Philosophical Debates on Seeing God in Medieval Kalām Theology

Speculum animae: Richard Rufus on Perception and Cognition Matthew Etchemendy (bio) and Rega Wood (bio) “Garrulus sum et loquax et expedire nescio. Diu te tenui in istis, sed de cetero procedam.” These are the words of Richard Rufus of Cornwall, a thirteenth-century Scholastic and lecturer at the Universities of Paris and Oxford. Rufus is apologizing to his readers: “I am garrulous and loquacious, and I don’t know how to be efficient. I have detained you with these things a long while, but let me now proceed to another topic.” This apology introduces the third part of the Speculum animae, a preliminary modern edition of which we publish here. In this short treatise, Rufus presents a unique Aristotelian theory of perception, describes what is and is not intelligible, and finally proves to his own satisfaction the immortality of the rational soul. To us this would hardly seem the place to apologize for being long-winded; indeed, we might wonder how Rufus could accomplish such an ambitious task in such a short treatise. We would certainly not accuse him of excessive verbosity. But Rufus was a man of exceptional humility, who once referred to himself as the least of the lesser (Franciscan) thinkers of his time.1 Despite Rufus’s humility, he was no minor figure in the development of Scholastic philosophy. A teacher at the Universities of Paris and Oxford (fl. 1231–1256 A.D.),2 he is the author of the earliest known, surviving lectures on several of Aristotle’s major texts, including the Metaphysics, the Physics, [End Page 53] De generatione et corruptione, and De anima3 (the last of which will be discussed at length in this introduction). In fact, Rufus was one of the very first lecturers to teach the libri naturales at Paris after a ban on such instruction was effectively lifted in 1231 A.D. His works were influential not only among his contemporaries, but also among later authors, particularly John Duns Scotus. Roger Bacon, though a harsh critic of Rufus, acknowledged Rufus’s influence and fame decades after his death, albeit among what Bacon termed the “vulgar multitude.”4 The Speculum animae is one of Rufus’s later works. He begins the treatise by posing the following question: “In what way is the soul all things?” This refers, of course, to a familiar doctrine Aristotle establishes in the De anima—that the soul is, in some way, all things (430b20–21)—and Rufus is here seeking to clarify it. But this is, in fact, only the first of five questions addressed in the Speculum. The five questions Rufus posits and answers in this treatise are, in order: 1. In what manner is the soul all things? 2. In what manner do a sensible and the sense, or an intelligible and the possible intellect, become one? [End Page 54] 3. What is predicated and of what is it predicated? 4. What is intelligible? 5. What is the cause of the immortality of the soul? In this short work, therefore, Rufus addresses apparently diverse topics including perception, understanding, logic, and the nature of the soul. But, in fact, the Speculum is principally a summary of Rufus’s theory of human perception and understanding. Like other medieval theories of perception and understanding, Rufus’s theory centers around the notion of species, a kind of form that is received in the soul when a person senses something or grasps something intellectually.5 In this, and in other aspects of the theory, Rufus was heavily dependent on Aristotle and St. Augustine. Rufus was working in a philosophical tradition based on Aristotle’s categories that had been accepted for centuries in the West. But in his lifetime, the Aristotelian corpus was enlarged to include [End Page 55] Aristotle’s psychology and more generally his natural philosophy and metaphysics, together with the commentaries of Averroës (Ibn Rushd). As is well known, this philosophical tradition was respected and continued not just by Rufus but by many authors after his time. So what makes Rufus’s theory unique, and why does it deserve our special attention? His account has a number of subtleties, but the main feature that distinguishes it...

