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<\/span><\/i> Older Reviews<\/a><\/h3>
<\/p>\n

\n\u2018O\u2019Rourke has a reputation as a first-rank scholar of philosophy.\u2019 (Encyclopaedia of Ireland<\/em>)<\/p>\n

\u2018Dr O\u2019Rourke is a scholar and a philosopher of high distinction.\u2019 (Alasdair MacIntyre)<\/p>\n

Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas<\/em>: <\/strong>\u2018Dr O\u2019Rourke\u2019s book Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas<\/em> is the definitive statement of the relevant body of philosophical and interpretative arguments. It is a remarkable achievement \u2026 This is one of the two or three most important books on Aquinas published in the last fifty years.\u2019 (Alasdair MacIntyre)<\/p>\n

\u2018After I had written the above, my attention was called to what seems to me the best and most thorough treatment of this whole question of the self-diffusiveness of the good, with the most abundant textual grounding, of any I have seen. This is the recent excellent study by Fran O\u2019Rourke, of University College Dublin, entitled Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas<\/em>. The author\u2019s exposition of Aquinas\u2019s position seems to me quite solid and well backed up.\u2019 (W. Norris Clarke, Fordham University)<\/p>\n

\u2018The scholarship of the author, who has a command of languages that will put almost any researcher in our century to shame, leaves nothing to be desired. Although the argumentation of the book is subtle and profoundly conceived, it is stated with the most lucid and compelling clarity. The book was a labour of love and is certain to remain for many decades – or more – the standard work in an extraordinarily difficult area of the history of metaphysics.\u2019 (International Journal of Philosophical Studies<\/em>)<\/p>\n

\u2018We should be grateful to Fran O\u2019Rourke for developing the question in this clear and solid work, grounded on precise analyses . . . In a masterly fashion, the author exposes the decisive influence of Dionysius in the genesis of the thomist conception of being\u2019 (Revue Thomiste<\/em>).<\/p>\n

\u2018The book\u2019s footnotes constitute a terrific, topically arranged guide to the primary sources.\u2019 (Speculum<\/em>, USA).<\/p>\n

\u2018This valuable work . . . is meritorious not only for its sensitive appraisal of Dionysius\u2019s own doctrines and Aquinas\u2019s critical assimilation of them, but also because of the evident effort expended to present a global, yet accurate portrayal of Dionysius's principles and viae as developed by Aquinas . . . This latter is excellently described . . . In this work of such high quality . . . So profoundly addressed in this work . . .\u2019 (Review of Metaphysics<\/em>).<\/p>\n

\u2018A truly magnificent study.\u2019 (C. Vansteenkiste, Angelicum<\/em>).<\/p>\n

\u2018The present book fills a definite gap \u2026 a splendid study \u2026 His clear and enthusiastic style of writing (rare in volumes belonging to the series in which it appears, most of which, scholarly though they often are, are mind-blowingly boring to read) does as much as his scholarship to indicate that what he is writing about is not to be treated lightly.\u2019 (New Blackfriars<\/em>).<\/p>\n

\u2018A very rich work.\u2019 Werner Beierwaltes, Emeritus Professor, University of Munich, Honorary Member, Royal Irish Academy.<\/p>\n

Allwisest Stagyrite<\/em><\/strong>: \u2018Fran O\u2019Rourke\u2019s \u201cAllwisest Stagyrite\u201d is a most informative and far-reaching study of Joyce\u2019s Paris-Pola notebook as evidence of his recourse to Aristotle.\u2019 (Denis Donoghue).<\/p>\n

\u2018\u201cAllwisest Stagyrite\u201d \u2026 is an excellent brief introduction to Joyce\u2019s use of Aristotle \u2026 Identifying the source of each of Joyce\u2019s quotations in Aristotle\u2019s De Anima<\/em> or Metaphysics<\/em> and analyzing each one in terms of its contents and Joyce\u2019s use, if any, of the material, O\u2019Rourke provides a concise and clear introduction to Aristotle\u2019s ideas both on their own and as Joyce understood and used them. He also succeeds in elucidating \u2013 more successfully than in any other study I am aware of \u2013 some of the most notoriously difficult passages in Ulysses. \u201cAllwisest Stagyrite\u201d is a very valuable contribution to Joyce studies, one to which I will often return myself and to which I will frequently send bewildered students who are desperate for some guidance in understanding Joyce\u2019s \u2013 and his character Stephen Dedalus\u2019s \u2013 Aristotelian thinking.\u2019 (Michael Groden).<\/p>\n

\u2018The significance of Aristotle for Joyce has always been known, but only in vague, general way. We now have a profound and detailed study of Joyce\u2019s engagement, which is lucid and informative and so a great help for Joyce scholarship.\u2019 (Fritz Senn)<\/p>\n

\u2018This project demanded the expertise of a professional student of ancient and medieval philosophy, with a wide linguistic and cultural background, and a thorough knowledge of Joyce\u2019s hyper-allusive texts. Few scholars have that combination of training and talent.\u2019 (Joseph Schork).<\/p>\n

\u201cUnity in Aquinas\u2019 Commentary on the Liber de causis<\/em>\u201d<\/strong>: \u201cFran O\u2019Rourke\u2019s \u2018Unity in Aquinas\u2019 Commentary on the Liber de causis<\/em>\u2019 is the most penetrating, thorough and insightful account of the importance of the notion of unity in this work by Aquinas in relation to the De causis<\/em> itself and its sources in Proclus and Plotinus to appear in print to date. His account is grounded in impressive and careful analysis and research and is thoughtfully documented in notes for scholars who might wish to pursue the issues in detail.\u201d (Richard C. Taylor, Marquette University).<\/p>\n

\u201cAristotle and the Metaphysics of Evolution\u201d<\/strong>: \u201cAs timely as it is profound. O\u2019Rourke gets to the fundamental issues in a clear and convincing manner.\u201d (Editor, Review of Metaphysics<\/em>).<\/p>\n

\u2018Excellent Article!\u2019 (Anthony Preus, SUNY).<\/p>\n

\u201cSincere thanks for your excellent article on \u2018Aristotle and the Metaphysics of Evolution\u2019. It is very fitting to make a bridge from Aristotle to modern evolutionary theory. Developing the thoughts of Ernst Mayr, you have especially succeeded in freeing the Aristotelian notion of form from many modern misunderstandings, and linking it with the modern concept of structure. Hearty congratulations!\u201d (Wolfgang Kullman).<\/p>\n

\u201cAristotle and Metaphor\u201d<\/strong>: \u201cExcellent study. The analysis of metaphor presents both the rich flexibility of language and its paradoxical limitations.\u201d (Editor, Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium in Ancient Philosophy<\/em>).<\/p>\n

\u201cIn general, I find the article to be clear, persuasive, and informative. The author also writes in a marvelously engaging style that illuminates the concept of metaphor, and expresses even in its own form the power of metaphor. Particularly strong are the sections on the composite nature of man and the way in which metaphor binds this composite together, as well as the importance of activity to metaphor. The paper does more than offer an exposition of the background to Aristotle\u2019s ideas about metaphor; it also engages in the play of metaphor itself. I think that very few changes are necessary.\u201d (Anonymous reader\u2019s report).<\/p>\n

\u2018Jacques Maritain and Plato\u2019<\/strong>: \u201cAny reader will be impressed by the careful scholarship and exhaustive scholarship that characterizes this article. In addition to making an original and clear contribution on an important issue in both the history of philosophy and in metaphysics, it is written in a lucid and a highly literary style.\u201d (Reader\u2019s Report).<\/p>\n

\u2018Aquinas and Platonism\u2019<\/strong>: \u201cI think the Fran O\u2019Rourke paper is absolutely excellent; I have given my much-marked copy to NN (who of course will not cite it until he sees it in print).\u201d (Fergus Kerr).<\/p>\n

\u2018The two most fascinating chapters here are those by David Burrell and Fran O\u2019Rourke\u2026\u00a0 O\u2019Rourke\u2019s article is now the best short introduction to its theme, Aquinas and Platonism. Its strength lies in adopting a speculative rather than a historical approach, moving beyond a \u2018sources and influences\u2019 kind of hermeneutic, to one where the distinction between a position adopted and the reasons why it is adopted is crucial This allows for a more nuanced positioning of Aquinas in relation to the Platonist tradition \u2026\u2019 (Review, New Blackfriars<\/em>, 2005).<\/p>\n

\u2018The Gift of Being: Aquinas and Heidegger\u2019<\/strong>: \u201cIn a penetrating study of the gift of being, Fran O'Rourke focuses on the contrasting perspectives of Heidegger and Aquinas.\u201d (Armand Maurer, Toronto, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly<\/em>).<\/p>\n

\u2018Virtus Essendi: Intensive Being in Pseudo-Dionysius and Aquinas\u2019<\/strong>: \u201cA most distinguished survey of the question of the influence of the Dionysian writings on Aquinas, going, like Fabro, to the fundamental matter and beautifully clear and well documented.\u201d (A.H. Armstrong).<\/p>\n

\u2018A serious and convincing work which deserves to be known by all who are interested in the radical metaphysics of Aquinas.\u2019 (Cornelio Fabro)<\/p>\n

\u2018Being and Non-Being in Pseudo-Dionysius\u2019<\/strong>: \u2018Thomists should be grateful for the excellence of O\u2019Rourke\u2019s article\u2019. (Angelicum<\/em>, Rome).<\/p>\n

Recommendation from Professor Declan Kiberd, for UCD President\u2019s Award <\/strong>(extracts)<\/p>\n

Dr O\u2019Rourke is an outstanding candidate for a President\u2019s Award. I have come to know him over many years through his wonderful work for both the Summer School and then the Joyce School. In the latter context, I became a student of some of his lectures and writings on the classical and scholastic sources for Joyce\u2019s writings and thought\u2014to such a degree that I would now consider Dr O\u2019Rourke one of the major global authorities on this rich and developing subject.<\/p>\n

The young James Joyce was not just a student of Aristotle but a disciple as well; and Dr O\u2019Rourke in the National Library monograph Allwisest Stagyrite<\/em> traces thirty-one major quotations across the Dubliner\u2019s oeuvre. He combines a scholar\u2019s understanding of each source with a real imaginative feeling for the contexts of the quotations in Joyce\u2019s work, producing a narrative of patient yet audacious scholarship. In this a true intrepidity of mind is matched by sound philosophic scruple. The study adds much to experts\u2019 reading of key passages, while at the same time being of practical help to students. One can ask no more of scholarly writing.<\/p>\n

Dr O\u2019Rourke\u2019s work on Aristotle offers in the most exact and disciplined language a deeply imaginative analysis of the ways in which Joyce responded to the works of Aristotle and, in the very act of applying these ideas, came up against their limits. His work in this area, part of the Bloomsday lectures, is original, incisive, clear and yet completely imagined. Dr O\u2019Rourke had offered convincing evidence that Joyce used the handbooks of Stonyhurst Jesuits in order to mediate the ideas of Aristotle via Aquinas. He will now provide a detailed documentation of all references from both Aristotle (mainly in Ulysses<\/em>) and Aquinas (mainly in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man<\/em>). Dr O\u2019Rourke believes that an Aristotelian system of correspondences may underlie Ulysses<\/em>\u2014this is an audacious but very possible interpretation, well worthy of further study. Also of interest is the fact that the older Joyce became more critical of these thinkers who had entranced him in youth\u2014Dr O\u2019Rourke may well be the very first major classical scholar to document the process of that disillusion. Certainly, both the Socratic and scholastic methods applied by Stephen in his Hamlet theory in the Library chapter of Ulysses<\/em> are revealed as inadequate bases from which to solve his own life problems, which raises the important question of whether Joyce found his own education impressive but impractical.<\/p>\n

