Truth Of Things Research Articles

‘An Abundant Supply of Discourse’: Augustine and the Rhetoric of Monasticism

What is it therefore to speak not only eloquently but also wisely, unless to apply sufficient words in the subdued style, elegant words in the moderate style, powerful words in the grand style, all the while speaking only true things which ought to be heard. But if someone is not able to do both [speak eloquently and wisely], let him say wisely what he does not say eloquently, rather than say eloquently what he says foolishly. If, however, he cannot do even this, let him so live as to provide not only reward for himself but also offer example for others. Thus his way of living may provide the equivalent of an abundant supply of discourse.

The Housemaid and the Kitchen Table: Incorporating the Frame in To the Lighthouse

One goes down into the well & nothing protects one from the assault of truth. Down there I cant write or read; I exist however. I am. Then I ask myself what I am? . . . It is not oneself but something in the universe that one's left with. . . . One sees a fin passing far out. What image can I reach to convey what I mean? Really there is none I think. . . . I used to feel this as a child--couldn't step across a puddle once I remember, for how strange--what am I &c. But by writing I don't reach anything. (Virginia Woolf, Diary 3: 112-13) The story is that Thales, while occupied in studying the heavens above and looking up, fell into a well. A good-looking and whimsical maid from Thrace laughed at him and told him that while he might passionately want to know all things in the universe, the things in front of his very nose and feet were unseen by him. This jest also fits all those who become involved in philosophy. (Heidegger, What Is a Thing? 3) In Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse James Ramsay tries to illustrate his father's philosophical concerns about subject, object, and the nature of for the artist Lily Briscoe: 'Think of a kitchen table then,' he told her, 'when you're not there' (23). Lily imagines that thinking, night after night . . . about the reality of kitchen tables makes Mr. Ramsay's face what it is (154). It would seem that Woolf, like Plato's maid in Heidegger's transcription, is laughing in To the Lighthouse at Mr. Ramsay as a philosopher who cannot see the objects in front of him, paradoxically including his wife, who, although she is a being and not a thing, is often perceived more in her objective beauty than as a subject. To Mrs. Ramsay her husband sometimes seemed as if he were born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle's. . . . But did he notice the flowers? No. . . . Did he even notice . . . whether there was pudding on his plate or roast beef? He would sit at a table with them like a person in a dream (70). Woolf and Lily want to incorporate what Mr. Ramsay's view leaves out, yet they are each in the position both of Plato's maid and of the philosopher, laughing at the blindly judgmental subject-object philosopher but in danger of falling into that well in their comparable attempts to know and represent the whole truth of things or people, burdened by their frames' limits and not blessed with fifty eyes. While Woolf's eagle eye looks energetically in Time Passes at things in the Ramsay household when no one is there--things that no human being can know in their thingness--her eye seems weak in this section when she looks at working-class women, ordinary people whom Woolf often seems as deaf and blind to as Mr. Ramsay is to the food on his plate. Though we are not given to see it, the Great War, like Mrs. Ramsay's death, also slices through this section, disrupting briefly but starkly the ruminative flow of some of Woolf's most poetic writing. Given that Woolf's universe is insistently relational, Time Passes, and the first and last sections that it bridges, pointedly challenge the reader to weave together Woolf's philosophy, art, and politics, especially since that section disturbingly does not represent what are for the novel's domestic narrative as for Woolf's life arguably its most significant events: the death of the mother and the Great War. Yet through her mourning of Mrs. Ramsay and her attempt to represent and incorporate Mrs. Ramsay's presence as well as her absence, Lily encounters things that remain from Mrs. Ramsay's life, things through which Lily approaches the problem of the thing itself. The thing-in-itself knows no frame and cannot be incorporated into any social, aesthetic, political, or at all human perceptual context without losing its thingness. For this reason, paradoxically, the philosophical problem of the thing itself--bottomless though it is--provides a sufficiently broad frame through which to interpret the relationships among Woolf's contexts and concerns in To the Lighthouse. …

America's tragic metaphor: Our twentieth‐century combatants as frontiersmen

In the twentieth century, many Americans tended to view our wars metaphorically as extensions of this nation's earlier frontier experience. From an anthropological perspective, those figurative analogies for contemporary combatants as frontiersmen reveal how an apparent “truth of things” expressed by some metaphors provided our culture with “a pastness to the future that is fundamentally reassuring.” This longitudinal study traces “social functions” of those metaphors which have become, from an ethical perspective, tragic not only because of their false analogies but also for their lack of worth when compared to other, more responsible frontier metaphors.

