Moral Truth and Moral Tradition: Essays in Honour of Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe ed. by Luke Gormally

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 493 Person of the Trinity. His arguments for refusing to identify Christ and the Word are thin. Lastly, Ward discusses the implications for religion of changes in thought since the Enlightenment. He makes a number of questionable generalizations about the implications of science for Christianity (e.g., "in a universe which is between ten and twenty thousand million light-years wide, human beings seem to shrink in virtual insignificance in the cosmic scheme of things" [285]), but gives a good defense of the reasonableness of believing on the basis of authority. The shortcomings of Religi.on and Revelati.on do not result from the actual positions that Ward espouses. A strong case can be made for these positions, hut when Ward agrees with the dominant liberal outlook he does not seem to feel a need to make such a case; it is more as if he simply goes with the flow. Queen's College Oxford, England JOHN LAMONT Moral Truth and Moral Tradition: Essays in Honour of Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe. Edited by LUKE GORMALLY. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1994. Pp. ix+ 246. $45.00 (cloth). How does one put together a traditional festschrift that honors the life's work of not just one philosopher, hut of two, especially when that cumulative life's work courses throughout a bevy of philosophical disciplines common in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition? This is the question that faced Luke Gormally as he planned a volume of studies to honor the philosophers Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe, both important figures in Englishspeaking philosophy in the second half of this century. The answer to the question was to produce a volume of studies written by "Catholic philosophers known to value Peter and Elizabeth's work" (4). But the proposed principle of unity goes beyond appreciation by the various authors of Geach's and Anscombe's work, for Geach and Anscomhe have been united together in fifty years of Catholic matrimony, a half century that has profoundly affected these two rigorous thinkers. Thus this volume of studies is an intellectual celebration of the couple's fifty-year marriage, and centers upon issues pertaining to ethics-largely because of the needs of the publisher to have some general category into which to place the book, even though ethical matters have not been main focus of either Geach's or Anscomhe's work. But then, when the two have written on ethics, their contributions have been significant and lasting; 494 BOOK REVIEWS one thinks of Geach's The Virtues (Cambridge, 1977); Anscombe's seminal article "Modern Moral Philosophy," Philosophy 33 (1958): 1-19; and her Intention (Oxford, 1957). The title of this book, Moral Truth and Moral Tradition, therefore serves as the widest possible embrace for the thirteen articles that comprise it. The editor has tried to provide some thematic unity among the contributions , clustering the thirteen papers into four categories: (1) Tradition and Truth; (2) Human Fulfillment, Divine Love, and Virtue; (3) Responsibility and Intention; and (4) Sex, Marriage, and Children. This, again, is a largely successful attempt to bring some order to the chaos that usually obtains in a festschrift, and at least has the merit of helping individuals and university libraries to categorize and catalogue the volume's contents for database searches, etc. But it is to be expected that, as also obtains in festschriften, the authors' contributions have no internal connection to one another, such that the ordering remains always ab extra. The volume commences with a graceful foreword by Cahal B. Daly, cardinal archbishop of Armagh, who learned from both Geach and Anscombe at philosophical retreats in the 1950s. His perspective is that of a once-teacher of philosophy, now a pastor of the Church, indebted to these two philosophers not only for their treatment of him as a young philosopher, but also for the contribution they have made to showing that "Catholic orthodoxy is philosophically respectable, as well as being a foundational element of integral European humanism" (ix). Luke Gormally's introduction to the volume sketches the careers of both Geach and Anscombe, the tenor of their interests, as well as his reasons for pursuing a volume of studies...