Dr O\u2019Rourke has an enviable record of publication in his own field, on which others will more valuably depose.<\/p>\n

Recommendation from Professor Michael Paul Gillespie (Marquette University)<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2018Since William Noon, S.J., published his groundbreaking study on the impact of Scholasticism on the life and writings of James Joyce, Joyce and Aquinas, there has been a dearth of analysis of the formative impact of classical philosophy on that writer. Dr. Fran O\u2019Rourke, a pre-eminent philosopher and a Joyce scholar of proven worth, now proposes to offset that disparity.\u00a0 I can think of no individual more qualified as a scholar or more capable as a critic to undertake such a task. I am both delighted and honored to have the opportunity to endorse Dr. O\u2019Rourke\u2019s work, and in the paragraphs that follow I hope to be able to convey in detail the reasons for the high esteem in which I hold his writing and the enthusiasm I feel for this project.<\/p>\n

Classical philosophy formed the centerpiece of the Jesuit education that shaped Joyce\u2019s intellectual growth. Unfortunately, in the years since the publication of Father Noon\u2019s book, fewer Joyceans have had the benefit of a broad liberal education that would give them the credentials to continue the work done by Noon. Over the past few decades an occasional article has appeared that has poked around the edges of the question of the impact of Aristotelian philosophy, but it was not until O\u2019Rourke took up the topic that commentaries well-grounded in traditional philosophy and highlighted by exceptional interpretive skills began to offer important insights into the intellectual world that shaped Joyce\u2019s thinking, perceiving, and writing.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Rourke has an impressive record of publication in Philosophy which demonstrates his skills as a scholar and his effectiveness as a writer. Diverse articles display an intimate familiarity with Aristotle\u2019s writings. Three of these indicate a detailed knowledge of the Poetics and Rhetoric, both of which have special importance for Joyce; they exhibit moreover a keen appreciation of the complex relationship between literature and philosophy, which is a prerequisite for his proposed project. Even to the non-philosopher, the essay \u201cAristotle and the Metaphysics of Evolution\u201d, published in a leading international journal, clearly exhibits an encyclopedic knowledge of the Aristotelian corpus. Likewise, his understanding of the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas has been well recognized.\u00a0 O\u2019Rourke\u2019s book, Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas<\/em>, has been singled out for praise by Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the foremost philosophers in the area.\u00a0 MacIntyre has described Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas<\/em> as \u201cone of the two or three most important books on Aquinas published in the last fifty years.\u201d This encomium strikes me as particularly important in terms of this proposal since Pseudo-Dionysius is the source of Aquinas\u2019 theory of aesthetics, which are decisive for Joyce.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Rourke\u2019s specific work on Joyce reinforces one\u2019s sense of his unique qualifications for this important study.\u00a0 His 2004 lecture to the UCD Arts Faculty, summarized at the Dublin Joyce Symposium, Joyce and Aristotle, stands as a watershed in understanding the vital connection between these two thinkers.\u00a0 O\u2019Rourke convincingly outlines the longstanding esteem that Joyce felt for the work of Aristotle by a painstaking explanation of how intimately Aristotelian ideals informed the intellectual life of Joyce\u2019s schooling.\u00a0 As O\u2019Rourke perceptively demonstrates, this translates quite directly into a shaping impact on Joyce\u2019s creative process.\u00a0 Further, O\u2019Rourke does not trace Aristotelian allusions in Joyce with the mind-numbing determination that one finds in lesser critics.\u00a0 He writes sensitively on the transformative process that Aristotle\u2019s views undergo through their incorporation into Joyce\u2019s creative efforts.<\/p>\n

In tandem with this lecture, O\u2019Rourke produced a very important reference guide both to Joyce\u2019s interest in Aristotle and to the early stages of Joyce\u2019s creative process.\u00a0 \u2018Allwisest Stagyrite\u2019 is a monograph, published by the National Library of Ireland, examining the thirty-one quotations found in a notebook used by Joyce in 1903 and 1904.\u00a0 It identifies for the first time Joyce\u2019s allusions to most of the quotations in Ulysses and Portrait, which could only be done by someone very familiar both with Joyce and Aristotle. O\u2019Rourke\u2019s scholarly identifications and erudite commentaries present Joyceans like myself, with only a fragmentary knowledge of Aristotle and his works, with a detailed look at how writings of that ancient philosopher animated the creative impulses of the young writer.<\/p>\n

This work forms the prelude to the truly important project that O\u2019Rourke now proposes.\u00a0 Although Kevin Sullivan\u2019s Joyce among the Jesuits<\/em> (1958) and Bruce Bradley\u2019s James Joyce\u2019s Schooldays<\/em> (1983) have touched on the impact of a Jesuit education on Joyce, neither study has the depth or concentration that O\u2019Rourke\u2019s proposal outlines. Joseph Schork and Brian Arkins have touched on classical influences in Joyce, but neither has examined the topic in relation to Jesuit pedagogy. Tracing the insinuation of Aristotelian and Aquinan ideas into the consciousness of Joyce, through the Stoneyhurst manuals and by other means, will concentrate attention upon a central force in Joyce\u2019s intellectual maturation. O\u2019Rourke\u2019s fluency in a range of languages\u2014Greek, Latin, Irish, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, and German\u2014and his sensitive interpretive skills make him uniquely qualified to undertake this project.<\/p>\n

All in all, O\u2019Rourke has distinguished himself as a dedicated student of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Joyce. He has also shown himself to be a dexterous polymath whose particular expertise is not confined to philosophical elements. (He wrote marvelously authoritative notes for a recital of Joycean music that he organized at National Concert Hall during the Dublin Joyce Symposium in 2004. As a member of the audience, I can attest to the power of the entire performance and the lyrical quality of O\u2019Rourke\u2019s tenor.) I understand that many very qualified senior academics will apply for this award. However, I cannot imagine anyone surpassing O\u2019Rourke\u2019s capacity to complete this study in an important and neglected area of research. The Encyclopedia of Ireland<\/em> (2003) notes that \u201cO\u2019Rourke has a reputation as a first-rank scholar,\u201d and everything in his c.v. affirms that view. Furthermore, it is obvious that his work is well underway, and his track record shows his ability to complete complex undertakings of this sort. The findings of his project will greatly enhance both Joyce scholarship and post-graduate education especially in Dublin where O\u2019Rourke teaches. I have no doubt when completed the study will quickly find a publisher and be a welcome addition to the canon of Joyce criticism.<\/p>\n

\n<\/div><\/div><\/div><\/div>

<\/span><\/i> Aristotelian Interpretations<\/a><\/h3>
<\/p>\n

Endorsements<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

\u2018In these splendid essays O\u2019Rourke teaches us how to understand Aristotle\u2019s contemporary relevance in often new and always illuminating ways.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Alasdair MacIntyre, University of Notre Dame<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u2018A refreshingly different collection of essays, generous in its range of reference, acute in mature philosophical judgment, and wearing great learning lightly. The volume is bookended by autobiographical reflections (in which Aristotle\u2019s surprising presence in Irish folk tradition emerges), and by a study of his impact on James Joyce. In between O\u2019Rourke gives us Aristotle whole: metaphysics, natural philosophy, psychology, ethics, aesthetics. This is an Aristotle who still has much to teach and intrigue us.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Malcolm Schofield, University of Cambridge<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u2018In this beautiful collection of essays, O\u2019Rourke combines impeccable scholarship with passionate philosophical engagement. Aristotle lives in the twentyfirst century through books like this.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Lloyd P. Gerson, University of Toronto<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u2018Fran O\u2019Rourke\u2019s interpretations are entirely reliable as presentations of Aristotle\u2019s thought. They have the merit of comparing it both with modern science and today\u2019s philosophy, highlighting its permanent value. The language is clear and accessible; what strikes the reader is the enthusiasm of the author and the freshness of his exposition.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Enrico Berti, University of Padova<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u2018This is not just another collection of scholarly articles, of which there are many, but a personal encounter with Aristotle. It starts with a wonderfully poetic evocation of the author\u2019s childhood as budding Aristotelian; the interpretations, however, are mature and original. O\u2019Rourke does not write for a detached scholarly audience or address dry and abstract themes. His thoughtful and reflective essays, scholarly through and through, display a rare empathy with the ancient philosopher and a sensitivity to themes of personal importance to all readers.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

Carlos Steel, former President, Higher Institute of Philosophy, Leuven<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u2018O\u2019Rourke\u2019s book exemplifies the remarkable synthetic power and attraction of an Aristotelian framework for grasping unity across diverse areas of reality. It also provides a powerful critical tool for assessing metaphysical claims made by contemporary science. It consciously counteracts an understanding of our world as composed not of realities but of relativities\u2026 Aristotelian Investigations <\/i>is a must-read for anyone who wants to discuss contemporary Aristotelianism.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

International Journal of Philosophical Studies<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Reviews by the following are copied below:<\/span><\/p>\n

Arthur Madigan, S.J., Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Dousa, Thomas M<\/span><\/a><\/span>., <\/span>The Catholic Library World<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Angela Curran, Bryn Mawr Classical Review<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Mark Hederman, Studies<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Markus H. Woerner, International Journal of Philosophical Studies<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

James V. Schall, The University Bookman<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Arthur Madigan, S.J., Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews<\/i><\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

This volume brings together ten of Fran O\u2019Rourke\u2019s essays published between 2003 and 2015. Most of these first appeared in edited collections, including three collections published in Athens that might be particularly difficult to obtain. Despite being written for different occasions, the essays exhibit a remarkable unity or consistency of viewpoint. They are not so much a series of interpretations of various Aristotelian texts, as a series of interpretations of philosophical and scientific issues from an Aristotelian point of view.<\/span><\/p>\n

O\u2019Rourke writes in a voice that is both recognizably Aristotelian and distinctively his own. While he is well aware of the exegetical and philosophical work on Aristotle done by (for instance) John Cooper, Terence Irwin, G.E.R. Lloyd, Martha Nussbaum, and Richard Sorabji, his own approach is different, focusing mainly on what the French would call the grandes lignes<\/i> of Aristotle\u2019s philosophy or what we might call his Big Ideas. Where recent work on Aristotle in English for the most part ignores Thomas Aquinas, Aquinas is a strong if unobtrusive presence in this book; the bibliography lists eight of his books and the index gives him 29 entries. For the record, O\u2019Rourke\u2019s first book was Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas<\/i> (Brill, 1992). Readers looking for the latest exegesis of Metaphysics<\/i> Zeta 13, Nicomachean Ethics<\/i> I 7, or similar classic texts may not find what they are looking for in this book. Readers looking for a broadly Aristotelian reflection on contemporary issues are likely to find in it a wealth of stimulating insights<\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Remarkably for someone writing on Aristotle, O\u2019Rourke begins (1-19) with a \u201cPortrait of the Author as a Young Aristotelian,\u201d recounting his childhood experiences of farm life in the Irish midlands, of Galway and Connemara, of hillwalking and sailing in Ireland, of traveling and mountain climbing in Greece. This narrative establishes a closeness to nature that has fostered O\u2019Rourke\u2019s affinity with Aristotle. In this context he then (19-28) raises the curtain on the ten chapters that follow.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 1, \u201cWonder and Universality. Philosophy and Poetry in Aristotle,\u201d explores the many similarities between philosophy and poetry as Aristotle understood them: their universal scope, their origin in wonder, their aim to express \u201cthe elusive mystery of reality\u201d (32). The desire to know the origin of all things, to grasp the totality of the real, lies at the root of poetry and philosophy alike.<\/span><\/p>\n

