Paul Richard Blum

Studies on Early Modern Aristotelianism

In Studies in Early Modern Aristotelianism Paul Richard Blum shows the Aristotelian profile of modern philosophy. Philosophy, sciences mathematics, metaphysics and theology under Jesuit leadership mark the difference of subject-centered modernity from ‘teachable’ school philosophy.

The Jesuits and Italian Universities 1548–1773

the discovery of Monitor’s wreck and the partial salvage effort. Part 2 of “Our Little Monitor,” the remaining six chapters of the book, is a “documentary record” through which the authors present an edited collection of correspondence from various aspects of Monitor’s existence (179). The authors include reports, logs, mail, and other similar material from escort ships, battle witnesses, naval administrators, engineers, surgeons, and President Lincoln. The correspondence is presented in roughly chronological order from Monitor’s arrival at Hampton Roads through battle with CSS Virginia, the battle’s aftermath, and Monitor’s sinking. Holloway and White have not radically shifted the narratives of the figures that loom largest around Monitor’s brief lifespan during the Civil War; however, they have done a great service to the historical community in drawing a vast wealth of sources about the ship to the surface. Some of those that served aboard Monitor, such as paymaster William F. Keeler and sailor George Geer, have edited volumes already dedicated to them, such as Robert W Daly’s Aboard the USS Monitor: 1862: The Letters of Acting Paymaster William Frederick Keeler, U.S. Navy, to his wife Anna (US Naval Institute 1964), and William Marvel’s The Monitor Chronicles: One Sailor’s Account. Today’s Campaign to Recover the Civil War Wreck (Simon & Schuster 2000). The authors of “Our Little Monitor” have gone beyond an edited volume and produced an accessible narrative intertwined with primary sources in a way that will give scholars a new depth of detail on circumstances from the ship’s inception to its recovery, and the general reader gets far more than just a glimpse behind the iron plate.

How to think with the head of another? The historical dimension of philosophical problems

In his autobiography, R.G. Collingwood describes thinking as a relation between question and answer. Embarking from the example of a particularly ugly statue, he formulates the conjecture that this object only seems ugly because the viewer does not recognize the intention of the artist and cannot know whether this intention might have been expressed successfully. From this, he deduces that one cannot figure out by the mere study of spoken or written statements what anyone thinks, but rather one must also know the question behind what was said or written, that was intended to be answered. Collingwood applies this type of argumentation to history and philosophy. For him philosophical problems “as well as their proposed solutions had their own history.” Consequently, “we only know what the problem was by arguing back from the solution.” From this, he draws the radical conclusion (with which he not only ruffled the feathers of his Anglo-Saxon fellowmen but for which also their heirs today would declare him incompetent), namely “For me, then, there were not two separate sets of questions to be asked, one historical and one philosophical... There was one set only, historical.” From this, we can conclude that to understand a philosophical thesis always means as much as to interpret it historically, insofar as it is to be read as the answer to a question posed by the author. Whoever thinks that Kant’s thesis, that it is the human mind that prescribes its laws to Nature (Prolegomena § 36), is nonsense, must read the main question of the essay along with his argumentation over again. And if the reader is still resenting the paradox, he should note that Kant explicitly anticipated that.

Platonic References in Pererius’s Comments on the Bible

Benedictus Pererius as a 16th-century Jesuit integrated Platonic and Neo-Platonic sources in his philosophical and theological works as long as they were compatible with Catholic theology. His commentary on Genesis and his theological disputations on St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans gave occasions to calibrate philosophy against theology. Pererius judges that pagan thinkers may be laudable for acknowledging the existence of God but cautions Christian readers as to the orthodoxy of such findings. Against the Protestant literalist interpretation of the Bible at the expense of philosophical theory of nature Pererius dealt with the questions of immortality and of the pagan notions of divinity and examined the role of philosophical heroes like Socrates and Hermes. Thus he welcomed philosophy as a potential source of religious thinking.