Understanding the relationship between nature and the divine in the second half of the sixteenth century in Europe was a spiritual imperative mired in epistemological uncertainty. Benito Arias Montano (c.1525–1598) is an important, if largely forgotten, figure in such debates as to the relationship between word and world. His contributions can now be assessed by English-speaking readers thanks to this latest monograph by María M. Portuondo. A historian of science, Portuondo’s prior book, Secret Science (U of Chicago P, 2009), revealed the long obscured contributions of Spanish cosmographers to the development of novel methodologies for the study of the natural world. Spanish cosmographers pioneered empirical methodologies for the study of American flora and fauna, Portuondo revealed, which put further into question the commonplace account of a Scientific Revolution centered on Protestant Europe. In her latest book, Portuondo demonstrates how textual hermeneutics and empirical observation were wedded together in the biblical natural philosophy of Benito Arias Montano. The book offers a biography of the life and times of Arias Montano as well as a critical analysis of his major published works on natural philosophy and their relation to his labors as a Hebrew philologist.Best known for his role as Philip II’s librero mayor at the royal library of El Escorial and for his editorial contribution to the Antwerp Polyglot Bible, Arias Montano also cultivated throughout his life an interest in nature that intersected in curious ways with his philological studies. Dissatisfied with the natural philosophies of his day, as Portuondo shows us, Arias Montano developed an idiosyncratic program of reform in which “piety and natural philosophy could be reconciled based on the authority of the Bible,” as the revealed Word served as “a font of knowledge about the natural world” (79). Trained as a Christian Hebraist at the University of Alcalá, he dedicated his life to the study of Hebrew, which he believed was “a natural language that reflected the true nature of things” (60). Unraveling the etymology of Hebrew words was the cornerstone of both his approach to biblical philology and natural philosophy. As Portuondo shows, what distinguished Arias Montano’s approach to the study of nature from the hexameral commentaries and natural theology of earlier Christian thinkers was his novel valuation of empirical methodologies. His biblical natural philosophy thus reflected “the empiricist approach characteristic of his Sevillian milieu as well as the disquiet of the broader community of European philosophers who questioned the ability of ancient natural philosophies to interpret nature” (154). This latter phenomenon, which Portuondo labels a “Spanish disquiet,” reflected a dissatisfaction with two prominent approaches to the study of nature: on the one hand, “a natural theological approach to the study of nature popular in sixteenth-century Spain,” and, on the other hand, “a purely empirical methodology and didactic organization of knowledge that seemed to grow increasingly disconnected from philosophy and theology” (31). She argues that Arias Montano responded to this disquiet by attempting to harmonize these two approaches. Dissatisfied with the natural historical debates of his day, he dedicated his life to distilling from the Hebrew Bible a series of metaphysical principles verifiable by empirical observation that could harmonize humanity’s understanding of the world with the revealed Word.The fruits of Arias Montano’s labors in reconciling the Bible with nature resulted in a magnum opus that comprised three parts. Only the first two parts made it to print: the Book of the Generation and Regeneration of Adam, or Anima (1593), and the History of Nature, or Corpus (1601). The final part, entitled the Vestis, was unpublished and is perhaps now lost or was never written (15). The seeds of this project appear in Arias Montano’s earlier work as principal editor of the Antwerp Polyglot. Charged by Philip II to guide this monumental