Following up on this, Chapter 2, \u201cPhilosophy and Poetry in Aristotle. Interpreting and Imitating Nature,\u201d gives an Aristotelian take on the ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy (Republic<\/i> 607b). Where Plato had intensified the quarrel by separating transcendent truth from sense experience, Aristotle grounded the human search for truth on sensible reality, thereby restoring the unity of knowledge and healing the quarrel. Aristotle understands art as an imitation of nature, not in the sense that a work of art is an image of a natural substance, but in the sense that the human creative process imitates natural growth. The goal of art, and in particular the goal of tragic poetry, is to increase our astonishment at what we find in nature.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 3, \u201cHuman Nature and Destiny in Aristotle,\u201d presents a comprehensive survey of Aristotle\u2019s understanding of the human being, drawing on his De anima<\/i>, biological works, Metaphysics<\/i>, Nicomachean Ethics<\/i>, and Politics<\/i>. While some interpreters play down those texts in which Aristotle asserts that human beings are akin to the divine and suggests that the active mind is in some way separate or separable from the body, O\u2019Rourke takes those passages at full strength, but admits that they are not entirely consistent with Aristotle\u2019s insistence on the unity of the human being. Aristotle believes that our human destiny on some level lies beyond our natural state, even though this threatens his unified metaphysical view of the world. \u201cWhile it seems Aristotle hoped to discern in man a cipher of transcendence, an element rising above the stream of biological continuity, he did not fully succeed within the terms of his own philosophy\u201d (85).<\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 4, \u201cKnowledge and Necessity in Aristotle,\u201d surveys the principal senses of necessity that O\u2019Rourke finds in Aristotle: the necessity of the apprehension of the proper sensibles; the necessity of the principle of non-contradiction; the necessity of truth; the necessity that belongs to Aristotelian causation; the necessity of the form or nature present in individuals; and the necessity of the first mover.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 5, \u201cAristotle and the Metaphysics of Metaphor,\u201d argues that the use of metaphor in ordinary speech and in poetry is grounded on the unity in diversity of human nature and of reality generally. The necessary foundation for transferred or metaphorical resemblance is what O\u2019Rourke calls genuine metaphysical analogy. He says, citing Henri Bergson:<\/span><\/p>\n

if we remove from Aristotle\u2019s philosophy everything derived from poetry, religion, and social life, as well as from a somewhat rudimentary physics and biology, we are left with the grand framework of a metaphysics which, he [Bergson] believes, is the natural metaphysics of the human intellect. (121; this view of Bergson\u2019s is also cited at 28, 181, and 235 and is a leitmotif for the collection)<\/span><\/p>\n

This natural metaphysics, O\u2019Rourke suggests, is the best explanation for metaphor.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 6, \u201cAristotle\u2019s Political Anthropology,\u201d explores three interrelated questions. Is the term \u201cpolitical\u201d proper to humans, or does it also apply to animals? The essential meaning of the term is its distinctively human meaning; it applies to ants, bees, and other such animals only in a secondary and derivative way. How can the polis be described as natural if it does not conform to Aristotle\u2019s definition of a nature (phusis<\/i>), an immanent principle of motion and rest? While the polis does not strictly speaking have such a principle, it does have what O\u2019Rourke calls \u201ca defining eidos<\/i> or form\u201d (136-37) that emerges from the natural tendencies of its members. How can the primacy of the polis be reconciled with the fact that its citizens are in some way independent, with autonomous activities and purposes of their own? The polis is prior in the sense that is the necessary condition for its members to live and prosper; without it they could not carry on their activities or carry out their purposes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 7, \u201cAristotle and the Metaphysics of Evolution,\u201d argues at length, and in conversation with Darwin, recent evolutionary biologists such as Ernst Mayr, Stephen Jay Gould, and Richard Dawkins, and scholars of Aristotle\u2019s biology such as David Balme, Allan Gotthelf, and James Lennox, that while Aristotle explicitly rejects the evolution of species, \u201chis philosophy is in many ways eminently receptive to the theory\u201d (145). Aristotle\u2019s metaphysics \u2014 meaning by this his concepts of act and potency, form and finality, the nature of causation and the explanation of chance \u2014 is precisely what theorists of evolution need in order to address the philosophical questions that their theory raises. While the perennial insights of Aristotle\u2019s metaphysics lie beyond the scope of science, including the life sciences, they are important resources for articulating the life sciences.<\/span><\/p>\n

On a more controversial note, Chapter 8, \u201cEvolutionary Ethics. A Metaphysical Evaluation,\u201d offers a critical appreciation, from an Aristotelian point of view, of Edward O. Wilson\u2019s Sociobiology<\/i> and similar works by Michael Ruse and Richard Dawkins. Most fundamentally, \u201csociobiology is incapable of recognizing the central philosophical question of self-existence\u201d (208), the question posed by Camus: is life worth living? And this question cannot be detached from the metaphysical question of why anything at all should exist.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the final analysis, evolutionary ethics is founded upon a biological endless regress in which persons have no ultimacy. Human individuals exist for the exclusive purpose of propagating offspring, whose aim is likewise simply to propagate. To what end? . . . . The activity of reproduction is not itself the foundation of morality. (211)<\/span><\/p>\n

What, then, is the foundation of morality? The answer, O\u2019Rourke suggests, is \u201cthe status of each member of the human species as an individual consciously aware of his or her freedom within the totality of the real, and the inescapable demand to make one\u2019s life personally meaningful, with all the possibilities and limits of our common nature\u201d (211-12).<\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 9, \u201cAristotle and Evolutionary Altruism,\u201d continues the Aristotelian criticism of sociobiology. The target here is the claim that human beings are altruistic because altruistic behavior benefits the human gene pool. This is wrong on two main counts. First, observation of animals does not indicate that their behavior is altruistic; but if we do not observe altruism in animal behavior, the project of explaining altruism as a genetic inheritance is wrongheaded. Second, and more importantly, when selfless altruism is found among human beings, it is found not in some supposed tendency of humans to sacrifice themselves for the sake of their species, but in friendships between virtuous people.<\/span><\/p>\n

Altruism, which it [sociobiology] claims is genetically motivated, is the figleaf providing sociobiology with the appearance of an ethics hitherto difficult to justify within the context of Darwinism. The scandal for traditional ethics has been the problem of evil; the challenge for evolutionary ethics is the fact of goodness, which makes little sense within the struggle for survival. (225)<\/span><\/p>\n

In Chapter 10, \u201cJoyce and Aristotle,\u201d O\u2019Rourke, who is also the author of Allwisest Stagyrite: Joyce\u2019s Quotations from Aristotle<\/i> (National Library of Ireland, 2005), presents a fascinating range of data on Joyce\u2019s youthful education in the works of Aristotle, especially the De anima<\/i> and the Metaphysics<\/i>. He then considers at some length the Aristotelian features of Ulysses<\/i>, in particular the recognition that the universe is characterized by analogy or similarity across diversity, the adherence to the principle that art imitates nature (correctly understood, that artistic process is like natural process), the insistence that beauty and tragedy require a certain magnitude, and the commitment to Aristotelian realism as opposed to Platonic idealism. The story of Stephen Dedalus is the story of an Aristotelian confronting both the radical alternative of Platonism and what O\u2019Rourke calls the modern rejection of self. \u201cAristotelian metaphysics and psychology provide Stephen in Ulysses<\/i> with the vocabulary and concepts he needs to understand himself and to interpret the world\u201d (240).<\/span><\/p>\n

Let me close with some marvelously suggestive<\/b> lines from the Introduction:<\/span><\/p>\n

We are the only animals that can be happy. Other animals have no share in well-being or in purposive living; their purpose is life, that of man is the good life. Morality and happiness are personal; virtue depends upon ourselves. As a result there is no hiatus between \u2018is\u2019 and \u2018ought\u2019: the notion of a \u2018naturalistic fallacy\u2019 is alien. Man\u2019s \u2018is\u2019 is<\/i> already an \u2018ought\u2019, his existence embraces obligation . . . . The distance between \u2018is\u2019 and \u2018ought\u2019 is that between our raw state and the self-project we discern; the dynamism and tension is the freedom experienced as we cover that distance in reflective acts of self-attainment. (26-27)<\/span><\/p>\n

Such is the wonderfully humane Aristotelian vision<\/b> that O\u2019Rourke offers for our consideration<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Dousa, Thomas M<\/span><\/b><\/a><\/span>. <\/span><\/b>The Catholic Library World<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/a><\/span>; Pittsfield<\/span><\/b>\u00a0Vol.\u00a087,\u00a0Iss.\u00a03,\u00a0<\/span><\/b><\/a><\/span> (Mar 2017)<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

In some periods of the past, Aristotle held pride of place in the philosophical firmament as a lodestar for other thinkers. The poet Dante famously characterized the Stagirite as \u201cthe master of those who know,\u201d and Saint Thomas Aquinas referred to him simply as the Philosopher. Within the current philosophical landscape, Aristotle\u2019s thought no longer enjoys the position of preeminence that it did in the past. Yet Aristotle still has much to offer philosophers today, if they have but the willingness to hear his voice and ponder his message. One such listener is Fran O\u2019Rourke, professor emeritus of philosophy at University College Dublin and author of the well-regarded monograph Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas<\/i> (2005). In Aristotelian Interpretations<\/i>, he offers readers ten essays, originally written between 2003 and 2015, that expound and develop various aspects of Aristotle\u2019s philosophy.<\/span><\/p>\n

The book opens with an autobiographically colored introductory essay in which O\u2019Rourke discusses his personal affinity for Aristotle\u2019s attitude to nature and reality, an affinity he traces back to his own experiences growing up in, and coming to know, the Irish countryside. The following two papers explore the similarities and differences between philosophy and poetry in Aristotle, one focusing on the element of wonder shared by these fields and the other on the different ways in which the philosopher and poet imitate nature. The next three essays turn to philosophical anthropology, with a paper on Aristotle\u2019s view of human nature and destiny; epistemology, with an article on his understanding knowledge and necessity; and metaphysics, with a chapter on the metaphysics of metaphor according to Aristotle. The sixth paper, on the political anthropology of Aristotle, discusses the metaphysical basis for his famous characterization of the human being as a \u201cpolitical animal\u201d (zoon politikon<\/i>). The following three essays turn to questions of biology and ethics as they relate to evolution. One lays out the possibility of applying Aristotle\u2019s metaphysical framework to evolution as a biological process, another presents a critique of sociobiological ethics in light of Aristotelian thought, and the third deepens this critique with special reference to the question of whether sociobiological theory adequately explains human motivations for altruistic behavior. The final chapter returns to a Hibernian theme, examining the influence of Aristotle upon the famous modernist Irish writer James Joyce. O\u2019Rourke shows that Aristotle\u2019s philosophy, which Joyce encountered as a student in Dublin and Paris, left a lasting impression on his thought. Eighty pages of endnotes provide ample documentation, while a well-stocked bibliography and excellent indexes round out the volume.<\/span><\/p>\n

