for the irreducibility of names and explanations and their obvious correlates, things and causes. Form is in things; natural kinds exist; "ones" come in a splended variety reflecting the diversity of forms. Such unpopular claims are expertly defended in this essay, one of the best contributions in the book. Sokolowski also paints a fine picture of the mind...