Del Principio di Creazione o del Significato by Allessandro Cortese (review)

352 BOOK REVIEWS able statements, for instance, ascribing ontological personality to the soul and its origin to freedom, seeking the foundation of the author's inductive reasoning from the existence of the creature to the existence of God in the relationship of part and whole, confusing operation and power while unsuccessfully attempting to see the origin of the will in cognition, etc., seem to deserve a rethinking and more precise formulations. The young people, to whose demands and mentality this " Truth about Man " is said to be so well adapted, must certainly enjoy a life well protected from the influence of modern civilization. Our students are not so unexperienced and unproblematic that they could be satisfied with the philosophical answers of this ontology of the human spirit. The Catholic University of America Washington, D. C. MARIUS ScHNEIDER, 0. F. M. Del Principia di Crcazione o del Signifieato. By Au.ESSANDRO CoRTEs~;. Padova: Liviana Editrice, 1967. Pp. 168. Whether systematization of the presumed points of confluence between philosophy and theology is at all efficacious remains an issue that readily invites and engenders controversy. Alessandro Cortese's Del Principia di Creazione o Del Significato is best appraised as a work which evidences the fact that &uch issues are perhaps more plaguing among Italian and European philosophers than certain members of either constituency care to admit. Thus, it is important to understand how such systematization accommodates a new kind of philosophy, and that the endeavor to elucidate this philosophy is an explicitly proclaimed objective of Cortese. Concerned to emancipate philosophy from its apparent restricted dependency on the contingent empirical world, Cortese attends with some care to the formal dieresis between the conception of " experience " ( = becoming) and the conception of " logos " (= immutability) . Reminiscent of Hegel, Cortese explicates this new philosophy in terms of a traditional account of the relation between experience and logos, a synthesis which obliges one to read logos in terms of experience and experience in terms of logos. Entailed in the notion of synthesis, and in fact apparently indistinguishable from synthesis itself, is what Cortese calls '' The Principle of Creation." The Principle of Creation seems to be what might be called " a pregnant concept," that is, there are certain outward visible signs that something is going on inside, but a description of internal affairs is rather speculative and cannot be teased out as one might like, at least until birth, assuming BOOK REVIEWS 858 birth is really a possibility for such concepts. Nevertheless, Cortese speculates at great length concerning the Principle, and it is difficult to deny that his speculation is theologically interesting. In his attempt to structure the Principle of Creation as an Absolute Principle Cortese claims that relativity is untenable since it commits one to a position of ultimate non-determinability which prima-facie makes the epistemological enterprise incoherent and nugatory. It is not enough, however, to claim or even to demonstrate that the implications of a relativistic conceptual scheme are devastating for epistemology, and thus Cortese introduces the notion of " Protologia " as the absolutizing force of the Principle of Creation. Endeavoring to unpack the sense of Protologia, the formal dieresis between immutability and mutability is carefully given an account by appealing to a particular usage of " Christianity " and " future." Christianity presents itself as a mode of " absolute-act " in the sense that it proclaims that God has become man in Christ and affirms his Death and Resurrection. Future presents itself as pure potential which has significance only insofar as it is, in the Aristotelian sense, actualized and become " fact " and therefore manifested as on the spacial-temporal designation, " present." There is a constant turning over, Cortese claims, a movement or process in which the sense of future becomes fact and out of this fact derives the sense of a new future, a new potential, the feasibility of a new fact. Yet, the formulation itself appears to commit one to certain intractable problems of stability. That is to say, the characteristic instability of the future throws one back unmistakably to the instability of the present whose relation to the past exemplifies the philosophically tenuous nature of the historical process itself. Attempting to make the reader feel the force of this...