Interdisciplinarity in Public: The Rhetoric of Rhetoric

In Trial of (1988), late I.F. Stone addressed a chapter Socrates and Rhetoric. Speaking on behalf of Athenian public, he took sides against and for rhetoric. Rhetoric, he said, was a skill enabling citizens to protect their interests in assembly and in law courts (90), hence an essential tool of Athenian democracy, and that was what anti-democratic most mistrusted about it. The unspoken premise of Socratic assault on oratory was disdain for common people of Athens (92).1 In academic departments in humanities and social sciences, defense of rhetoric against a universalizing Platonic or scientific reason is not news. Among many who have lately been trying move rhetoric, in Stanley Fish's words, disreputable periphery necessary center, one can cite historians Hayden White and Dominick LaCapra, economist Donald McCloskey, sociologist Jean Baudrillard, and literary critics as otherwise diverse as Bakhtin, de Man, Wayne Booth, Terry Eagleton, and Fish himself.2 In anthropology, communications, philosophy, political science, law, and even medicine, and especially in interdisciplinary projects that connect them, revival of rhetoric has been proceeding for some time. Unfortunately, one cannot conclude from Stone's eloquent non-specialist defense that there has been a sudden conjunction of academic high theory with common sense of general or extra-academic reading public, which has heretofore tended take term rhetoric as a slur, a synonym for deceit, manipulation, and propaganda, for tyranny of words unchecked by truth of things.3 This essay will explore a more modest hypothesis: that Stone's grounding of rhetoric in democratic polis or offers a significant but also troubling analogy rehabilitation of rhetoric in university, which much contemporary opinion, left and right, of course opposes as specialized, professionalized, private. In brief, I will argue that if interdisciplinary move toward rhetoric moves scholarship in direction of public, and as such is politically desirable, phrase the public that I and others plug into our politico-disciplinary arguments at value-laden points like this is also a piece of rhetoric, and as such be examined carefully for its multiple, devious, and perhaps even unintended persuasive effects.

From Humanism to the Humanities (review)

150 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 27:1 JANUARY 1989 The excellent chronological method used in this work (and not by, e.g., Gilson) makes it possible to follow the evolution of Henry's philosophy of truth from its more "Augustinian" form in his earlier writings to its more "Aristotelean" form in his later ones. All philosophies of this period exhibit these two great influences, and Henry interweaves them into his own original philosophy of knowledge in most fascinating ways. In the more "Augustinian" view, concepts in the human mind have a direct relation to God's mind, not merely an indirect relation via the created thing (39). Our concepts of course represent creatures, but they do so by first representing a divine exemplary cause. In the order of real beings, God's ideas are the cause of created things, and this order of creation is directly reflected by and present in our knowledge of creatures. In his later works, however, Henry seems to come to a view which is somewhat like, but not identical with, that of St. Thomas Aquinas. Truth in the human mind is merely truth of a sign, not truth of a real thing. Conformance of the concepts in our mind to the essences of things outside our mind is sufficient for truth, so no direct reference to God or divine ideas or exemplary causes is needed (48, 58). In ancient and medieval philosophies, epistemology was intimately connected with metaphysics, and Marrone rightly points out that Henry's view--that the essence is the truth of each thing (129)---depends on Avicenna's distinction of essence from existence . In Avicenna, according to Henry, each creature has an esse essentiae and an esse existentiae. Even essence is constitutued by the God-relation, by the relation that created essences have to their divine exemplars. This will amuse admirers of St. Thomas, or of Kierkegaard, for whom existence is the God-relation. In Henry, since pure essence includes in itself the relation to God, our knowledge of that essence is already a participation in God's hidden art. By a route via Aristotle and Avicenna, Henry rejoins his earlier, more Augustinian, view that knowledge of creatures presupposes the presence of God's mind to our mind. Marrone's method and results are of the best scholarly quality, solidly based on original sources. A few minor points might raise an eyebrow, e.g., in Augustine it is not the content of our ideas so much as the necessity of the judgment which requires divine corroboration 04)- The English prose, alas, verges on the turgid and at times even on the ungrammatical (82). An excellent bibliography and index make the book even more useful. Marrone has given students of medieval thought an excellent, accurate, and subtle guide to some of the complexities of the philosophy of knowledge and of being of a neglected but significant thinker, Henry of Ghent. PAUL J.W. MILLER Rome, Italy Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine. From Humanism to the Humanities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986. Pp. xvi + 224. $27.5 o. Although based on Roman models, the classical education we now know (or knew before our technocratic age) first took shape in fifteenth-century Italy, where its program was formulated and promoted by humanists such as Guarino of Verona. In From BOOK REVIEWS 151 Humanism to the Humanities Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine, challenging what they consider to be the idealized vision of humanism found in standard accounts, claim that the primarily literary and grammatical education provided by these humanists was distinctly flabby in comparison with the rigorous training in logic inculcated by their scholastic predecessors and competitors. The authors assert, rather than argue (much less prove), that scholasticism, with its emphasis on disputation, produced scholars with finely-honed minds, geared to "active thinking" and intellectual dissent. By contrast, the relentless drilling, passive absorption of textual detail and rote-memorization characteristic of humanist schools turned out, so they tell us, well-read, well-spoken and well-behaved young aristocrats, whose docile frame of mind made them the sort of unquestioning yes-men both princes and republics were happy to employ. Unlike most historians of Renaissance...

