William A. Frank

Ludwig Wittgenstein concludes his Tractatus with the injunction, "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence." As the concluding proposition of a tersely written, tightly organized work, the reader would expect it to have a strong bite. Yet the statement has been variously ignored, dismissed, and misunderstood, interpreted as the inspired words of a mystic or as the final banishing of metaphysics from philosophical discourse. It is with the help of Janik and Toulmin’s work that it becomes clear how the proposition serves as the crown to a book which Wittgenstein maintained was primarily an ethical work. In presenting the Viennese Weltanshauung of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, there emerges the picture of a society where appearances ruled in all areas of cultural life, in the government, and in the arts. Viennese society was characterized by a vast impotent bureaucracy, the Strauss waltz, and the feutillion. The leader in the inevitable reaction was Karl Kraus. He instigated a critique of Viennese society through an ingenious and refined use of cultural modes of expression. Along with him, leaders emerged for each of the special arts, language, music, architecture, painting, sculpture, who, in their own particular role, tried to restore truth and responsibility to the affairs of men. The development of the characters and the issues involved make this book important. Of lesser value, unfortunately, are the chapters dealing specifically with the work of Wittgenstein, who is represented as one of the emergent leaders. Although we are rhetorically persuaded that his talk of "simples," "representation," "depicting," or "language games" is tied up with the critique of a fundamentally sophistical intellectualism, we are not led on to seeing how the critique was carried out.—W. A. F.

With this book Allan Wolter makes available the essential writings of Duns Scotus on the will and morality. The book fills a major lacuna in medieval and Scotistic studies. In making the book Wolter tells us that his primary purpose was twofold. First of all, he wished to "correct common misconceptions that arose because of [Scotus's] voluntarist notion of God's relationship to creatures". The means he chose toward this therapeutic end in the history of philosophy is simply a matter of putting forth an accurate and complete report of Scotus's teaching. The second purpose was "to show the unity of [Scotus's] ethical system based on right reason". Measured by these criteria, I would judge the book to be remarkably successful. Duns Scotus on Will and Morality gives a complete view of Scotus's ethical system. The selections are made carefully and generously so that the reader can appreciate the fullness of Scotistic moral teachings.

From Marcus Tullius Cicero’s philosophical writings, the author first draws out a modest network of ideas that informs his understanding of what it means to be a good man (vir bonus). Then, he finds in Cicero the idea of a befitting mutuality among four distinctively human capacities: a faculty for inquiry into and love for truth manifest in words and actions (reason); a disposition for the recognition of and attraction to things of worth beyond self-interest (the honorable); an acute sense of one own spheres of responsibility along with facility for speaking and acting appropriately within them (appropriate action), and fostering and extending the bonds of mutual personal relations grounded in justice and benevolence (society). Against the background of deep commitments in modernity to hedonism and autonomous individualism, the author proposes a retrieval of the virtue of the honorable as an attractive alternative.

The work provides a safe edition of Duns Scotus' Quaestiones quodlibetales qq. 16, 17, and 18, together with a commentary that develops Scotus' mature teaching on the will. The intent here is to present a textually accurate and philosophically significant sketch of the Subtle Doctor's quodlibetal teaching on the will. ;To insure a reliable text, an edition of the three questions is generated from three manuscripts judged by the Scotus Commission to be sufficient for the purpose: Munich Staatsbibliothek Clm 8717 , Clm 26309 , and Worcester Cathedral F. 60 . ;The commentary consists of five chapters. The chief task of the first three chapters is to so understand the will that its freedom is compatible with the necessary volition of God's self-love and trinitarian spiration, and the source of the radical contingency in God's love of others and the love of finite agents for any object. In developing the ontology of the will, reference is made to Scotus' Questions on the Metaphysics Book. IX, Q. 15 and Ordinatio I, DD. 38 - 39. ;The teaching on the will's self-mastery, established in the prior chapters, is further emphasized in the fourth. The heart of 0.17 concerns the role of grace and its bearing on the will's freedom and self-determination. Scotus is found to affirm freedom unequivocally denying legitimate play to grace and charity. ;Chapter V casts the issue of free will into the context of moral goodness and right reason. The specific task is to discover the foundation in the will for the imputability of its acts. The interpretation concludes that intrinsic to the will's freedom is the will's innate inclination to justice. ;The net results of the study are a fresh appreciation of the unity of theme in Quodlibet QQ. 16 - 18, provision of a safe edition of the text, and a presentation of Scotus' ontology of the will, taken in its systematic breadth and placed in the lively context of the 14th century quodlibet

This massive study makes an important contribution to the history of philosophy for two reasons. First of all, it stands as the most complete and careful philosophical analysis of Ockham's thought to date. Adams's expositions and analyses will become the gloss which generations of students will have to reckon with as they confront the text of Ockham. Secondly, this work represents an exemplary method of philosophical commentary, one that proves to be a remarkably illuminating way into the mind of a medieval scholastic disputant. Because Ockham's thought is intensely dialectical and argumentative, Adams appropriately exposes his doctrines through an exacting recovery of his argument within its dialogical context. For example, in the crucial chapter 2, "Universals Are Not Things other than Names," we come to understand Ockham's nominalism as it emerges from his rejection of moderate realism; Adams presents this rejection through a reconstruction of Ockham's encounter with the living tradition of Aquinas, Scotus, Walter Burleigh, William of Alnwick, Nervaeus Natalis, and Henry of Harclay. As the dialectic proceeds from figure to figure, the issue of the universal reshapes itself with great sophistication. Adams's formidable analytic powers and her sharp focus on the key philosophical issue enable her to succeed in this method. The reader also gets the sense that Adams herself believes one can come to truth through philosophical argument, and not just the truth of what Ockham taught but the truth of what he sought. This earnestness enables her to keep a fix on the dialectic's "emerging rule" which becomes the source of unity in what could otherwise degenerate into a bewildering complexity of historical detail or the vanity of analytic logic-chopping.