scholarly undertaking through the theologically and politically fraught waters of Post-Reformation, Post-Tridentine Europe, Arias Montano included among the many appendices of the Antwerp Polyglot a treatise on the interpretation of Hebrew etymologies. Entitled De arcano sermone, Portuondo shows how this appendix, which poses as a glossary of biblical terms in Hebrew, “is informed by the notion that biblical Hebrew—properly deciphered—reveals the arcane and occult properties of things and their natures and forces” (107). Arias Montano first articulated in the sermone the central intellectual preoccupation of his later life: to recover “the relation between word and things that existed when the Bible was written” (113). What Arias Montano produced was “a comprehensive and non-Aristotelian/Ptolemaic cosmology” based primarily on his philological analysis of the Hebrew text of Genesis in conjunction with his empirical studies. While conventional in many respects—his insistence on the Earth being at the center of the universe being a case in point—Arias Montano argued in favor of some radical propositions. For example, he “did away with the notion of an unbreachable boundary between the different parts of the heavens and between the heavens and the earth, [and] reduced matter to a single liquid with a dual nature” (245). Arguing against the long-held conviction that the planets and stars were incorruptible entities, Arias Montano argued for their fundamental materiality. The planets and stars, like every earthbound entity, were composed of varying degrees of two primordial liquids that accounted for the distinctive properties of plants, animals, metals, and waters. While his methodology was unconventional from the perspective of the New Sciences, he shared with thinkers like Bacon and Galileo a dissatisfaction with the prevailing systems of natural philosophy that merited the need for serious reform.Portuondo’s study is an invaluable guide for those interested in exploring the great diversity of approaches to the study of nature at play in the sixteenth century. She paints a detailed panorama of competing systems that deftly differentiates between natural theology and natural philosophy, empiricism and Aristotelian-Thomism, hexameral commentary and cosmography. Perhaps Portuondo’s greatest contribution is arguing for Arias Montano and his syncretic methodology to be included as part of a larger reform movement within natural philosophy alongside the more famous proponents of the New Sciences. “Only when we divest ourselves of the notion that the triumph of the New Sciences was inevitable,” Portuondo argues, “can we appreciate the variety and richness of these system builders’ projects and appreciate the uncertainty of the whole enterprise” (52). Nevertheless, Portuondo’s focus on Arias Montano’s commitment to empirical methodologies downplays his links to the esoteric culture of the late Renaissance that developed around the Hermetic Corpus and the Orphic Hymnes (235). While there are key differences, both Arias Montano’s alchemical knowledge as well as his methodological valuation of textual hermeneutics point to a productive convergence of seemingly contradictory approaches to the study of nature in the period. While textual hermeneutics is no longer permitted today as a methodology in the natural sciences, hermeneutics in the time of Arias Montano was fruitfully cultivated by natural historians of all stripes. This is precisely the angle that brings literary historians to the work of Arias Montano. To draw lines in the sand differentiating the more esoteric beliefs of the sixteenth century from Arias Montano’s biblical natural philosophy risks perpetuating the blind spots of a traditional historiography of the Scientific Revolution that largely ignored approaches to the study of nature that did not feed into later developments in the natural sciences. This is nevertheless a magisterial study and a touchstone for understanding how science and faith converged productively in sixteenth-century Spain.