The Presocratics in Context

book is intended be the starting-point from which new work on the will derive impetus and inspiration (p.vii). It stands ... as the beginning of a new programme of reading and interpretation of the Presocratics (p.13). It pretends to justify a new method of approach the reading of the Presocratics (p. 183).1 Audacious claims, iconoclastic and ambitious. The title is itself something of a boast. The argument is uncompromising. There is a swashbuckling vigour of thought, and a willingness an eagerness address folly by its proper name. And is there really room for a new approach the Presocratics? Can we really set about rethinking early Greek philosophy? Humph, the sceptical reader will mutter, such pretensions can only puff themselves into falsehoods or else deflate into familiar truths. Not so, not so. The boast is firmly grounded, the audacity a proper pride. This is be blunt the best book on the I have seen for years. I am minded rank it alongside Reinhardt's Parmenides and is there higher praise? Dr Osborne says some new things. She says some true things. She says some interesting things. She says some important things. And therefore for most of this review I shall growl and grumble.2

Notes toward a History of Anti-Criticism

NUMBER OF SCHOLARS, including Gerald Graff, Frank Lentricchia, and Richard Ohmann, have written (or are in midst of writing) exemplary histories of modern criticism.1 Thinking about these histories of however, prompts me to speculate whether there is a related, but not identical, history that consists of a range of ideas, attitudes, practices, and values that we would not exactly want to label criticism, but something else. I am intrigued as much, if not more, by what I tentatively call anti-criticism, that other which isn't criticism and from which criticism distinguishes itself. This brief formulation begins to indicate what anti-criticism is or at least might be, but relation between criticism and anti-criticism is more complicated and puzzling than a simple opposition or polarity implies. One could imagine an unlettered or untutored soul who claims to be against who doesn't see need for it (it kills books), who opts instead for a hearty impressionism and untrammeled subjectivity, who is, in a word, a kind of anti-critic. But it may be harder to imagine a practicing critic or scholar who openly professes, in a paradoxical sort of enabling and disabling gesture, that his analysis is neither impressionistic nor subjective but is, nevertheless, feeble and self-defeating, cannot come close to success, does not and could never go far enoughor sternly ought not be allowed to go farther than it should. Such a person believes, even as he explicates texts and applies isolable technology that is modern criticism,2 that what he is doing cannot and possibly should not really be done. Numerous critics, past and present, properly belong in histories of but just as many (they are often same people) would also figure in a history of anti-criticism. Here is a sentence from first page of a recent essay by Helen Vendler on the study and teaching of literature: Perhaps only true thing to say about study and teaching of literature is that it is impossible.3 We might be inclined to pass by this sentence without paying it much heed, regarding it as a winning expression of critical modesty. But sentence is more beguiling than that if one lingers over it for a moment. Surely it is somewhat perplexing that a critic of Vendler's stature and