The foregoing list of chapters cannot begin to do justice to what is truly a splendid book<\/b>. O\u2019Rourke couches his exceptionally clear exposition and well-considered application of Aristotle\u2019s philosophical ideas in fresh and sprightly prose that reflects his enthusiasm for his subject<\/b>. Although the essays were written over a number of years and for different occasions, the recurrence of certain themes throughout-above all, that of Aristotle\u2019s \u201cunrestricted openness [to] the fulness of reality\u201d (27) as it plays out in his metaphysics and theory of knowledge – gives the volume an intellectual unity and coherence that make it much more than the sum of its parts. Indeed, underlying O\u2019Rourke\u2019s Aristotelian Interpretations<\/i> is a truly integral vision of Aristotle\u2019s thought. This scholarly, yet eminently readable, book will be a marvelous addition to any academic library supporting a program in philosophy<\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Angela Curran, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2018.10.22<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

Fran O\u2019Rourke, a professor at University College, Dublin, writes on a wide range of topics in Aristotle. This collection brings together ten of O\u2019Rourke\u2019s essays, previously published between 2003 and 20015. The volume begins with a personal introduction written for this volume in which O\u2019Rourke reflects on his life growing up in on the Western coast of Ireland and how this upbringing instilled in him a love of philosophy and Aristotle, in particular. The collection ends with a fascinating discussion of the James Joyce-Aristotle connection. The chapters in between engage in a lucid and insightful manner on a host of themes in Aristotle ranging from metaphysics, poetics, ethics, politics, and science.<\/span><\/p>\n

With a volume of previously published work, there is always the danger that an author will bring together essays with no common thread solely for the sake of making his or her work available to a broader audience. Fortunately, with this volume, O\u2019Rourke has chosen essays with, broadly speaking, a common theme. \u201cEach essay is in one way or another motivated by the attitude of marvel that Aristotle recognized as the wellspring of philosophy, which he himself conveys frequently in his writings\u201d (p. 21). As O\u2019Rourke reads Aristotle, wonder or marvel (O\u2019Rourke uses \u201cwonder\u201d and \u201cmarvel\u201d interchangeably as translations of \u201cthauma\u201d) is \u201cespecially revealing of human knowledge and inquiry\u201d (p. 31). By this, O\u2019Rourke seems to mean that the attitude of wonder, which is \u201cthe reflective admiration of that which we know but do not fully comprehend,\u201d is the impetus for knowledge (epist\u0113m\u0113<\/i>) and is even an \u2018incipient knowledge\u2019 (gnosis<\/i>).\u201d For when we marvel at things in nature we become aware that what we are immediately acquainted with surpasses our understanding (p. 31). O\u2019Rourke says that Aristotle\u2019s phrase from the Parts of Animals<\/i>, \u201call things are marvelous,\u201d could serve as the motto for the volume. For, as O\u2019Rourke reads Aristotle, the wondrous or marvelous is for Aristotle the motivating factor behind all areas of inquiry, whether they are philosophical or artistic, ethical or scientific (p. 39).<\/span><\/p>\n

The view that Aristotle thinks that poetry is a source of knowledge is a strong focus of much contemporary analysis of the Poetics<\/i>. O\u2019Rourke contributes to this debate in three chapters in the first part of the book (Chapters 1, \u201cWonder and Universality, Philosophy and Poetry in Aristotle,\u201d 2, \u201cPhilosophy and Poetry in Aristotle: Interpreting and Imitating Nature\u201d and 5, \u201cAristotle and the Metaphysics of Metaphor\u201d), by discussing the role that wonder plays not only in the origins of philosophy but also in poetry. The first two chapters examine the role that wonder and a desire to understand play in explaining the shared work of philosophy and poetry. Both activities share a common origin in the lived experiences of human beings. The desire to understand more fully the items in one\u2019s experiences is the impetus for human beings to do philosophy and to make and appreciate poetry. The best poetic plots \u201cjar and jolt\u201d the viewer\u2019s categories of experience by presenting a series of incidents that are unforeseen, yet shown upon reflection to follow one another, by necessity or probability (p. 35).<\/span><\/p>\n

In Chapter 5, O\u2019Rourke offers an insightful discussion of metaphor\u2019s power to evoke marvel and astonishment. Indeed this chapter is the best illustration of what O\u2019Rourke calls Aristotle\u2019s \u201cmetaphysical\u201d approach to knowledge and inquiry, which is a consistent theme throughout the book. Metaphors make use of analogical reasoning. A good metaphor (for instance, an old man is a “withered stalk\") encourages the listener or reader to search out the common notion that unites two terms (Rhetoric<\/i> 3.10, 1410b18). O\u2019Rourke sees Aristotle as a forerunner of cognitive accounts of metaphor, which stresses the role of metaphor as a tool to discover \u201clikeness in unlikeness\u201d (p. 116) by jolting the mind with the surprise of recognition (p. 115). Thus, O\u2019Rourke sees metaphor as a prime illustration of the metaphysical nature of a human being\u2019s knowledge, even in an everyday context. For in grasping the similarity introduced by the metaphor, the listener goes beyond the confines of immediate experience and moves closer to the metaphysician\u2019s understanding of the similarity between all beings as beings (p. 118).<\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 3 looks at Aristotle\u2019s views on what we can know about human nature. Humans occupy a special role in the natural world as beings possessing logos<\/i>, reason. The capacity for reason distinguishes humans from all other animals (p. 59). O\u2019Rourke\u2019s examination of knowledge in Aristotle leads him to a wide-ranging and interesting discussion of Aristotle\u2019s hylomorphism to explain the relation between body and soul. The problem is that Aristotle also thinks that a human being\u2019s nature contains an element of divinity (p. 84). O\u2019Rourke concludes that the divine and immortal aspect of a human being ultimately threatens Aristotle\u2019s views on the unity of individual human beings as hylomorphic composites of form and matter, and points to the idea that, \u201cthe destiny of Aristotle\u2019s man lies beyond his natural state, and is in some sense beyond his control\u201d (p. 84).<\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 4, \u201cKnowledge and Necessity in Aristotle,\u201d examines the metaphysical foundations of Aristotle\u2019s empiricism. While all knowledge begins with sense experience, understanding is ultimately anchored in a principle that governs truth, the principle of non-contradiction. O\u2019Rourke explores a significant difference between Aristotle and modern empiricists: scientific knowledge is not only universal in scope, but necessary in character, and made possible through explanations of the ultimate causes of primary substances, fixed natural kinds that are ultimately understandable through their final causes (p. 96). Thus, Aristotle\u2019s essentialism is the foundation of his epistemology.<\/span><\/p>\n

O\u2019Rourke considers the often-raised objection to Aristotelian essentialism that not all human beings have the capacity for rationality, for instance, mentally impaired human beings. He maintains that Aristotle can respond by saying that the \u201cnecessity\u201d of humans\u2019 being rational animals is \u201chypothetical\u201d: what is necessarily the case is not that all human beings are rational, but that necessarily, given the adequate and proper circumstances<\/i>, all humans acquire rationality, as \u201can acorn will become an oak tree\u201d (p. 96). \u201cAttainment of an individual\u2019s final immanent purpose is dependent upon the natural conditions being present for its development; this occurs, not by necessity, but for the most part\u201d (p. 96). By extension, a baby human being will become a rational animal, given the appropriate conditions.<\/span><\/p>\n

O\u2019Rourke continues with a discussion of Aristotle\u2019s essentialism in Chapter 6, \u201cAristotle\u2019s Political Anthropology,\u201d which is a fascinating discussion of what is involved in Aristotle\u2019s definition of a human being as a political animal. One central problem concerns how to reconcile the idea that the individual depends on political association to flourish with Aristotle\u2019s view that the best sort of life described in Nicomachean Ethics<\/i> Book 10 consists life of contemplation (the\u014dria<\/i>). O\u2019Rourke addresses this problem by understanding the claim that a human being is a rational animal as a claim about essence. The essence of a human being involves logos<\/i>, the capacity to reason and communicate (1253a10). Logos<\/i>, so understood, can only be fulfilled within a community (p. 142). We need to be part of a polis, then, to develop and exercise the natural and distinctive capacities for discriminating right from wrong and communicating through language. While humans are happiest when contemplating, they nevertheless achieve what is most distinctive about their nature when they participate in the shared life of political association (p. 143).<\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 7, \u201cThe Metaphysics of Evolution,\u201d is a carefully argued essay<\/b> that is grounded in a close reading of Aristotle\u2019s work as well as a familiarity with contemporary criticisms of Aristotle<\/b>. The chapter addresses the important question whether Aristotle\u2019s doctrine of substantial form necessarily excludes evolution. This question is of interest because contemporary critics who maintain that his ideas rest on an outmoded view of biology have dismissed Aristotle\u2019s metaphysics and his theory of scientific explanation. O\u2019Rourke argues that Aristotle would not accept evolution because of his doctrine of the fixity of the species (p. 173). However, O\u2019Rourke argues that Aristotle\u2019s notion of form, \u201cconstrued as the power of constructing new individuals of that form\u201d (p. 172) is compatible with evolution. Heredity is determined at the genetic level, and genes have form (eidos<\/i>), even if this form is also open to mutation (p. 174). Aristotle\u2019s insight about form as the principle that explains the growth and development of an individual can then be seen in modern discussions of genetic form. O\u2019Rourke concludes: \u201cthe principles of his metaphysics acquire new verification and relevance\u201d (p. 174).<\/span><\/p>\n

Chapter 8, \u201cEvolutionary Ethics: A Metaphysical Evaluation\u201d and Chapter Nine, \u201cAristotle and Evolutionary Altruism\u201d present O\u2019Rourke\u2019s view on how Aristotle would respond to contemporary sociobiological discussions of evolutionary ethics. These approaches, such as those found in E. O. Wilson, argue that we are ethical because being so is fitness-enhancing for the species. O\u2019Rourke concludes that Aristotle would reject such an approach to ethics. Aristotle\u2019s ethics offers us reasons why we should want to be moral: being ethical is what makes possible human happiness and flourishing (p. 195). Aristotle\u2019s approach would be pointless if biology is destiny. Ultimately, according to O\u2019Rourke, sociobiological approaches to ethics fail because they do not come to terms with the nature of a human being as a rational being that chooses to fulfill that nature through individual actions that express universal as well as personal values (p. 197).<\/span><\/p>\n