Today 's studies on information sometimes claim that the term was a technical one in ancient philosophy. While Plato and Aristotle talk about forms (eidos, idea) from which the Latin "information" is derived, claiming that they operate on a technical notion of information risks taking us into an interpretive loop of 2,400 years. In this chapter, I shall discuss the notion of information in three areas of Aristotle 's philosophy: natural philosophy, theory of perception and theory of knowledge. I shall argue first that something analogous to a non-semantic notion of information can be found in Aristotle 's biology. Second, while the notion of semantic information is helpful for analysing some problematic features of Aristotle 's theory of perception, we should not identify the semantic nature of that information as linguistic either in human beings or in non-human animals. Finally, if analysed carefully, the notion of information can be used to clarify certain features of Aristotle 's theory of knowledge that seem odd from the perspective of modern epistemology. In particular, sometimes when he is expected to account for the justification of individual knowledge claims, he is perhaps more focused on explaining how human beings come to process information in ways that allow them to acquire knowledge.

Reviewed by: The Curious Eye: Optics and Imaginative Literature in Seventeenth-Century England by Erin Webster Wendy Beth Hyman Erin Webster, The Curious Eye: Optics and Imaginative Literature in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. 224 Pages. In these first decades of the twenty-first century, humanists all too often find our disciplines undervalued relative to the forms of knowledge produced by STEM fields (although as COVID has all too grimly shown us, we societally undervalue the conclusions of science, too). But in the early modern England wherein so many of our disciplinary divisions emerged, natural philosophy was continually influenced by metaphorical thinking, and, conversely, literary texts justly competed with scientific instruments by “acting as optical devices.” The domains of sight and insight, objectivity and imagination, did not constellate as they do now, i.e. as provinces of opposed fields of study. Instead, The Curious Eye: Optics and Imaginative Literature in Seventeenth-Century England traces early modern epistemological complementarity via an “important and understudied analogy between the optical technologies of the period and figuration itself” (9). In the realm of the literary, Webster is an adroit thinker across a range of poetic and prose works, and is an especially brilliant Miltonist. But she also writes with ease and clarity about the complex imbrications of literary and scientific approaches to in/visible and distant realms. The Curious Eye understands metaphors and microscopes as similar sorts of tools, but also makes a case for the ways of knowing most distinctive to literature. The first chapter, “Poetry as Optical Technology,” argues that the changing nature of early modern optics—especially the Keplerian discovery of the eye itself as an optical instrument—can be traced in shifting theories of poetics as well. At least since [End Page 94] Marjorie Hope Nicolson’s 1950 Breaking of the Circle, scholars have attended to the impact of the scientific revolution on the subjects treated by poets like Donne, Herbert, and Milton. But Webster is interested less in poetic conceits about compasses or stars than she is in poetry’s claim to perspectival potency—that is, its ability to correct both the distortions of the mind’s eye and to supersede the rudimentary nature of some optical instruments. Paradoxically, this idea gained traction simultaneous with Johannes Kepler’s discovery about the nature of human vision, which delineated the mechanics of sensory perception from the conceptualization of what was seen. In this shifting terrain, where all vision was mediated in some way, poetry had an equally legitimate claim as a vehicle for yielding insight into the nature of things. Chapter 2 shifts to the role of simile and figuration in natural philosophical writing. Conventionally speaking, scholars have understood the emergence of the Royal Society of Scientists as not only a methodological (Baconian) project, but also a rhetorical one. Webster resists the usual polarities of the scholarship, instead probing why similitude, in particular, was “singled out as among the most insidious of the idols of the marketplace” (48). In a Foucauldian reading, she points to similitude’s epistemological associations with outmoded theories of sensory perception, scholasticism, and arcane resemblances. Her reading is nuanced: natural philosophers might reject figuration qua “ornament and adornment,” but they also deployed it for utilitarian ends. That is because natural philosophers recognized that like mechanical instruments, “literary technologies… did something functional”: they created images (55). In Chapter 3, “Envisioning Empire in Bacon, Hooke, and Cavendish”—and to a lesser extent in Chapter 6, “The Optics of Virtue in Boyle, Cowley, and Behn”—Webster takes up some of the social and political implications of the “empire of knowledge” ruled by the natural philosophers’ eye. The realm of what Stuart Clark calls “ocularcentrism,” after all, is also a panoptical realm: a realm of categorization and domination of its objects of study. This chapter, aptly, considers how “vision plays a central role in the establishment and maintenance of political and epistemological authority” (77). Although Hooke and Bacon exemplify these tendencies without reluctance, Webster curiously finds Margaret Cavendish actually resisting the authoritarianism of the singular gaze. The argument rests on seeing within Cavendish’s Blazing World a celebration of the “embodied nature of all forms of knowledge” and...

The Logic of Nature

These sixteen original essays, whose authors include some of the world's leading philosophers, examine themes from the work of the Cambridge philosopher G. E. Moore (1873-1958), and demonstrate his considerable continuing influence on philosophical debate. Part I bears on epistemological topics, such as scepticism about the external world, the significance of common sense, and theories of perception. Part II is devoted to themes in ethics, such as Moore's open question argument, his non-naturalism, utilitarianism, and his notion of organic unities.