Veritas Rerum: Contrasting Cosmic Truth in Hellenistic and Christian Thought

VERITAS RERUM: CONTRASTING COSMIC TRUTH IN HELLENISTIC AND CHRISTIAN THOUGHT The Truth in Things: Ontology THE DELIBERATE and systematic reflection of hinking believers on their lived belief, theology can choose from among many ways (hodoi) or methods of reflecting. Various historical forces have conspired to provide the preponderance to a particular kind of philosophizing theology , wherein deductive, syllogistic reasoning predominates. Valid and inevitable in itself, this type of theology is not simply sufficient, and if, falsely supposed sufficient, thins theological reflection and, ultimately, religious experience, of their proper profundity and richness. Other approaches to the meaning of being are not only helpful, but necessary. As J. N. Findlay has recently admonished us, Platonic myths " represent, with some decorative devices, a very serious ontology . . . and theology which we moderns would do well to take seriously, since they may well be true." 1 Centuries before , Dante's Divine Comedy had made it clear to Boccaccio that "poetry is theology." This idea was later elaborated by Charles Maurras, who suggested that "Ontology would perhaps be a better name, for poetry inclines above all to the roots of the knowledge of Being." 2 Not that poetic reflection and description are without their own proper dangers, both in discovery and in communication. Even (or perhaps, precisely) in the utterly symbolist mentality of the Middle Ages, Alain t J . .K. :Findlay, " The Myths of Plato," in Myth, Symbol and Reality, ed. Alan Olson (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1980) 165. 2Cited by Jacques Maritain, Art and Ffoholasticism (London: Sheed and Ward, 1949) 173. 1 ROBERT L. KRESS de Lille cautioned that "poetry's lyre rings vibrantly with falsehood in the external literary shell." Nevertheless, "internally it communicates a hidden and profound meaning.... Whoever reads with penetration, having discarded the external shell of falsehood, finds the sweet tasting fruit of truth enclosed within." 3 Why is this the case? For two reasons. First of all, both philosopher and poet are petitioners of the truth, propelled thereunto by their experience of the cosmos which prompts in them wonderment (admiratio). St. Thomas Aquinas, commenting on Aristotle, well remarks: It is clear that puzzlement (dubitatio) and wonderment (admiratio ) proceed from ignorance. For when we encounter effects whose cause is hidden from us, then we wonder about their cause. And, insofar as wonderment was the cause leading to philosophy, it is clear that the philosopher is in some sense or other a philomythes , that is, a lover of fable (story), which is the property (the hallmark or characteristic) of poets. For this reason, the first who considered the principles of things (de principiis rerum) in a narrative (or story: fabularem) form were called theologizing poets, as were Perseus and certain others who were [known as] the seven wise ones. The reason why (causa quare) the philosopher is compared to the poet is this: both are concerned with mirandathings which evoke puzzlement and wonderment. For the stories with which poets are concerned are composed of certain " wonderfull " things. Philosophers, too, have been moved from wonderment to philosophizing. And because wonderment_ proceeds from lack of knowledge, it is clear that they have moved to philosophize in order to escape ignorance.4 The second reason poets and philosophers enjoy perichoresis in the pursuit of truth is the perichoresis of truth and being itself . According to the Scholastics, "ens et verum convertuntur ." 5 That is, being and true are interchangeable terms, for, 3 Alain de Lille, De Planotu Naturne, PL CCX, 451 C. 1 Thomas Aquinas, In XII Libras Metaphysicor11-1n Aristotelis EJJpositio, L.I,1.3 (Marietti 55) . 5 On this, see Joseph Pieper, Wahrheit der Dinge (Munich: Kosel, 1947) 11-27, 107. VERITAS RERUM 3 as Thomas Aquinas notes, " The name truth expresses the congeniality and coming together of being and intellect." 6 Later, he emphasizes that " each and every thing is true and no thing is false." 7 In a word, truth is a disposition of being which neither adds to being nor specifies a special mode of being. It describes, rather" what is found in being in general." For, as "the philosopher concludes, the same order obtains in being (esse) and truth (veritate) ... and thus the nature (ratio) of...