One topic for further debate concerns O\u2019Rourke\u2019s claim that wonder and understanding occupy similar roles in Aristotle\u2019s Metaphysics<\/i> and Poetics<\/i>. This claim is an essential aspect of O\u2019Rourke\u2019s cognitive reading of the Poetics<\/i>, according to which poetry is the source of knowledge about human affairs. Jonathan Lear, a skeptic about the cognitive view, thinks that the relationship between wonder and understanding in the Poetics<\/i> is the opposite of that presented in the Metaphysics<\/i> (Lear, \u201cKatharsis,\u201d in A. O. Rorty, Essays on Aristotle\u2019s Poetics<\/i>, Princeton 1992). Wonder at the natural world gives rise to philosophy and the inquiry into the ultimate nature of things (Metaphysics<\/i> 1.1). However, in the Poetics<\/i> Aristotle says that events are astonishing (thaumaston<\/i>) when they occur \u201ccontrary to expectations but on account of one another\u201d (Poetics<\/i> 9, 1452a4-5). Lear interprets this to mean that it is the understanding that unexpected events occur on account of one another that gives rise to amazement while, in the Metaphysics<\/i>, it is the other way around. O\u2019Rourke seems to concede Lear\u2019s point, but then suggests that amazement can lead to mystery, which leads to inquiry, so there is no problem in thinking that wonder prompts understanding in the same way in these two texts (p. 35).<\/span><\/p>\n

Here I think O\u2019Rourke may be conceding too much ground to Lear, and a stronger response is available to him. When things happen contrary to expectations, this is astonishing, and it produces a desire to understand why the unexpected event occurred. When the plot links incidents via a necessary or probable connection, the audience can reflect on the structure of the plot and come to understand, in retrospect, why the events, while unexpected, were a result of what went before. So, astonishment gives rise to a desire to understand and the search for an explanation, just as Aristotle outlines in Metaphysics<\/i> 1.1.<\/span><\/p>\n

In O\u2019Rourke\u2019s work, a clear picture emerges of the critical role that metaphysics plays in Aristotle\u2019s approach to philosophy, art, ethics, science, and politics. With its focus on the topic of wonder as the wellspring of philosophy, Aristotelian Interpretations<\/i> succeeds in providing a fresh perspective on tried and true topics in Aristotle, as well as advancing a fruitful discussion of the relevance of Aristotle\u2019s essentialism for contemporary philosophy<\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Mark Hederman, Studies<\/i> (Dublin), June 2018<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

Who is the greatest philosopher that ever lived? Many might hesitate to answer that question, Fran O\u2019Rourke does not. For him Aristotle is, without any doubt, the holder of that title. This book substantiates the claim. The magnanimity and comprehensiveness of Aristotle\u2019s dictum that \u2018every realm of nature is marvellous\u2019 sums up O\u2019Rourke\u2019s conviction and describes also his own connaturality with his hero. The maxim also serves as an underlying and unifying motif for this volume of original essays. Aristotelian Interpretations<\/i> considers themes of perennial interest, offering new avenues of interpretation, illustrating how Aristotle\u2019s thought may be creatively applied to a variety of timeless and contemporary questions. Each chapter concerns itself with central themes of metaphysics, aesthetics, political anthropology, ethics, and epistemology. The result is a panoramic survey of Aristotle\u2019s philosophy showing that, far from being just a figure of historical interest living over two thousand years ago, this remarkable thinker provides us with a vision which is applicable and relevant. While many of Aristotle\u2019s empirical presuppositions are obviously out of date, science having taken such gigantic strides in the meantime, his deeper intuitions and unrivalled wisdom have perennial validity.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Aristotle\u2019s philosophy, as well as being comprehensive and profound, is noted for its common sense, its belief in and reverence for nature, and its overall confidence in the human mind\u2019s capacity to discover and to formulate truth. Those who might find somewhat <\/span>flat, dull, and forbidding, a preliminary glance through Aristotle\u2019s Ethics,<\/i> for instance, should remind themselves that such an apparent banality is the result of total absorption of such thought into our cultural bloodstream. Aristotle\u2019s books have become the warp and woof of life as we were born into it. They formed the shape and fabric of the cultural shelter woven around us. That is why this book by Fran O\u2019Rourke is such a godsend<\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u2018We are the only animals who can be happy . . . Morality and virtue are personal . . . and virtue depends upon ourselves,\u2019 this author tells us in his introduction, echoing the master he has been studying all his life.<\/span><\/p>\n

As for the book itself: <\/span>Aristotle, in On Poetics,<\/i> says that a good story is one in which events occur \u2018unexpectedly but on account of each other.\u2019 So it is with this collection of essays by Fran O\u2019Rourke. Each essay builds from the previous, and an introduction provides a masterly and poetic vindication of the symmetry of the whole along with the credentials of the author. The collection is the work of a lifetime. Retired as Professor at University College Dublin in 2016, O\u2019Rourke has presented to a wider readership a summary of those aspects of his subject which have pertinence to our twenty-first century preoccupations. This he does with fluency and flair<\/b>. The ten essays which make up the chapters span more than ten years during which some were delivered as lectures and most were published in distinguished journals from 2003 to 2015.<\/span><\/p>\n

Living in Ireland in the Twentieth Century<\/span> many of our unquestioned assumptions about reality, unbeknownst to us, were unshakeable truths worked out by that ancient genius Aristotle. <\/span>Our philosophy, over twenty-seven centuries, as many have said, amounted to footnotes to Plato and Aristotle. We inherited from the Greeks a way of life, an explanation of ourselves, an architecture for civilisation. Most of our words to describe any of our important enterprises are Greek: politics, ethics, economy, philosophy etc. The list is almost half our vocabulary. Every time we invent, or are overwhelmed by, something new we reach for a Greek word to label it. The \u2018tele\u2019, the \u2018phone\u2019, \u2018gamma\u2019 rays, \u2018micro\u2019soft, \u2018paedophile\u2019, \u2018psychopath,\u2019 all Greek words. We may, quite understandably, have thought that we had changed considerably in the twenty or so centuries which separate us from the ancient Greeks, but they set the parameters and the direction so definitively that they determined much of our more recent lifestyles, from pharmacology to the Olympic Games.<\/span><\/p>\n

This volume presents a survey of Aristotle\u2019s thought. There are chapters on poetry, politics, and philosophy; a presentation of Aristotle\u2019s teaching on metaphor and analogy; all delivered with the confidence and the skill of one who is familiar with the subject and yet full of sympathy for the reader who is not. The author is also aware of the cultural prejudices which most certainly alienate a twenty-first century readership from so ancient and so prestigious a philosopher. The writing has an urgency that engages and each sentence has a pertinent ring. Perhaps the most captivating chapters are those [four] which challenge contemporary \u2018sociobiology\u2019 and so-called \u2018evolutionary ethics.\u2019 O\u2019Rourke uses Aristotle to question such popular writers as Edward O. Wilson, Michael Ruse and Richard Dawkins. Here we have a robust Aristotelian challenge to the condescending dismissal of all ethical theory before the nineteenth century. O\u2019Rourke ably refutes the assertion that \u2018all human behaviour, including morality and religion, is based upon genetics.\u2019 \u2018Sociobiology is incapable of recognizing the central philosophical question of self-existence\u2019 (208), which cannot be detached from the metaphysical question of why anything at all should exist.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the final analysis, evolutionary ethics is founded upon a biological endless regress in which persons have no ultimacy. Human individuals exist for the exclusive purpose of propagating offspring, whose aim is likewise simply to propagate. To what end? . . . . The activity of reproduction is not itself the foundation of morality (211).<\/p>\n

What, then, for O\u2019Rourke is the foundation of morality? \u2018The status of each member of the human species as an individual consciously aware of his or her freedom within the totality of the real, and the inescapable demand to make one\u2019s life personally meaningful, with all the possibilities and limits of our common nature\u2019 (211-12).<\/p>\n

A chapter on Joyce shows how indebted to Aristotle was the author of Ulysses<\/i>. Not just because all those educated in Catholic Ireland were steeped in the underpinnings of his thought, but because Joyce\u2019s very approach to creativity derives from a serious study of Aristotle\u2019s works. O\u2019Rourke, it should be remembered, is also the author of\u00a0Allwisest Stagyrite: Joyce\u2019s Quotations from Aristotle<\/span><\/em>\u00a0(National Library of Ireland, 2005). He presents a convincing display of data on Joyce\u2019s youthful education in the works of Aristotle, especially the\u00a0De anima<\/span><\/em>\u00a0and the\u00a0Metaphysics<\/span><\/em>. He then considers at some length the Aristotelian features of\u00a0Ulysses<\/span><\/em>, in particular the recognition that the universe is characterized by analogy or similarity across diversity, the adherence to the principle that art imitates nature (correctly understood, that artistic process is like natural process), and the commitment to Aristotelian realism as opposed to Platonic idealism. The story of Stephen Dedalus is the story of an Aristotelian confronting both the radical alternative of Platonism and what O\u2019Rourke calls the modern rejection of self. \u2018Aristotelian metaphysics and psychology provide Stephen in\u00a0Ulysses<\/span><\/em>\u00a0with the vocabulary and concepts he needs to understand himself and to interpret the world\u2019 (240).<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

However, an even more interesting thought is hinted at: in Finnegans Wake<\/i> Joyce may have o\u2019erleaped Aristotelean causality altogether in search of an a-causal principle. An interview with Samuel Beckett in 1957, reveals the suggestion that \u2018Joyce\u2019s fictional method does not presume that the artist has any supernatural power, but that he has an insight into the methods and motivations of the universe … a perception of coincidence.\u2019 This might correspond to Jung\u2019s preoccupation with \u2018Synchronicity: an A-causal connecting principle,\u2019 which he describes as \u2018the parallelism of time and meaning between psychic and psychophysical events, which scientific knowledge so far has been unable to reduce to a common principle . . . The occurrence of meaningful coincidences which, in themselves, are chance happenings, but are so improbable that we must assume them to be based on some kind of principle, or on some property of the empirical world.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

O\u2019Rourke paints a picture of himself in the introduction as a child in rural Ireland who had access to a pre-electric age, and therefore who lived in a natural world similar to the one which Aristotle might have inhabited. We in Ireland are not so estranged from our roots that we can forget the soil in which we were nurtured. Poets such as Seamus Heaney, quoted in this introduction, are able to refresh our memories in this regard. It was through this world of unspoilt nature that both these philosophers, Aristotle from Stagira in Greece, and Fran O\u2019Rourke from Ratheniska, in the Irish midlands, made the discoveries which formed their minds and hearts. \u2018A country childhood affords endless experiences of nature in its fresh sensuality\u2019 (2), O\u2019Rourke declares with pride. These lifetime reflections of Fran O\u2019Rourke on one of the greatest philosophers the world has known, both in their original inspiration as talks delivered throughout his professorial career, and now in their comprehensive and yet accessible form, should be required reading for all, especially those of us who think the world began when we arrived<\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Markus H. Woerner, International Journal of Philosophical Studies<\/i>, 2017<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