Early in his career and in critical engagement with ordinary language philosophy, John Mackie developed the roots of a methodology that would be fundamental to his thinking: Mackie argues that we need to clearly separate the conceptual analysis which determines the meaning of an ordinary term and the factual analysis which is concerned with the question what, if anything, our language corresponds to in the world. I discuss how Mackie came to develop this distinction and how central ideas of his philosophy are based on it. Using the examples of Mackie’s moral skepticism and his work on Locke’s theory of perception I show how his methodology opens the door to error theories but can also support more positive claims. Finally, I put Mackie’s methodology in a historical perspective and argue that in cases like the Gettier debate, we can use it to cast light on the vagueness of the underlying methodology in some philosophical debates.

Beyond the internalism/externalism debate: The constitution of the space of perception

Prajñākaragupta is well known as the author of the extensive commentary on Dharmakīrti’s Commentary on Epistemology. In The Ornament of the Commentary on Epistemology, Prajñākaragupta offered his philosophical analysis of several important topics of Dharmakīrti’s philosophy of religion, theory of perception, logic, and dialectics. This chapter focuses on four prominent topics in Prajñākaragupta’s interpretation. The first is his peculiar view of causation, known as “backward causation.” According to this view, a future entity is taken to play the role of a cause of a present entity, against our commonsense view that a cause always precedes its effect. The second is his definition of existence equated with perception, an Indian version of esse est percipi. This definition is sharply contrasted with Dharmakīrti’s definition of existence by an entity’s causal efficacy, which presupposes the mind-independency of objects. The third is his interpretation of the Buddha’s omniscience. While Dharmakīrti focuses on the Buddha’s knowledge of the Four Noble Truths, a practical matter for Buddhist followers, Prajñākaragupta turns our interest to its epistemic greatness, namely the Buddha’s knowledge of everything including past and future entities, beyond our senses. Finally, the fourth is the doctrine of the wisdom of non-duality, to which all of Prajñākaragupta’s philosophical arguments are reducible.

In philosophy we do not draw conclusions. ‘But it must be like this! ‘ is not a philosophical proposition. Philosophy only states what everyone admits. This is one of Wittgenstein ‘s most important statements about the nature of philosophy. Commentators seem reluctant to take it at its face value. Peter Hacker comments on the first sentence: ‘It does not mean that there are no arguments in philosophy, or that no definitive conclusions can be drawn from them, e.g. that solipsism and idealism are incoherent, or that a private language is unintelligible. ‘¹ Garth Hallett comments on the third sentence: ‘[T]o appear plausible this too must be recognized as prescriptive, not descriptive. The trouble is that even the concluding words may have to be read ‘ ‘which everyone ought to admit ‘ ‘. ‘²

In this paper I deal with Whitehead’s early theory of perception, as presented in Whitehead’s first philosophical book from 1917. I argue that it differs from the theory developed subsequently, in the works on natural philosophy, by being subjectivist. Although the theory bears resemblance to Russell’s contemporary theory of perception, I hold that Russell’s influence on Whitehead was shallow. Much more substantive was the influence he received from G. F. Stout. Whitehead’s early theory of perception has a Stoutian infrastructure, that is, it draws on Stout’s analysis of mind from Analytic Psychology and assumes the Stoutian concept of „presentation”, as well as a Stoutian interpretation of the „principle of hypothetical sense-presentations”.

Since the time of the first philosophers of nature, philosophy has under¬gone many changes. Though some would dispute whether this discipline makes any progress nobody could deny that philosophical debate is following a certain path and moving towards certain conclusions. Philo¬sophical thinking develops because philosophy, like other sciences, is commonly regarded as an emending quest for knowledge, a constant attempt to establish a body of truths about the universe and ourselves. Since this ambitious attempt often fails to achieve its ends, one can see the changes in philosophy as successive answers given to the demand for a new method. The perspective of adopting a new method, the need for which is particularly felt at each turning point, has always been con¬nected with the hope that it is possible to transform philosophy into science, episteme, in the sense familiar to the Greeks.