Meaning and Myth in the Study of Lives: A Sartrean Perspective (review)

Reviews227 its own rules for establishing the metaphysical meaning of what it has borrowed from the history of thought" (p. 12). I do not share his indifference, if indifference it is. Can the student of meaning and truth afford a plurality of realities? Is not ontological bankruptcy sure to ensue when epistemology knows no limits? Of course, the fictive artist may make a fictively valid use of a "wrong" idea. The house of meaning as we know by dwelling in it has room for deceptive vistas and blind corridors. But somebody sometime should have some sense of the uses of truth in the structuring of a work of literary art, or else we look in the direction of believing in no meaning whatever except in verbal structure as structured. In the long run, I think, and probably in the not very long run, the concept of meaning cannot do without the concept of truth. As I read Finnegans Wake, it is so crammed with meaning that it oozes meaning at every pore. It leers meaning, it insinuates meaning, it stumbles and staggers meaning, it plays meaning, it claims meaning, it fumbles meaning, it often blunderingly reaches down into the depths of human meaningfulness, its author knowing that the simple and the true thing is the child of the deeply obscure and the intricately complex. I have no quarrel with people who love the books I love — and a few who don't. Professor White loves the Wake. Whitman CollegeThomas D. Howells Meaning and Myth in the Study of Lives: A Sartrean Perspective, by Stuart L. Charme; vii & 190 pp. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984, $25.00. Stuart Charme links Eliade's notion of myth with Sartre's search for the "fundamental project"— as it is effected in every person's life and as it is revealed in Sartre's autobiography (The Words) and in his biographical studies of Baudelaire, Genet, and Flaubert. In this context, he does not hesitate to call these Sartrean works "religious" — in intention and in effect. Charmé shares with Eliade the belief that a myth, which is essentially cogmogonic, offers a unique vision of reality with its fundamental structures. The account of a mythic event is a "true story" insofar as it represents "what is truly real and significant for those who believe it" (p. 153). Through myth humanity imposes a pattern of meaningful repetition upon the irreversible flow of time. Charme claims that in our secular society the sphere of myth is within us. 228Philosophy and Literature The evolving self might best be compared, Charme believes, to the story one tells oneself as he retrospectively orders the events of his past and establishes meaningful relations among them. Obviously more than one line of plot and interpretation would be possible whether in biography or autobiography. The method is in any case hermeneutic. "In some ways," Charme says, "interpreting a person's life may fruitfully be compared with the process of creating and interpreting texts" (p. 3). A distinctive characteristic of Sartre's study of lives is its paradigmatic function , and this, too, Charmé links with religious hagiography. This is not to say that Sartre holds up his subjects, still less himself, as models to be imitated. But his purpose includes more than the discovery of what makes a given individual tick. In The Family Idiot Sartre seeks to show through Flaubert how everyone is a "singular universal," reflecting his familial and social conditioning and in turn putting his own stamp on his period. Sartre's own struggle to create a self, in Charmé's view, embodied the problems and tensions peculiar to our age. The result is not a pattern for us to follow but a gift to aid us in our own selfclarification . In this connection Charmé compares Sartre's works with Erik Erikson's "religious biographies" of Luther and Gandhi. Indeed, there is a running commentary on resemblances between Sartre's existentialism and Erikson's psychology which have been too little noted and deserve further exploration. Occasionally Charmé's attempt to find compatibility in writers usually thought of as offering opposing views (e.g., Sartre and Freud) leads him to blur distinctions. He goes...

“To Set a Form upon that Indigest”: Shakespeare’s Fictions of History

an odd term, virtually an oxymoron, for a radical tension exists between two words. History proclaims a commitment to fact, to events as they happened. Thus, Thomas Cooper defines historia in his Thesaurus (1565) as the declaration of true things in order sette foorth. Play on other hand, declares a commitment to fiction, to an artificial verbal structure whose subject, as Chapman writes, is not truth, but things like truth.l Enemies of theater, however, demanded from history play payment for a debt perhaps never owed. Audiences that know histories before they see them acted, it was claimed, are euer ashamed, when they haue heard what lyes Players insert amongst them, and how greatly they depraue them. If they be too long for a Play, they make them curtais; if too short, they enlarge them with many Fables, and whither too long or too short, they corrupt them with a Foole and his Bables.2

