An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature by R. A. Kocourek (review)

BOOK REVIEWS It is naive as the question which J. B. S. Haldane posed some years ago as to whether Christ is anatomically present in the Eucharist. Finally, Augustine's argument to the existence of God from truth is by no means "a preview" of Anselm's ontological argument (p. 1~8), and even if it were, it was not Kant who exposed the inadequacy of Anselm (ibid.). In dealing with Spinoza, the author does not wish to label him as a pantheist. Yet he declares that" God is identical with all substance which is the basic concept of Spinoza" (p. ~11). It would have been useful if the author in his apparently wide range of scholarship had also consulted a dictionary to see what the word" pantheism" means. Truth would have profited if Dunham were as critical of Hume as he is of Augustine and Aristotle and if Kant had been presented as constructing such a doctrine of the speculative intellect as to make unreliable even its awareness of the categorical imperative in the practical intellect. With all of Kant's inadequacy, he certainly intended God to be more than "a regulative formula " (p. ~73) . Though presenting intellectual approaches to religion, this book would leave the reader just as skeptical as the meditations of Tillich and Brunner. It is not a reliable presentation of the subject-matter in many places, and the criticism is sloped to an agnostic viewpoint. In general, it will not recommend itself to those who want to know what others have taught, and it is not a worthwhile guide to readers who want to know what to think themselves. Loretto Heights College, Denver, Colorado. VINCENT EDWARD SMITH. An Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature. Compiled by R. A. KocouREK. St. Paul, Minn.: North Central Publishing Co, 1948. Pp. 176. A translation of St. Thomas Aquinas' De Principiis Naturae and of the first two Books of the Commentary on the Physics of Aristotle are the chief contents of this deceptively simple little book which should be a treasure for Thomists. It is very economically printed in view of class-room use. In addition it contains a brief introduction on the nature of scientific demonstration, plus several precious excerpts from Aristotle and St. Albert the Great on the utility of the study of natural science, an outline of the natural science of Aristotle and of Book I of the Physics. Its appearance is, one may hop~, significant. Hitherto, although the major theological works of St. Thomas have reached translation, there has BOOK REVIEWS been little translated of his philosophical works except the Opuscula. These, however, can only be footnotes to the fundamental expositions which continue to lie buried in the Commentaries on Aristotle. Since there is a certain. scarcity even of the Latin editions of these works, there is some excuse for the absence of translations of them also. But as the truth of St. Thomas becomes more and more evident, the absence of translations of his major works is going to become more and more ironical. In the meantime, we continue to see the anomaly of more and more philosophical works about St. Thomas, but few or no book of St. Thomas. The assumption is, no doubt, that the devotees of St. Thomas are perfectly familiar with his major teachings. How this can be, when even his major Latin editions are not widely circulated, is something of a mystery. Prof. Kocourek's translation of a substantial portion of one of those major works may now give us the occasion to reflect whether we do not often use the term 'Thomistic' with somewhat reckless abandon. For example, the subject matter of the philosophy of nature-usually called ' cosmology ' in deference to that staunch old "Thomist," Christian Wolff-is occasionally said to be inanimate mobile being. In Book I, Lesson I of Prof. Kocourek's translation, one will find St. Thomas being quite specific that the subject of the philosophy of nature is mobile being absolutely. The study of inanimate mobile being and animate mobile being, as the same Lesson reveals, comes under a later treatment of particular types of motion. Likewise there is the question of how...