How to Deal with Muslims? Raymond Lull and Ignatius of Loyola

As a small contribution to the topic of the relationship between Christians and Muslims, this chapter exploits two sources that shed light on it from a late medieval and a Renaissance angle. One is Raymond Lulls Vita coetanea and the other is Ignatius of Loyolas autobiography, which was originally referred to as Acta P. Ignatii . The Saracens allegation stands in stark contrast with the theological interpretation of what is known as kenosis, which according to Lull is inversely proportionate to mans arrogance. Elsewhere, Lull emphasizes that God became incarnate not for the sake of human redemption, as often expected, but rather for the sake of self-revelation and consequent love. According to Michael Dougherty, it is a pattern of the Vita coetanea that Lull ascribes, or even imputes, the solution of moral dilemmas to divine intervention. Keywords: Acta P. Ignatii ; Christians; Ignatius of Loyola; Muslims; Raymond Lull; Vita coetanea

Rhetoric is the Home of the Transcendent: Ernesto Grassi's Response to Heidegger's Attack on Humanism

We are still far from pondering the essence of action decidedly enough. We view action only as effecting an effect. Its effectiveness and reality is assessed according to its utility. Yet, the essence of action is performing. To perform means: to unfold something into the fullness of its essence, to conduct it into this fullness: producere. Hence performable is essentially only what is already there. What ‘is’, first of all, is Being. Thinking performs the relation of Being to the essence of man. It does not make or effectuate this relation. Thinking renders and offers [this relation] to Being only as what is committed to it from Being. This offering consists in Being to be uttered in thinking. Language is the home of Being. In its housing man is at home.

The Historiographical Concept ‘System of Philosophy’: Its Origin, Nature, Influence, and Legitimacy

of Letters as a precursor to an ultimately triumphant sensibility and style of thought. Through Huet, Shelford offers a corrective to this view which should have wide implications. It must be said that these implications would have resonated more effectively if she had engaged some of the more provocative analyses of literature and learning in the seventeenth century, such as those of Alain Viala or Reinhart Koselleck.3 Still, this is a valuable study which, like all wellresearched works, repays close reading.

Moral Philosophy on the Threshold of Modernity (review)

literature: “The trope of the Frenchified English person, who has lost his or her own national identity in his obsession with French fashion, is common” (146). Disease, Hentschell explains, is expressed through the comportment of foreign clothing; Harris is equally interested in the relationship between commodity and disease. While the introduction works to situate the volume within broader contexts, individual essays do not always engage fully with scrutinizing the now-substantial body of scholarship on humoralism, or prior literary criticism that one might wish to find in a collection about the representation of disease in early modern England and Europe written by both literary-oriented critics and historians; however, the clear strength of Sins of the Flesh is its breadth of illustrative material and methodological approaches to “reading this disease,” which, Siena reminds us, “is a complex process” (13) indeed. KAARA L. PETERSON Miami University of Ohio

An interview with Stanislav Sousedík on the Czech Republic before and after Charta 77

Abstract PB: Paul Richard Blum/SS: Stanislav Sousedík

Atonement before guilt: The end of history and the endings of mystery stories

Abstract Extract The ending of a story is crucial to the meaning of that story, producing a state of mind that liberates the significance. This does not necessarily mean that something is now clear that was not clear before, since a word of explanation at the beginning or in the middle would have brought about an insight that is gained only by the end. Johann Peter Hebel tells us about two peasants on their way to market. The rich one promises the poorer fellow to give him a cow if he agrees to swallow a frog. When the poor man has gobbled half of it, he promises the rich one that he will renounce his right to the cow if he will eat the rest of the frog. At the end both men ask themselves why they have swallowed a frog. And that is the question after the narration of a story. The essential thing is not the reestablishment of balance, whatever intricacies first disturbed it (by the way, the rich man stays rich and the poor man stays poor). The sense of this story is that only at the end can both men grasp the non-sense of their discourse. The clarity achieved by the end of a story is not a logical transparency, but rather an awareness of the intricate quality of the situation described. The guilt appears only at the end — the whole story was, from the beginning, an anticipated atonement.