Is Nominalism Compatible With Truth?: A Note

IS NOMINALISM COMPATIBLE WITH TRUTH? A NOTE I F " TRUE " applies as straightforwardly to things like diamonds and friends as it does to statements, the answer to the above question is " no ". But as against the received view and for the reasons which follow, I here argue that " true " does apply to the former in an as underived a sense as it applies to the latter. How this falsifies nominalism becomes clear as soon as it is shown how the underived truth of things, " ontological truth " as it is sometimes called, implies that universals exist. Supporting the view of those medieval realists who denied that expressions of the sort "true gold " are derivative from the sense of " true " in " true statement ",1 I contend, first, tha;t the standard argument for the view that " true " applies primarily to statements alone (call this the reductionist view) is unsound. Then, in two separate arguments I argue that that same reductionist view is in fact false. Finally, I show how the underived concept of ontological truth implies that universals exist and hence that nominalism is false. To begin, then, what I take to be the standard argument for the reductionist view runs like this: Since, say " Y is a true diamond" implies but is not implied by " It is true that Y is a diamond", it follows that "true" in the latter sense of the term (i.e. in the sense of what is said) , must be the logically primary sense of "true", in which case "true" as ascribed to diamonds as well as to other things constitutes a secondary, 1 According to St. Augustine, St. Anselm and St. Thomas Aquinas, the truthrelation would exist even if human beings were eliminated. They believed that things could be said to be straightforwardly true in the sense of conforming to eternal ideas in the divine intellect. 459 460 JOHN PETERSON derived sense of "true". But in that case there is really no such thing to begin with as an irreducible "truth of things". Alan White has succinctly put the argument as follows: When an X, e.g., a statement or a story, is characterized as true in virtue of what is said in it rather than for itself, such an X is a true X and only if what is said in it is true. When, on the other hand, an X, e.g., a Corgi or courage, is characterized as true other than because of what is said in it, an X is a true X if and only if according to some restrictive standards of X it is true to say that it is an X. The former use of " true" is primary. " This is a true Corgi" implies, but is not implied by, "It is true to say that this is a Corgi." To suppose that it were implied by it would commit one wrongly to holding that " This is a Corgi, but not a true Corgi " is contradictory, and also that when it is true that X is a thief, a professor or a pianist, then he is a true thief, a true professor or a true pianist. But the whole point of characterizing some X other than what is said as true is to suggest that" X" is here being used according to some restrictive standards by which not everything called by that word is, in the user's opinion, truly so called. What commonly passes for a Corgi may not be at Crufts a true Corgi; what is commonly called a rose or mahogany may not, botanically speaking, be a true rose or true mahogany. The higher our standards the more reluctant we are to allow that a certain degree of love, courage, or freedom should truly be called love, courage or freedom; it is not true love, true courage or true freedom.2 And yet, to reflect a moment on this argument is to realize at once that what gives White free passage to deny "It is true to say that X is a Corgi " implies " X is a true Corgi " is the rather dubious assumption that we always use "true" in expressions like " true Corgi " or " true...

The Pivot of John's Prologue

The prospect of writing anything further about the prologue of John reminds one of the verdict quoted by W. C. van Unnik in a similar context some twenty years ago: ‘the new things he said were not true and the true things were not new’. The prudent course may, therefore, be to refine an already established position with the hope of being able to say something true, even if it is not altogether new. The thesis of this article is that the prologue is a chiasm with verse 12bat its centre. That the prologue is chiastic is not a new thesis; that its centre isv. 12bis. The first part of this paper attempts to establish this thesis. The second part studies the key phrase inv. 12b, τέκνα Θεοũ, and the implications of its position in the prologue.

Commonwealth Institutes of International Affairs

Philip Kerr1 comes round and we draft a telegram to Belgrade to tell the Serbs they must stop fighting in Carinthia. A dinner in the evening to discuss the formation of an AngloAmerican Institute of Foreign Affairs, with an annual register or yearbook. Lionel Curtis,2 who conceived the scheme, explains his purposes in a really admirable speech. A discussion follows. General Bliss, Bob Cecil, Crowe, Eustace Percy, Coolidge, Headlam Morley, Latham are there.8 Crowe makes a speech criticizing the scheme. Bob Cecil supports it. He said one true thing. He said, 'There is no single person in this room who is not disappointed with the terms we have drafted. Yet

