Page 4, 20th January 1939

20th January 1939

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Page 4, 20th January 1939 — Philosophy
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Philosophy

Watch Western Thought Grow
The Unity of Philosophical Experience. By Etienne Gilson. (Shoed and Ward, I Os. ed.) Reviewed by THOMAS OTLBY, O.F.
-NOT a few people nowadays would agree that philosophy is like putting on blue glasses and going into a dark room to look for a black cat —only the cat isn't there. The general reader sometimes has the feeling, and so has the ecclesiastical student about to embark on theology after his coarse of philosophy. So much piling up of technicalities, and so little to show for it : the mountains hare iahotired and brought forth not even a mouse. The tale is one of obscurity and contradiction, with some of the greatest minds arriving at a learned ignorance and Hegel sombrely remarking on his death-bed : " Only one man 'understood Int, and he did not understand me (alter."
Yet the dying of philosophy has been regularly attended by its revival. According to Professor Gilson, the first law to be inferred from philosophical experience is that philosophy always buries its undertakers. To our present weariness it seems likely that some /1CM., philosophical dogmatism is now at hand : Marxism. for all its crudeness, shows a passion for reality lacking in the academies. Man is incurably metaphysical, and is always trying to carry his mind beyond the particular sciences to their ultimate ground.
It is here that the history of philosophy can be more suggestive of hope than of discouragement. Far from being a science long since exhausted, metaphysics itself has scarcely been tried.. What passed by its name was often something else, and it is well to enquire whether the misadventures that have befallen European thought have not in fact been due to this substitution.
THE purpose of these Harvard Lee1 tures is to show how recurrently the metaphysical pitch has been queered. Beginning with Abelard's attempt to obtain philosophy from pure logic, they go on to consider the opposite reaction into philosophy as a mere hanger-on of revealed theology and the breakdown of medieval philosophy after Ockham'e reduction of it to an empirical description of our ways Lf knowing.
Then comes the Cartesian experiment. Here also Professor Gilson is a great authority. His judgment is severe. "There is more than one excuse for being a Descartes, but there is no excuse whatsoever for being a Cartesian." He observes the intrusion of mathematics and traces the development of a mentalism cut away from its living tissue, and its failure to withstand the criticisms of Loeke and Hume.
The third section, on the modern experiment, starts with Kant. The author will not have us overawed by that great name. Appetite comes to displace mind, romantic and liberal at that, but ruthless and totalitarian in the end. With Comte philosophy is translated into sociology, and this still generally persists. It is not without point that the canon of positivism was completed on the day dedicated in the Comtist calendar to the highly inriividual figure of Rabelais.
THIS history of the formative in fluences in Western thought is written with sympathy and humour. It is the product of a mind both resilient and tough; secure, not in its pride of wisdom, but in its love of wisdom; possessed by the perennial philosophy which St. Thomas articulated in the thirteenth century and which our times need.
Professor Gilson is a Christian and a philosopher who has no need to shout to keep his courage up.
AUGUSTINIAN COMPARISONS
Saint Augustine and Fre-nch Classical Thought. By Nigel Abercrombie. (Humphrey Milford, 8s. 6d.)
Reviewed by GERALD VANN, O.P.
THE author discusses, after a preliminary survey of Augustinian ethics, the similarities between the saint's teaching and the thought of Montaigne, Descartes and Pascal. Apart Irons questions incidental to the main theme, such as the author's divergence from Gilson on Auguetine's use of the cogito, there are two main points which one would raise. The first is that there Is no review of the difference between the teaching of Augustine himself and that of the medieval Augustinians. The second is that the Augustinian and Thornist peychologies seemed to be viewed as though they were both scientific disciplines, alike in method and scope, but differing in conclusions; the likeness between the Augustinian psychology and the Thomist mystical psychology is not adverted to (the latter is not mentioned in the resume of Thornist psychology at all). and the two Doctors are thus set in an opposition which Is unjustifiable, important though their divergencies are in other matters.
These criticisms leave untouched the positive value of the book: the cornparisone, text for text, between these thinkers are useful indeed for anyone studying either the work of the three French philosophers, or the checkered history of Augustinianism itself.




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