\u2018In all natural things there is somewhat of the marvellous\u2019 (Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium <\/i>645a 17\u201318).<\/span>1 <\/span>Aristotle\u2019s own guide to his researches functions equally as the motto that permeates this wide-ranging, personally committed, scholarly and lucidly written collection of articles by an Irish Aristotelian. O\u2019Rourke (21) admits that not everyone will agree with all his interpretations of Aristotle or the conclusions to which he commits this author. However, they have considerable relevance for the discussion of contemporary truth-claims concerning metaphysics, ethics, anthropology and poetics. They form a confident invitation to debate. Like foci of an elliptical planetary orbit, the book\u2019s topics centre on the relation between metaphysics and poetics on the one hand and on relations between the philosophy of nature and human nature on the other, forming an integrated whole. Their treatment shares a radically open attitude to reality and resists philosophical or scientific reductionism. The author explains in the Introduction that this attitude has been part and parcel of his Irish upbringing. This introduction is remarkably personal, contending that philosophy is a love of wisdom embedded in people\u2019s ways of life, not primarily an academic activity.<\/span><\/p>\n

In Irish folk traditions and specifically for James Joyce, Aristotle was \u2018the Wise\u2019, equally highly regarded with King Solomon, in spite of the fact that he was acknowledged not to know everything: \u2018Three things Aristotle did not understand: the coming and going of the tide, the working of the honeybee, and the mind of a woman\u2019, says an Irish triad. Wisdom, from this point of view, is not the perfected or elitist knowledge of experts, disconnected from real questions of the living world and from human experience of what it means to flourish or to fail as a human being. It is personal, existential and open to experience. Correspondingly, Aristotelian Interpretations <\/i>is not primarily intended to provide in-depth scholarly exegesis of Aristotle\u2019s texts for their own sake. For the most part, the book discusses issues involving a critique, in terms of an Aristotelian framework, of problematic contemporary metaphysical or ethical claims. For O\u2019Rourke, Aristotle\u2019s insights form, as Henri Bergson believed, \u2018the natural framework of the human intellect\u2019, since it is possible to disentangle this framework sufficiently from its historically contingent features. It rests on \u2018the spontaneous urge to accept the visible world around us as real and intelligible\u2019 (235) rather than sceptical relativism or methodical doubt. Yet relying on such a framework need not, and should not, generate dogmatic attitudes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Hence, O\u2019Rourke uses a circumspect but optimistic \u2018realist\u2019 method of extrapolating insights, particularly from Aristotle\u2019s metaphysics, psychology and his zoological writings. At the opening of his book he discusses the origin of philosophizing. This is wonderment as \u2018a reflective admiration of that which we know but do not fully comprehend\u2019 (31) and its unlimited scope (thaumazein tou pantos<\/i>). O\u2019Rourke extends this claim by seemingly going further than \u2018the philosopher\u2019: poetry is equally based on wonderment of unlimited scope. In both cases, wonder and its range of objects are ultimately reflected in the human soul, which \u2018is somehow everything that is\u2019, providing intelligibility (Aristotle, De Anima <\/i>431b 21).<\/span><\/p>\n

There is a specific sense in which the poet has greater freedom of understanding than the philosopher. Whereas the philosopher, while interpreting nature, uses concepts in order to grasp ultimate causes and principles of what he initially experiences as wondrous, the poet, by \u2018imitating\u2019 nature, creates wonderment in the audience, using imagination, metaphor, parable or allegory. By generating and resolving marvel in the audience, he does not explain reality conceptually. He actively brings to the fore what might be the case as either likely or necessary. He also aims at the universal, what it means to fail as a human being, for instance, but reveals it to the audience in a process of re-enacting actions and characters of specific types as unexpectedly, yet intelligibly linked to one another. This imitative process (mimesis<\/i>) is analogous to the causal activity of nature itself. Most importantly, mimesis <\/i>is an ability characteristic of human beings, since they are the most imitative of animals (Aristotle, Poetica <\/i>1448b 6\u20137). This activity is fundamentally linked with the human ability to reason. Both are attempts to make reality intelligible.<\/span><\/p>\n

Three of O\u2019Rourke\u2019s chapters at the beginning of the book specify this view. The final chapter on \u2018James Joyce and Aristotle\u2019 exemplifies the volume\u2019s first and principal focus by paying homage to the greatest Irish writer of the twentieth century. These chapters are concerned with the relation of philosophy and poetry to reality, their similarity and difference. Metaphor, and its working as \u2018transfer to one thing of a term belonging properly to another name\u2019 (Aristotle, Poetica <\/i>1457b 7), plays the crucial role in clarifying this relation. This transfer is based on the recognition of likeness in unlike things, providing imprecise precision in respect of what it conveys. Aristotle praises it in poetry because obscurity has a welcome place here, scorns its use in philosophy because it has an air of wondrous strangeness and lacks clarity. However, for O\u2019Rourke, analyzing its role and its disclosing function is crucial to an understanding of their analogous relations to reality. Among the four kinds of transfer of signification in metaphor (genus to species, species to genus, species to species, and according to analogy) (Aristotle, Poetica <\/i>1457b 7\u20139), O\u2019Rourke attempts to show that proportional metaphor, which involves \u2018intrinsic analogy\u2019 (Cajetan), is not only crucial for understanding the unity and diversity of human nature (ch. 3), and of knowledge (ch. 4), but foremost for grasping the unity in diversity of beings in the cosmos as a whole (ch. 5). This \u2018power of universal reference and comprehensiveness\u2019 (107) of analogy that underlies proportional metaphor makes it metaphysically significant. Consequently, O\u2019Rourke does not use intrinsic analogy merely as a four-part ratio functioning as a logical tool <\/i>of comparison between anything that can be counted, measured or compared in diverse areas of reality. For O\u2019Rourke, through implicit sympathy with neo-scholastic \u2018analogia entis<\/i>\u2019 (Przywara <\/span>1962<\/span>) as a metaphysical \u2018Ur<\/i>–Prinzip<\/i>\u2019, and by side-stepping discussion of long-lasting disputes in Aristotelian-Thomist traditions of which he is nonetheless fully aware, analogy becomes much more than a logical tool or principle of cognition; it becomes part of metaphysics. However, there are two issues one might raise here. First, in Aristotle\u2019s writings, the analogous unity of being itself remains an open problem, in spite of the fact that \u2018the term \u201cbeing\u201d is used in many senses, yet not equivocally, but all of these are related to something which is one and a single nature\u2019 (Aristotle, Metaphysica <\/i>1003a 33f), namely substance, and in spite of formulations such as \u2018being from one\u2019 or \u2018aiming at one\u2019 (Aristotle, Ethica Nicomachea <\/i>1096b 25\u201329). Second, a radically different understanding of \u2018being\u2019, originating from an interpretation of the same text in Aristotle (Metaphysica <\/i>VI), but presupposing the ontological univocity of \u2018ens\u2019 of Scotist traditions which re-emerge in contemporary philosophy (Deleuze 1994), remains unmentioned by O\u2019Rourke. For him, metaphysics in the sense of seeking a first science of being qua being, and investigating the first causes and principles common to all beings, is the widest horizon for understanding the range and working of analogy.<\/span><\/p>\n

An indication of the importance of analogy for our understanding of reality becomes obvious in Aristotle\u2019s zoological investigations. They frequently use analogies between parts of different kinds of animals as a method of scientific ordering (\u2018What the feather is in a bird, the scale is in a fish\u2019). Here O\u2019Rourke uses an inductive generalization backed by a reason to go further: Whatever applies to analogies in zoology, applies to them generally, for him. By referring to the similarity of relations \u2013 a relation of relations in itself \u2013 among a diversity of beings, the widest possible frame for grasping universal unity among diverse substances can be formulated, since they transcend the unity of the individual, species, genus and categories of being. However, analogical relations do not represent a super-genus or a super-category; they create connections across <\/i>categories.<\/span><\/p>\n

Obviously, analogies are not the same as proportionate metaphors which are their linguistic expressions. Metaphysical principles such as act and potency are perfectly realized in every particular being (\u2018This eye actually sees and is capable of seeing\u2019) and affirmed by perfect <\/i>transfer to different entities as intrinsic to them (\u2018This bird flies, this fish swims \u2013 both move\u2019). Yet proportional metaphors (\u2018Old age is to life as the sunset is to day;\u2019 hence \u2018the sunset of life\u2019) involve an imperfect <\/i>transfer of an attribute from its primary to its secondary subject, because the transfer to another entity of a name which primarily does not belong to it happens via a relation of similarity in some secondary or accidental sense, grasped creatively by the imagination rather than by reasoning alone. These metaphors denote something in an unverifiable, imprecisely precise way that nonetheless carries the conviction of truth and creative insight. The more vivid metaphors are, the more they disclose an actuality (energeia<\/i>), the better they fulfil their proper function. By taking up some of Aristotle\u2019s hints (Aristotle, Rhetorica <\/i>1411b 21\u201333; 1412a 4\u20136), O\u2019Rourke (112) suggests that energeia <\/i>is the metaphysical foundation of metaphoric resemblance. Here his own poietico-metaphysical stance becomes most apparent. It is the analogical understanding of the unity of reality through reason and imagination which is open to creative discovery. Hence, \u2018Aristotle and the Metaphysics of Metaphor\u2019 (ch. 5) forms the central part of the collection. Its constitutive metaphysical presuppositions, such as the distinction between potency (dynamis<\/i>) and actuality (energeia<\/i>), form (eidos\/morphe<\/i>), which accounts for the basic similarity and relative continuity of beings of the same class, and matter (hyle<\/i>), together with teleology (telos<\/i>\/entelecheia<\/i>), are equally fundamental for the second focus of Aristotelian Interpretations<\/i>, dealing with the relation between biological nature and the human being. This part is a critical response to claims made by modern theories of evolution (E. O. Wilson; M. Ruse; R. Dawkins) which see it in terms of quasi-metaphysical, teleological explanations of the origins and final purpose of the living cosmos. Three of O\u2019Rourke\u2019s chapters (chs 7 to 9) deal with Neo-Darwinist theories of evolution, particularly with their drastic ethical implications. He shows persuasively that they are essentially reductionist. It also turns out that despite the fact that Aristotle himself rejected evolution as a theory of a common ancestry for animals, and although he recognized man\u2019s link to primates (Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium <\/i>689b 31\u201333), O\u2019Rourke\u2019s interpretative use of metaphysical principles, particularly that of form, allows him to accommodate the evolution of species for several reasons. Since Aristotle\u2019s form-concepts do not refer to Platonic non-material essences but refer to immanent, incarnate principles of individual substances, they are to some extent elastic. Nature, by proceeding from the inanimate to the animate by small steps, sometimes actually makes it difficult to decide whether something is animate or not (Aristotle, De Partibus Animalium <\/i>681a 15\u201317 [a sponge as plant]; Aristotle, Historia Animalium <\/i>487b 9\u201310 [a sponge as animal]). Aristotle was familiar with evolution as accidental change, happening to members of a species while they remain sufficiently similar for the most part. He also knew that abnormalities, should they increase qualitatively and quantitatively in living beings, may lead to the form of another animal (Aristotle, Politica <\/i>1302b 38\u201340). But could a series of accidental changes amount to substantial change? Provided that evolution includes the latter, when something of a certain kind (an ape) mutates into something of a different kind (a human being), then there must remain at least some element of the old which is a real potency to the new, exerting a formative as well as a transformative power which cannot be explained by matter alone, since matter is only receptive of form. Pure chance as a cause here must also be excluded, unless one admits the quiescent presence of virtualities, i.e. of forms in inexplicable disguise. Hence, real potency to something different cannot be denied in substantial change.<\/span><\/p>\n