Henry of Livonia and Balthasar Russow: The chronicler as literary artist

As vehicles designed for the primary purpose of recording and examining human history, chronicles do not readily invite literary treatment ; with a few notable exceptions they have rarely received it. Generally blunt and prosaic records of facts and events arranged in order of time of occurrence, chronicles have tended, in matters of presentation, to remain doggedly faithful to the restrictions inherent in the Greek root chronos , 'time.' They are usually the first form of historical writing to appear in any culture. In England, for example, both the Anglo-Saxon and medieval Peterborough chronicles, in spite of a certain stylistic vigor, fail to attract the serious historian: they are for the most part primitive and formless testimonials to the human impulse to record events, and the naive sense of cause and effect which they demonstrate radically limits an understanding of even the simplest forms of power. Having dutifully listed dates, places, and occurrences, the earliest chroniclers hesitate to shape, much less probe, history: there is no proportioning according to later historical importance, nor do the earnest clerical recorders pause at crucial moments to examine in depth the characters or motives of those who mold the events which they list. In examining the work of the earliest chroniclers the reader also feels that their conception of their role defeats not only utility but also pleasure. It is true, of course, that the historian, unlike other writers, bears the burden of a primary responsibility to discover and state the truth of things, without regard for either literary effect or the demands of bored

Gulliver the Preacher

In his expository writings about religion, Swift suggests that moral fervor is often a disguise for immoral motives. He advises the preacher to avoid any pronounced display of personal qualities in his sermons and to try to eliminate the almost inevitable distortions caused by self-display. In his satires, Swift often has his persona say true things for reprehensible reasons. The satire then becomes primarily a study of the moral implications of the relationship of the speaker to his proposals, rather than primarily an incitement to practical action. In Gulliver's Travels the persona presents a view of man's evil that is generally in accord with the traditions of Christianity and of satire. But Swift shows us the immoral intentions of Gulliver; although Gulliver pretends that he wants to reform us, his pretense is a strategy for disguising his own evil from us and from himself. The satiric attack in the book then becomes double; Gulliver satirizes man, and Swift satirizes the motives for Gulliver's satire.

The Openness of Being by Eric L. Mascall

BOOK REVIEWS 587 The Openness of Being. The Gifford Lectures in the University of Edinburgh 1970-71. By ERIC L. MASCALL. London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1971. Pp. ~78. £8.50. The Anglican theologian Eric Mascall in bringing his gentle scholarship to the 1970-71 series of the Gifford Lectures furthers an already prestigiou~ series-Alfred Whitehead's Process and Reality, for example, originated as the Gifford Lectures of 19~9. Stating that " unnecessary verbosity is at best inconsiderate and at worse immoral," (p. 91) the author manages to avoid both rudeness and sin, while ranging with wit and insight, and completely without obfuscation and mystification, over rather a complete spectrum of what has constituted natural theology discussion over the past few decades. Clearly, a good deal of his own reading comes to the fore in the process, and indeed the bibliographical character of the Lectures is very pronounced. The procedure is largely one of allowing the various arguments and points of view to sound and resonate for themselves in a markedly dispassionate climate that makes for enlightened discourse. It does not preclude the author testing the arguments at their weakest points and appending his own (usually alternative) viewpoints. Most of these, it is true, have been expressed in the author's earlier publications, though they are here newly nuanced at several strategic points. What dominates throughout is Fr. Mascall's epistemological stance of robust Realism. This renders him understandably impatient with the metatheological concerns of much of Anglo-Saxon theology whose fixation on language has indeed produced a paralysis of sorts. It is no surprise then to find him looking with sympathy on the " transformational generative grammar " of Noam Chomsky which-against the claims of logical empiricists and ordinary language analysts--offers some hope for anchoring language in metaphysics rather than vice versa. Nevertheless, the question as to how thought and language do inter-relate remains an open and vexing one for theology, and the feeling persists that Fr. Mascall is disposed to separate them a bit too radically: "... the truths themselves are something other than our assertions of them, and are not in themselves linguistic at all." (p. ~5) If one means truth in things this affords no problem, but formally speaking truth is in the judgmental act of mind, and here the plot thickens. A footnote from J. A. Baker to the extent that "truth does not come to men clothed in words, it comes to them as words " is much to the point in serving to preclude the oft-entertained notion that formal truth somehow or other lies behind and beneath language as having a non-linguistic reality of its own. To think is not merely to acquire language (as Leslie Dewart boldly maintains in his Foundations of Belief, e. g., p. 1~6), at the same time language is not a mere apprendage to thought for the sole sake of communication. Heidegger's aesthetic, almost mystical, notion of Being (Sein) "coming to pass" in Dasein as primal 538 BOOK REVIEWS languages needs a lot more hard-headed verification than his disciples have been able to offer. But the mind is indigeneously dictive; what it knows it necessarily brings to expression (which is not to say the knowing is the interior speaking or conceiving) , and the articulation is, in some primal sense at least, language. There are, of course, further problems: theological language is readily diversified as mythological, symbolic, or analogical, and the truth-bearing capacity is not identical in each case; the distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments (in Hume's sense) implies not only distinct kinds of truth but distinct meaning in language too. At any rate, I for one, can only feel that a satisfactory theological explorative act into the problem of language is yet to come. This same Realism means that the review of the " ontological argument " in the light of current attempts to rehabilitate it, notably that of Charles Hartshorne, is cautious at the very least. Fr. Mascall seems intrigued with the approach of M. J. A. O'Connor who suggests that Anselm understood God as really existing within the mind as well as without it. It is difficult to see how this...

