Scott MacDonald

This volume is an important supplement to the two volumes in the series of Cambridge Histories covering the philosophy of the Middle Ages. Dronke's book, which adopts the format of the latter volume, is intended to fill the gap between them. It contains sixteen contributions by fifteen scholars. The contributions are arranged in four parts. The four essays in part 1, "Background," provide useful summaries of the intellectual inheritance that provides the cultural environment for what has been called the twelfth-century renaissance. These essays give us, for the first time I think, a clear and reasonably broad account of the historical and philosophical relations between twelfth-century thinkers and ancient thought. Part 2, "New Perspectives," contains four chapters, one on twelfth-century scientific speculations, one on the grammatical, logical, and semantic issues that grew out of interest in grammar, and two on logic during the period. These chapters are the most exciting in the book: they succeed in showing us not only some of what is new and distinctive in twelfth-century thought but also in taking us to the frontiers of some of the philosophically most interesting current research. Fredborg's "Speculative Grammar" and Jacobi's "Logic : The Later Twelfth Century" uncover some of the strange and intriguing roots of characteristically medieval developments in logic: issues such as the properties of terms, the theory of supposition, and fallacies; and methods such as the use of sophismata and instantiae.

Aquinas argues that practical reasoning requires foundations: first practical principles (ultimate ends) grasped by us per se from which deliberation proceeds. Contrary to the thesis of an important paper of Terence Irwin's, I deny that Aquinas advances two inconsistent conceptions of the scope of deliberation and, correspondingly, two inconsistent accounts of the content of the first practical principles presupposed by deliberation. On my account, Aquinas consistently takes first practical principles to be highly abstract, general, or formal ends, ends subject to specification and determination by a process of reasoning. Aquinas therefore gives deliberation wide scope, allowing (indeed, requiring) it not only to settle for us the things that are for the sake of our ends but also to engage in determining in important respects what our ends are. Accordingly, I conclude that Aquinas's foundations in ethics are “thin.” Our natural grasp of first practical principles gives us very little in the way substantive ethical principles.

This issue of MedievalPhilosophyandTheology is atypical in that it contains a single work by a single philosopher and scholar. Norman Kretzmann, the author of the work here presented, was one of the founders of this journal and served as the chair of its editorial board from the journal’s inception until his untimely death in 1998. His intimate association with MedievalPhilosophyandTheology and his dedication to its mission makes the journal an entirely appropriate vehicle for the publication of the work that filled the last year of his life