O\u2019Rourke sees an analogous understanding of form at work in modern genetics, to be found in the discussion of information carried by DNA. Here, form is to be understood as the real and actualizing principle, structurally determining what things are in their permanence and change. However, he adds a caveat: \u2018We may affirm the reality of form although we may not fully grasp its nature. It is sufficient to point to its effects and operations\u2026\u2019 (178). This turns form into an almost occult entity, to be explored further but directing research in an attempt to explain what has yet to be explained. Here O\u2019Rourke provides a cutting critique of Neo-Darwinist theories of sociobiology, their implications for ethics and, more radically, for our understanding of what it means to be a human person and what the point of living is. Their authors (Wilson, Ruse) conclude that all human behaviour, including morality, is carried out for the sake of genetic evolution. Consequently, the value of ethical behaviour is restricted to the biologically causal conditions from which it arose. On their view, morality\u2019s key function in this process is to promote the survival of human genes, because these alone are of enduring value and purpose, not individuals or groups (Dawkins). Correspondingly, personal freedom to choose one\u2019s moral goals and the means to achieve them is based on self-deception. O\u2019Rourke argues instead that substituting causal conditions for moral reasons falls victim to a genetic fallacy of deriving an ought <\/i>from a (questionable) is<\/i>. Adducing causal conditions and their development offers no sufficient reason why we should adopt them as a moral norm. Acting as a moral person involves taking possession of one\u2019s biological heritage, controlling it by forming one\u2019s moral personality \u2013 with the capacity to selfreflect, to deliberate and to choose responsibly, using reason and will. Responsibility presupposes personal freedom. This complex process of free self-determination with the telos <\/i>of flourishing as a personal human being (happiness) is \u2018not entirely explicable in biological terms\u2019 (199). If it were, it would defeat its own meaning, specific function and purpose.<\/span><\/p>\n

The \u2018figleaf\u2019 that provides sociobiology with the appearance of ethics is genetically motivated biological altruism, understood as self-destructive behaviour performed for the benefit of others. However, it is hard to reconcile with the claim of evolution by natural selection, because it reduces fitness for survival rather than increasing it. Yet, \u2018selfless altruism required for the successful propagation of the species is nowhere to be found among humans\u2019 (216). Some saints and heroes may count as exceptions, but they do not act for the sake of promoting the selfish gene. Aristotle\u2019s analysis of types of friendship, particularly of friendship of equality between virtuous individuals, provides a more adequate model, beyond altruism and egotism, for explaining the dynamic interplay of self-love and love of the other, to be aimed at in moral behaviour.<\/span><\/p>\n

O\u2019Rourke ends his discourse by eulogizing James Joyce, who prides himself on being an Aristotelian owing to his Jesuit and early university education, and his reading experience in Paris. Many elements of his writings, even some of the principles of organization in his works, particularly Ulysses<\/i>, bear witness to this. They abound with Aristotelian allusions. Chief among them \u2013 although hitherto unrecognized, O\u2019Rourke argues \u2013 is analogy as a principle of artistic construction that joins literary diversity in unity. By expressing himself differently in different parts of his work while simultaneously retaining unity of style, Joyce consciously adopts the unity of analogy as a principle of literary production. O\u2019Rourke\u2019s book exemplifies the remarkable synthetic power and attraction of an Aristotelian framework for grasping unity across diverse areas of reality. It also provides a powerful critical tool for assessing metaphysical claims made by contemporary science. It consciously counteracts an understanding of our world as composed not of realities but of relativities. Yet it is not self-reflective in the sense that the reasonableness of its convictions is questioned, since \u2018one might not be sure that one always holds them reasonable\u2019 (quoting Joyce\u2019s Stephen Hero<\/i>, 233).<\/span><\/p>\n

More importantly, the use and meaning of analogy as key to understanding \u2018being\u2019 is not left undebated in the history of philosophy, initiating a grand dispute between Thomist and Scotist schools of thought, a debate which does not appear to have ended today. It is hard to see that it can be solved simply by reference to a philosopher\u2019s or a writer\u2019s character, as implied in Johann Gottlieb Fichte\u2019s remark: The kind of philosophy which one chooses depends on what kind of human being one is: because a philosophical system is not like lifeless household effects which one might reject or accept as one wishes; instead, it is animated by the soul of a human being who possesses it. (J. G. Fichte, Erste Einleitung in die Wissenschaftslehre <\/i>1794, para 5) On the other hand, it is not unrelated to character, as noted by Stanislaus Joyce talking about his brother and also noted by O\u2019Rourke (233).<\/span><\/p>\n

In sum, Aristotelian Investigations is a must-read for anyone who wants to discuss contemporary Aristotelianism<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Note<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

1. All references to Aristotle\u2019s work are to the edition edited by Jonathan Barnes (Aristotle,<\/span><\/p>\n

1984).<\/span><\/p>\n

References<\/span><\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

Aristotle. 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle \u2013 The Revised Oxford Translation<\/i>, Vols. I\/II, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press.<\/span><\/p>\n

Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. Difference and Repetition<\/i>. Translated by Paul R. Patton. New York: Columbia University Press.<\/span><\/p>\n

Przywara, Erich. 1962. Analogia Entis: Metaphysik<\/i>. Einsiedeln\/Freiburg: Johannes Verlag.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

James V. Schall, S. J.<\/span>, The University Bookman<\/i><\/span>, <\/span>Spring 2018<\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

On Aristotle: Impressive Interpretations<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

\"book<\/span><\/a><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cThe power of symbolic signification is possible only because the human mind has an unlimited openness to the entirety of reality, and can thus create a connection between any two entities. Aristotle expresses this openness in the De Anima<\/i> when he states: \u2018The soul is, in a sense, all things.\u2019 The mind has the ability to intentionally receive any reality in mental form and intentionally fabricate countless modalities of meaning. The mind, he states, can become everything and make everything.\u201d<\/a>[1]<\/span><\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cTo accept that we have a genetic propensity to behave morally does not yet explain why we are obliged to act morally. Applying Aquinas\u2019 comment on the individual nature of knowledge (hic homo intelligit<\/i>), we may affirm: hic homo deliberat et agit<\/i>. Moral action is a matter of personal motivation, resolve, action, responsibility, and consequence. It requires a sense of personal identity and continued moral commitment over time. The center of moral behavior is the individual person, consciously aware of herself or himself as motivated for individual reasons, and aware of the responsibilities and consequences attending on one\u2019s actions.\u201d<\/a>[2]<\/span><\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014Fran O\u2019Rourke, Aristotelian interpretations<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Liberal education means insight into what things are<\/i>, into the truth of things, and into how they fit together, how and why they act. The word \u201cliberal\u201d in \u201cliberal education\u201d means freedom from ignorance, coercion, and vice in order to discover the whole of reality. It never properly means doing or thinking as we please with no relation to reality, including our own nature. The best way to acquire a \u201cliberal education\u201d today might well be simply to imitate James Joyce\u2019s early 1900s sojourns in Paris. There, as Fran O\u2019Rourke recounts, Joyce set himself down in the Biblioth\u00e8que de Sainte-Genevi\u00e8ve to read a French translation of most of the works of Aristotle. He had already begun reading Aristotle in his earlier academic life in Ireland.<\/span><\/p>\n

Of course, today nothing more countercultural could be imagined than a \u201cliberal education\u201d consisting of a careful reading and rereading of Aristotle to understand both present and past times and minds. And yet, when we come across a writer like Fran O\u2019Rourke, who does know his Aristotle, we begin to suspect that, just maybe, we best begin here with Aristotle, whose ostentatious rejection is often held to be the foundation of the modern world. But as Henry Veatch wrote in his incisive 1974 book on Aristotle, when this same modern world has exhausted itself in following the consequences of what happens when we reject Aristotle, it may be best to return to the sanity that always prevails when reading Aristotle.<\/a>[3]<\/span><\/sup><\/a> This view was also that of Leo Strauss, who understood that the recovery of our souls involved recovering the sanities that we find in Aristotle.<\/a>[4]<\/span><\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

But doesn\u2019t the main problem in Paris today revolve around Muslim terror, not the condition of European philosophy? Yet, if we recall Avicenna, Averroes, al Ghazali, and other Muslim philosophers, we will soon see that Aristotle was very much pertinent to most of the issues that we have with Islam today. I recall hearing the famous Lebanese philosopher and politician, Charles Malik, once remarking in conversation that the main intellectual link between Islam and the West was precisely Aristotle. To understand why Islam did not, in the end, follow Aristotle is to understand why terror can be and is claimed to be a good.<\/a>[5]<\/span><\/sup><\/a> The main problem with Islam does not concern its terror, but its ideas about truth and terror.<\/span><\/p>\n

To read Aristotle is to begin to know how things are. And to know how and why things are is to be educated liberally.<\/span><\/p>\n

Aristotle is himself a liberal education. He is the one who best explains to us why we seek to know things \u201cfor their own sake,\u201d why we need to know the order of things. No one, even to this day, works his way as carefully though the whole range of reality as carefully and clearly as does Aristotle. And when other thinkers come close, it is usually because they are themselves first readers of Aristotle. To read Aristotle is to begin to know how things are. And to know how and why things are is to be educated liberally.<\/span><\/p>\n

We cannot deal with Muslim voluntarism, itself a rejection of Aristotle, if the root of our own philosophy\u2014as it has mostly been since the fifteenth century\u2014is basically but another form of the same voluntarism. The initial problem with Islam is, in fact, the rejection of the central teaching of Aristotle that man is a rational animal in which will follows intellect. The will cannot create its own contents. It must first receive then from reason open to what already is. Man cannot define what is real or good apart from his knowledge of what is. <\/i>Aristotle and Islam do not come up in O\u2019Rourke\u2019s book as Aristotle and Ireland\/Europe do.<\/a>[6]<\/span><\/sup><\/a> But still, we would not be wrong to suspect that the present problem of the soul both of Europe and of Islam is linked to each other by the rejection of what is central in Aristotle, who, more than anyone, stood at the origin of the mind of our civilization.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fran O\u2019Rourke is a man of many parts, even a singer of Irish folk music. He retired in 2016, after thirty-five years teaching in the philosophy department of University College, Dublin. He studied in Cologne and Vienna. His doctorate is from Leuven in Belgium. He has written on Pseudo-Dionysius, Aquinas, and James Joyce. This book, in fact, ends with a chapter on the influence of Aristotle on Joyce. The chapter serves as a summary of the work of both men. \u201cTrue genius discerns both the singularity of the grand unity and the minutiae of multiplicity; for that reason it is exceedingly rare,\u201d O\u2019Rourke writes.<\/span><\/p>\n

The brilliance of [Joyce\u2019s] <\/span>Ulysses<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/span> is that of a universal panorama woven from the torn threads and broken shards of multifarious living; its success derives from the writer\u2019s mastery of creative analogy. Joyce is himself proof of Aristotle\u2019s conviction that analogy is a sign of unique genius, a natural gift that cannot be acquired. Joyce effected in art a fundamental insight gained from his study of Aristotle. (238)<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the most remarkable themes in this book is how analogy and metaphor can bind all things together, even the most disparate ones. This capacity is due in large part to the mind\u2019s ability to abstract the forms of concrete, individual things and in that spiritual form to see the relations that exist between even the most remote or unsuspected things.<\/span><\/p>\n