Emotion and Feeling

mN HIS essay, Emotions,' Errol Bedford has made an important contribution to the philosophical study of the language of emotion. Yet I think he has, along with saying some true things, given an emphasis that distorts his subject matter and propounded a thesis which is untenable. So I undertake here first briefly to exhibit Bedford's position in its most provocative form, and then to criticize it. The criticism I offer involves me, on its constructive side, in an attempt to bring into view one function that some statements about emotion, those of a certain class, perform. Bedford neglects this function. At times he seems to deny it. At other times he appears barely to acknowledge the function, in order to discount it. I shall argue that without an adequate appreciation of it we cannot expect to understand what an emotion is.

Marxism and the History of Philosophy

God was my first thought; Reason my second; Man my third and last thought, Feuerbach wrote in a famous passage of his Essence of Christianity. In the intellectual history of Germany, theology had given way to philosophy; now, he believed, philosophy would have to find its true subject-matter in the negation of philosophy, in Anthropology the Science of Man. In France, some twenty years earlier, the young Auguste Comte had proclaimed an even more radical negation of philosophy. Man, he wrote in his Considerations philosophique sur les sciences et les savants, began by conceding phenomena of all kinds due to the direct and continuous influence of supernatural agents; later he came to regard them having been produced by various abstract forces inherent in bodies, but distinct and heterogeneous; in the end he confined himself to considering them subject to a certain number of invariable natural laws which are nothing but the general expression of the relations observed in their development. A theological or fictitious stage of human thinking, in other words, had been followed by a metaphysical or abstract stage in which philosophy had replaced religion; now man had evolved to the scientific or positive stage in which science replaces philosophy and the scientist acquires the power of the clergy. Marx and Engels had been profoundly influenced by Feuerbach in their youthful transition from the radical philosophic criticism of the Left Hegelians to the primarily social and economic concerns of Communism. They believed, with Feuerbach, that traditional philosophy had no future; they accepted that part of his philosophic program which said that one must recognize as the true thing, not the thing it is an object of the abstract reason, but it is an object of the real, complete man.' But of Comte, Marx and Engels had to the very end of their lives no high opinion. This was not mere professional jealously. Anyone who had not mastered Hegel was in their view not competent to set up a major thinker. Hegel, they believed,

Lxiv: The Identity of Francesco Cieco da Ferrara

Francesco Cieco da Ferrara, author of the Mambriano, has been an enigmatic figure in Italian literature. It is strange that so little is known of this important intermediary between Boiardo and Ariosto. Long after his death, it is true, some definite but extravagant things were written about him by literary men who probably felt the need of dressing up the poor poet: he was an eminent jurist, a theologian and philosopher. But we know only Cieco the minstrel, and common sense would question the truth of these assertions. Again, almost a hundred years after his death, the family name of Bello was bestowed upon Cieco by Francesco Buonamici, a philosopher and astronomer whose information about Italian literary matters was scant and inaccurate. Although scholars like Rua have followed the Bello clue without success, this cognomen has come down into our library catalogues and even into Rua's own edition of the Mambriano, Would it not be good sense to dismiss the Bello christening as the tardy and offhand mistake of an astrologer?

Napier’s Method as a Basis for the Theory of Logarithms

The customary school method of dealing with logarithms (i.e. the initial definition : if ax=N then …) has one great defect : it gives no lead whatever towards the higher theory of logarithms, nor even towards methods for calculating them. “How shall we introduce our sixth form girls to the theory?” a mistress recently asked; “it seems to come like a bolt from the blue.” Klein has some true and forcible things to say on the subject [Elementar Mathematik vom höheren Standpunkte aus, (3 ed. 1924) I, p. 155 et seq.] from among which a sentence or two may be quoted.