La filosofia de la ciencia según Santo Tomás by Juan José Sanguineti (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 333 Melden holds that one might be morally obliged not to keep one's promise in a given situation. Thus, one might be morally obliged to do moral damage (p. 21). This paradoxical implication makes one wonder about the status of " moral damage." In the final analysis, it is damage to the interests one has a right to pursue (p. 172) . A person has a human right to pursue his or her interests; special rights are based on this fundamental right. Nevertheless, a person does not necessarily have a right to pursue all of his or her interests; morally self-defeating interests-for example, the interests of terrorists-are excluded (pp. 76-78). These clarifications are not sufficient, however, to render the notion of moral damage an informative one. One who breaks a promise does moral damage, but this is to say only that one violates the right of the promisee. Saying this hardly contributes to explaining the right in question, and it certainly does not explain the normative status of the right. JOSEPH M. BOYLE, JR. College of St. Thomas St. Paul, Minnesota La filosofia de la ciencia segun Santo Tomas. By JuAN Jos:E SANGUINE~!. Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 1977. Coleccion Filosofica # 25. Pp. 371. One of the criteria which De Wulf laid down for the integrity of any new Scholasticism was that it should engage the modern sciences. Sanguineti seems to accept both this criterion and something like its converse. He wants to find in Aquinas's doctrine of scientia a restorative which will bring the modern sciences back to health. Sanguineti does have for his extended criterion more ample materials than were available to De Wulf. There is not only a half century's inquiry into scientific epistemology, but also-and most importantly-a much richer supply in the history of medieval philosophy and science with which to explore Aquinas's writings. Curiously, Sanguineti ignores this material. What he does instead, earnestly, is to square off a simplified Thomism against a simplistic rendering of natural science. Sanguineti's earnestness is evident from the first page. There he decries the contemporary confusion of scientific purpose which has yielded scepticism . He wants to counter with a treatment " of the foundations of method, the object and order of the sciences" (p. 14; the translations are mine). The foundation of science, as of all knowledge, Sanguineti finds in a fundamental grasp of being: " the cause of all intelligibility is the light of being (ser) as the act of every perfection " (p. 23). The "destructive possibil~ 334 BOOK REVIEWS ity " for turning away from being is the root of error; habitually chosen, it justifies itself with a doctrine of relativism or historicism which " concludes ... that everything is the same, that everything is equally true or false " (p. 44) . This becomes the positivistic claim that a science is merely a " body of propositions organized around an object of thought or of experience " (p. 47) . What Sangnineti finds most objectionable in this is both the loss of being as true and the covert transmission of an anti-metaphysical ideology under the guise of scientific neutrality (pp. 48-49, 70) . On the first count, he sees the renunciation of a search for real causes as patently Un-Thomistic and as not true of scientific practice (pp. 50-55) . On the second count, more crucially, such a stance leads to the corruption of what Sanguineti calls the " spontaneous metaphysic " by which we stand in relation to the proper object of all knowledge, which is being itself (p. 49) . The denial of the connection between science and being emerged in the modern age " owing to very complex circumstances, the common ground of which is the principle of immanence insofar as it is opposed to the recognition of being (ente)" (p. 74). This has meant reducing being to some one aspect of itself-to its quantifiability or some other relation which it has to man (pp. 91, 94, 97). Aquinas would offer instead the insistence that any science depends on its subjectwm, which it can never treat as a property, the formality of which it attempts to reach through various per se predications (pp...