Bohr tells us that in his discussion with Einstein at Princeton in 1937, regarding the understanding of modern science, they did not get beyond a humorous debate on “which side Spinoza would have taken if he had lived to see the development of our days” [7, 237]. It is well known that an important element in Einstein-Bohr controversy about modern science was its philosophical-epistemological interpretation (e.g., [7]; [14, pp. 683–4]). Hence, the issue of this article is the epistemological problems concerning the interpretation of science of our day in the framework of evolutionary epistemology. Elsewhere I interpreted Spinoza’s theory of knowledge as evolutionary epistemology [30], [32] and I consider his philosophy of nature (as distinct from “natural philosophy”) as the best basis for philosophy of science. The quest here is to understand science as one of the human cognitive modes of representing reality. I will analyze the epistemological controversy between Einstein and Bohr in regard to the interpretation of scientific theories and their capacity to represent reality, and compare their philosophical positions with Spinoza’s. I believe that through the philosophical discussion of the epistemological problem of scientific representation of reality we can advance to a better understanding of our scientific theories. This is expressed forcefully by Einstein:

DIVINE ACTION, DETERMINISM, AND THE LAWS OF NATURE by Jeffrey Koperski. New York: Routledge, 2020. 168 pages. Hardcover; $160.00. ISBN: 9780367139001. Ebook; open access. *When it comes to talking about God's action in the world and laws of nature in the science classes I teach, my students sometimes wonder if God, violating the very laws he created, is a problem. Jeffrey Koperski has written a book for those students and for you, too! You can see that Koperski is a teacher well experienced with explaining philosophical ideas to students majoring in anything but philosophy (who form the bulk of our philosophy teaching). This makes his new book a very accessible and enjoyable read. Moreover, no matter your background, you are likely to learn something new reading this book, perhaps even about your favored approach to divine action in the world. *Koperski is right to point out that philosophy of science--particularly philosophy of physics--is missing from most divine action discussions. If it enters at all, philosophy of science makes only cursory contributions. He is also right to observe that the causal closure of the physical, or of nature as a whole, gets too little attention in the divine action literature despite the outsized role it plays. Koperski ably shows why neither causal closure nor determinism are genuine obstacles to divine action in the world. Philosophy of science allows Koperski to clear a lot of this dead brush from the ground of divine action literature. This is an important contribution to the discussions. *Koperski helps us think more accurately about laws of nature (full disclosure: he and I have talked about these issues and tread a lot of the same ground). The assumption or metaphor of laws as "governing" events in nature has been accepted as largely unanalyzed in the divine action literature. Though he rarely uses this language, Koperski shows why the metaphor of laws "governing" things does not stand up to close analysis. He endorses a view of laws functioning as constraints that enables us to think more clearly about how God can act in the world without violating laws. *Koperski describes his model for divine action as decretalist and nonviolationist. The laws that scientists deal with represent divine decrees--gifts of order and constraint to creation. The regularities of creation genuinely exist and genuinely act. Koperski captures a biblical view of God's relationship to creation; he also considers natural philosophers' critical thinking about laws in the seventeenth century. *As for nonviolationism, Koperski points out that laws--the nomic conditions or features of the world--do not make things go (no "governing" metaphor). Rather, as physicists have recognized, it is forces that make things move. What laws do is provide nomic constraints on the behavior of forces (p. 134). His model is nonviolationist in that these laws are not violated when God acts in nature; rather, when there are nonnomic changes, "the laws adapt to change. This was true when we thought that nature was Newtonian, and it remains true in the age of quantum mechanics and relativity" (p. 135). Koperski's account is consistent with what I think physics reveals to us about the laws of nature--they function as typicality conditions: A law tells us what to expect for the behavior of forces on a system typical for the constraints represented by the law. But when new factors or conditions are introduced, the law does not tell us what to expect. The typicality is shattered, but not the law. Yet, this does not distress physicists; we know how to model and calculate what happens with these additional factors that the original law did not cover. *Consider a simple example: A grandfather clock keeps time well because of the lawlike