For an academic book, it begins unexpectedly with a nostalgic account of the author\u2019s family experience on the farms and lands of Ireland. At first, this introduction seems out of place. Yet it is a very poetic chapter. \u201cI loved the wonderful landscapes of the west of Ireland, especially the mutual proximity of land and sea,\u201d O\u2019Rourke writes.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cComing from the flat Irish midlands, I was immediately attracted to the mountains of Connemara. Martin Heidegger once remarked that the philosopher should also be a good mountain climber. This is true not only in a vague metaphorical sense; there is a keen affinity between mountaineering and philosophy, a parallel between the physical activity of one and the spiritual activity of the other.\u201d (10)<\/span><\/p>\n

In this passage, we already glimpse at work that analogous relation of things that enables us to understand one thing by its similarity to another.<\/span><\/p>\n

We may be tempted to think we are pure spirits, but we are not\u2014and it is best that we are not.<\/span><\/p>\n

When we come to the end of this introduction to O\u2019Rourke\u2019s childhood memories of what he saw and did in Ireland, we begin to realize that what he is really doing is to introduce us to the world that Aristotle saw, not in Ireland, of course, but in Macedonia or any place where nature, human and otherwise, presents itself for us to observe it, to behold it, to think about it, what it is<\/i>. All the way through this book, we are conscious of the fact that to understand what is<\/i> we cannot bypass our own individual seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching things with the faculties that are given to us by the mere and wondrous fact that we exist and exist as human beings, body and soul, our own body and our own soul. And yet, we constitute one being, one substance, one person. We may be tempted to think we are pure spirits, but we are not\u2014and it is best that we are not. O\u2019Rourke wisely repeats the passage in Aristotle\u2019s Ethics<\/i> that reminds us that, given a choice, no one would want to be someone else.<\/span><\/p>\n

Aristotle covers so much. O\u2019Rourke systematically goes through how Aristotle looks on being, the causes, our final destiny, how we know, what mind means, what soul means, why there is a \u201cFirst Mover\u201d who moves by thought thinking itself.<\/span><\/b> \u201cExistence is naturally desirable; to be happy is to actualize human existence in the best possible manner\u201d (86). We \u201cactualize\u201d our existence by living it. But as human beings, existence is not just brought to its perfection automatically or by some outside agent, however much we depend on the cosmos and its origins for what we are initially. I was particularly struck by O\u2019Rourke\u2019s awareness that the drama of existence itself is what is played out in each of our human lives. The existence of millions and billions of human beings on this planet is not actualized in some collective form or ideal. It is actualized in each existing human being<\/b>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Though we exist as individual persons, because of our knowledge and our power to act on account of it, we are not deprived of the rest of the world.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWe do not have simply a vague desire for the fact of being,\u201d O\u2019Rourke writes. \u201cOur happiness derives from the awareness of our own life as good; each man\u2019s existence is desirable for himself.\u2026 Self-awareness is a certainty; it is concomitant self-awareness of ourselves in our knowing the world and as agents within the world\u201d (86). Though we exist as individual persons, because of our knowledge and our power to act on account of it, we are not deprived of the rest of the world. Through knowing, we can become what is not ourselves without changing what is not ourselves. This fact is basically why it is all right to be a single, relatively insignificant human being. We desire our own existence, but this existence opens out onto all that is<\/i> wherein we self-actualize ourselves in terms of our chosen relation to the good that is there and that we come to know, to accept or reject.<\/span><\/p>\n

The chapters on the ethics and politics of Aristotle are very good. But in reading them, we are conscious of the fact that without that to which Aristotle has argued in his metaphysics, physics, De Anima<\/i>, and logic, we will not catch just how ethics and politics fit into the whole\u2014why man is such a unique being in the universe. Aristotle says that \u201cIf man were the highest being, politics would be the highest science.\u201d But since he is not the highest being, his own highest practical science is politics. But this politics, at its best, is itself ordered to what is higher than man. He is ordered to what is higher through his own soul as it exists in his own personal being.<\/span><\/p>\n

This ordering is the ultimate source of his dignity and why politics is ultimately limited, by the good, by the Socratic principle that it is never right, for anyone, including the statesman, to do wrong. \u201cThe city came into being that man might be able<\/i> to live, but continues to exist that he may live well\u201d (124). The living well includes all the practical and theoretical things that can manifest what it means to be mortal in this world. The common good means the effort to activation of all the goods man in his variety can bring forth in this world.<\/span><\/p>\n

When politics has come to be what it ought to be, it turns us finally not to the practical life of this world but indirectly to the contemplative life, to our wonder about what it is all about and how to articulate what we can know about the highest things, even if, as Aristotle also said in the last book of the Ethics<\/i>, it is small in comparison to other, more visible practical things. \u201cThere is ambivalence at the heart of wonder. It is not simply the absence of knowledge, but a knowledge that there is something beyond its reach. This finds its explanation in Aristotle\u2019s distinction between what is intelligible in itself and what is evident to us\u201d (32). We realize that we are limited beings with a power of mind that is capax omnium<\/i>, capable of knowing all that is<\/i>. Thus we must grant that \u201cthe intelligibility of the real far exceeds our understanding.\u201d It is this realization that is no doubt the primary natural reason why something like a divine revelation might just be both possible and even actual.<\/a>[7]<\/span><\/sup><\/a> It also explains the \u201crestless hearts\u201d that we so readily associate with Augustine.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cTruth is the affirmation of reality as it is; in so far as something is, it necessarily is; in so far as a judgment is true, it is necessarily true. Truth has an absolute and necessary quality deriving from the unconditional character of existence itself. Once being is, it cannot not be: in so far as an assertion is true, it is true for all time\u201d (91). The contemplative order\u2014beyond politics but not bypassing it\u2014and its relation to the virtues is the proper locus of the truth to which the mind is open. Truth is concerned with the things that are<\/i>, with their affirmation. The practical world is filled with things made, spoken, sung, tasted, with the things that result from our capacity to imitate things, to find out how they work, what they are. The things that are and the things made need not be antagonistic to each other, though they can be when used by men out of their proper order.<\/span><\/p>\n

O\u2019Rourke, again, is fascinated with the relation of things to each other. He even catches Aristotle\u2019s oft-quoted remark about the relation of humor to intelligence:<\/span><\/p>\n

Most witty sayings, according to Aristotle, derive from metaphor and beguile the listener in advance: expecting something else, his surprise is all the greater. His mind seems to say, according to Aristotle, \u201cHow true, but I missed it.\u201d Such discovery provides the pleasure of easy and rapid learning. (116)<\/span><\/p>\n

Laughter is a sign, a hint that the universe reveals ultimately a joy that is both expected and unexpected.<\/span><\/p>\n

We learn by distinguishing one thing from another, by recognizing that this thing is not that thing. We name things; sometimes very different things have the same name. There are many languages that name the same thing differently. Laughter is a sign, a hint that the universe reveals ultimately a joy that is both expected and unexpected. This truth was the marvelous point on which Chesterton ended his <\/span>Orthodoxy<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/i> The possibility of wit, of humor, relates to the fact that we can hold in our spiritual souls at the same time words with different meanings, experiences with different understandings about what they are. The simultaneous seeing of all these possibilities makes us laugh.<\/span><\/p>\n

The subject of wit and laughter again brings up a refrain in O\u2019Rourke\u2019s understanding of Aristotle that gets to the core of things. Aristotle\u2019s view of the cosmos is that ultimately it is coherent. \u201cNature is inherently coherent; it is not, as he expresses it, a \u2018series of episodes\u2019 like a badly constructed tragedy. The perception of the world as an interrelated wickerwork of substances and causes gives foundation to the conviction that the cosmos is essentially and integrally united.\u201d When we read these words, we are not reading the words of an astronaut or an astronomer. What we are reading are the words that flow out of Aristotle, who already sensed and understood how and why things fit together. What follows in line of our true knowledge is not something that Aristotle would not have recognized, but something that he argued to be the case all along.<\/span><\/p>\n

In conclusion, let me return to the two initial citations that are found at the beginning of these reflections. The first concerns the mind that is found in each member our kind. It is because we have minds that we can worry about, wonder about, what is out there, what is not ourselves. And we can not only pay attention to it, but we can see its diversity and its unities. But we know with our mind not only what is not ourselves, but also the possibility that we can change, reshape many things. We even suspect that we can and should use things that are just there through no contribution of our own. Indeed, it suggests that the uninhabited world was in fact meant to be inhabited. It was meant to provide a place for a being that knew and acted.<\/span><\/p>\n

The second citation concerns the fact that it is not the species man that thinks and acts, but its individual members, Socrates, Mary, and Henry. Human life exists in the form of lives of individual persons in given times and places, threescore years and ten. All such beings have talents and capacities that might differ somewhat. At bottom they know that what they do with their given span of time defines what they shall be. O\u2019Rourke is consistent in his insistence that for Aristotle man has a soul but he is not just a soul. His senses and his mind work together to provide him with knowledge of what is not himself. \u201cResponsibilities and consequences\u201d do follow on our actions. These actions in turn are based on knowledge that we initially acquire from our beholding what is out there, what is not ourselves, whether it be in the Ireland of Joyce or the Macedonia of Aristotle.<\/span><\/p>\n

When we reread Aristotle in the light of Fran O\u2019Rourke\u2019s \u201cinterpretations,\u201d we quickly become aware that the most secure path we can find to a \u201cliberal education\u201d still begins with Plato and leads through the works of Aristotle, whether we read him in French, Greek, or Irish. Most of the reasons given about why Aristotle is out-of-date are either themselves now also \u201cout-of-date\u201d or were never understood with the clarity that Fran O\u2019Rourke saw in the natural things in Ireland that led him to the wondrous things seen and recorded by Aristotle. Finally, this is where we need to begin re-evaluating what we mean by a \u201cliberal education.\u201d \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Notes<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>1.<\/span><\/a> Fran O\u2019Rourke, <\/span>Aristotelian Interpretations<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/span> (Dublin: Irish Academic Press 2016), 206.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>2.<\/span><\/a> Ibid, 195.<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>3.<\/span><\/a> Henry Veatch, <\/i><\/span>Aristotle: A Contemporary Appreciation<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/span> (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press 1974). See also Robert Sokolowski, <\/span>The Phenomenology of the Human Person<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/span> (New York: Cambridge University Press 2007).<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>4.<\/span><\/a> Leo Strauss, <\/span>The City and Man<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/span> (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1964).<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>5.<\/span><\/a> See Robert Reilly, <\/span>The Closing of the Muslim Mind<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/span> (Wilmington: ISI Books 2010).<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>6.<\/span><\/a> See Joshua Mitchell, <\/span>Tocqueville in Arabia<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/span> <\/i>(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a>7.<\/span><\/a> See James V. Schall, <\/span>Political Philosophy and Revelation: A Catholic Reading<\/span><\/i><\/a><\/span> (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press 2014).<\/span><\/p>\n

Posted: March 25, 2018 in <\/span>On Letters and Essays<\/span><\/a><\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

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<\/span><\/i> PhD reports<\/a><\/h3>