regularities involved in its functioning. Yet, if I use my finger to keep the minute hand from moving forward, the clock will cease keeping time accurately. No laws have been violated; however, a genuine physical change has taken place regarding the clock's functioning. The regularities are still there--the laws are still operative--but they adapt to the presence of a new effect or force introduced into the clock system. What this means is that "once the laws of nature are distinguished from the behavior that is the result of those laws and nonnomic conditions, we find a vast space of contingency in which God can act" (p. 135). Koperski calls this a "neoclassical model of special divine action" (p. 135) because God is not manipulating laws to act in the world. If humans can make genuine nonnomic changes to nature without violating laws (e.g., rockets that overcome gravity's pull), clearly God is able to. The question then becomes one of God's relationship to the contingent order he has given creation. *You may be thinking of possible objections to this account of divine action. Koperski discusses several and I recommend you read what he has to say about them. I will briefly discuss what seem to be the most serious--that is, possible violations of energy conservation. There are many reasons to think that conservation laws function as constraints on systems when particular conditions hold. For instance, as Koperski points out, according to general relativity, energy conservation does not apply to an expanding universe. In a dynamic spacetime, the motion of objects does not conserve energy. More generally, any system whose dynamics depend on time will fail to conserve energy, and there are lots of such systems in the actual world. Physicists have precise ways of quantifying how much a system violates energy conservation and describing the resulting order of the system in question. The idea that any system violating energy conservation can always be embedded into a larger system restoring conservation is just that--an idea and nothing more. Physicists do not have any good reasons supporting this idea (though some defend it to maintain their reductionist intuitions). There is plenty of opportunity for divine action in the world and energy conservation is never an issue. *One could sweat some details. For example, Koperski rehearses arguments to the effect that quantum processes suppress chaos, thus undercutting the amplification of small quantum changes to macroworld effects (pp. 52-53). While it is true that quantum mechanics is no friend of chaos, the amplification argument is more along the lines of a chaotic macroscopic system being sensitive to quantum fluctuations; this doesn't depend on the existence of so-called quantum chaos. There always are stringent constraints on such amplification, however; so, Koperski is correct that banking on this as a route for divine action is still a hopeless cause. And I am not convinced that physics and philosophy of science are pointing toward an eventual rejection of ontological randomness in quantum mechanics (pp. 60-63). Irreducible randomness is not lawless chaos; it is a form of order that God has given to creation even if it offends the deterministic intuitions of some physicists and philosophers. None of Koperski's account stands or falls with these quibbles. *I would like to see Koperski's account enriched with the doctrine of creation, such as in Understanding Scientific Theories of Origins: Cosmology, Geology and Biology in Christian Perspective, Robert C. Bishop et al. (IVP Academic, 2018). His discussion in sec. 4.2 suggests that seventeenth-century natural philosophers eventually ditched all forms of divine-mediated action for direct or unmediated divine action as embodied in the laws of nature (the discussion is a little oversimplified, but this is a short book). This amounts to treating the laws of nature as the main mediators of all that happens in creation (back to the "governing" metaphor). In contrast, the doctrine of creation's emphasis on multiple forms of divine-mediated action helps to address the divine relationship to creation in which God is working in and through nature, not outside and apart from it. This is exactly what Koperski's account needs for some of the questions he entertains at the end of the book and for some he leaves unanswered (e.g., why one does not have to restrict divine concurrence to Thomist models only). *Reviewed by Robert C. Bishop, Department of Physics and Engineering, Wheaton College, Wheaton, IL 60187.

This collection of essays edited by Florian Barrière and Caroline Bertonèche presents an anthropological and cultural approach to astronomical themes in poetic works from antiquity to the Romantic period (with emphasis on Latin literature and British Romantic poetry). Apart from the main subject, the framework spans myth, theater, natural philosophy, and musical composition. Although the reader can tell that the emphasis is on the philological aspects of works, it is done with much careful consideration of contemporary scientific and philosophical debate and a good knowledge of the critical literature.