574 Dialogue XXVI (1987)

being causal with respect to other things), and there, it has it because it has the
status of essence. "Essence" expresses an ineluctable ontological contribution
which in creatures cannot be that of esse. Such a contribution is only conceivable because both essence and esse in creatures presuppose the divine causality.
(And I claim to be giving no ' 'existence of its own'', apart from esse, to created
essence, no "esse essentiae".)
I would take as expressive of the general vision I am promoting the words of
St. Thomas in the De ente: "Of substances, some are composite and some are
simple, and in both there is essence; but in simple [substances there is essence] in
a truer and more noble degree, according as, also, they have more noble being
[esse]: for they are the cause of those which are composite, at least [this is true
of] the first simple substance, which is God."4 I.e., the study is of essence.
Essence is found most truly of all in God (how far we are from a doctrine in which
"God has no essence"!). We grade essence by the grade of esse the thing
exhibits (since essence is that through which and in which a being [ens] has being
[esse]), and we grade that esse by the efficient causal hierarchy. The efficient
cause has more noble esse than its effect.
One can see why Owens focusses on esse and uses it as the scientific principle.
It may seem a small difference to insist on, but I would, while keeping essence
and esse in parallel view, as does St. Thomas, take essence as the scientific
principle, while regarding the existence of creatures as the "property", in the
Aristotelian scientific schema. I think this would result in a greater appreciation
of the kinship between essence (or form) and existence, and so in a greater
appreciation of the intelligibility of existence.
I congratulate the Houston Center for its wisdom in making more readily
available these important works of this outstanding Canadian philosopher.
LAWRENCE DEWAN,

o.P.

College dominicain de philosophie et de theologie,

Ottawa

Science, Action, and Fundamental Theology: Toward a Theology of

Communicative Action
HELMUT PEUKERT

Translated by JAMES BOHMAN

Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984. Pp. xxviii, 330. $37.50
Helmut Peukert is a member of the Department of Catholic Theology, University of Miinster. His book, originally published in German in 1976, stands here as
part of a series entitled, "Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought",
under the general editorship of Thomas McCarthy. Previous works in the series
include books by Theodor Adorno, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Jiirgen Habermas.
The central question with which Peukert is concerned in this book is whether
or not theology, given the negative critiques it has received in recent decades,
can any longer be considered an intellectually respectable academic discipline.
At root this is a question about the intellectual respectability of theology's
4 St. Thomas, De ente et essentia (Leonine ed., chap. 1, lines 58-63).

Book Reviews/Comptes rendus 575

foundations, the cognitive ultimates in terms of which theological claims are to
be understood and justified. Peukert approaches this question in an unusual way,
addressing it directly only after a lengthy inquiry into the foundations of other
academic disciplines. His general conclusion is that, surprising though it may
seem when first suggested, the foundations of the other disciplines are deficient
save insofar as they incorporate the foundations of theology. That is to say, the
cognitive ultimates of theology, far from being intellectually disreputable, are
even crucial to the intellectual respectability of the other academic disciplines.
Feukert arrives at his general conclusion through two main steps. The first
step is a contention that the most basic claims in any disciplinary area cannot be
those that regard theoretical objects; rather, they can only be the claims that
constitute the concrete interactive practice or "communicative action" of the
community of theorists at its best. Every supposition that the claims expressing a
value-neutral formal system can be cognitively self-sufficient eventually breaks
down, to be replaced by the admission that the claims constituting the concrete
value-shaped practice of the investigative community as such are cognitively
more fundamental. Moreover, one can discern a certain "transcendental presupposition" underlying the practice constituted by these cognitively more
fundamental claims. For at its best that practice necessarily, if usually just
implicitly, both employs as its criterion and attempts to realize fully as its goal
the notion of a "universal solidaristic communication community", a community that in the limit includes all human persons, where reasonable evidence
alone compels, and where everyone is treated with total fairness by everyone
else. Peukert illustrates this first step of his argument by explicating in some
detail the shift to the foundational primacy of the practical that occurred in
mathematics and logic, from Frege, Whitehead, and Russell to Godel and Tarski;
in natural science, from the early Carnap through Popper to Kuhn and Feyerabend; in linguistics, from the early Wittgenstein to the later Wittgenstein,
Searle, and Austin; in social science, from Parsons and Luhmann through Mead
and Schutz to Adorno, Apel, and Habermas; and in one line of philosophy-ofreligion and theology, from Carnap, the early Wittgenstein, and Ayer through
Hick and Ramsey to the later Wittgenstein and Phillips.
The notion of a universal solidaristic communication community, the notion
inescapably presupposed as the criterion of concrete interactive practice and
whose realization is inescapably presupposed as that practice's goal, is the
starting point of Peukert's second main step toward his general conclusion.
Analysis of that notion brings to light the "paradox of anamnestic solidarity", an
apparent contradiction within the notion itself as concretely operative. On the
one hand, there is one's commitment to live in a relationship of total solidarity,
complete fairness, and unconditional justice with all other human persons,
including those yet to be born and those long dead. On the other hand, there is
one's experience of the death of the innocent other, one's recognition of the
apparent radical injustice that many persons throughout history, despite or
sometimes even precisely because of their own attempts to live in universal
solidarity, seem to have been totally forgotten, permanently lost, definitively
annihilated. In other words, one's commitment to universal solidarity is both
necessary as a precondition of communicative action and seemingly frustrated in
advance by the facts of history. In the face of this apparent contradiction, two
responses are possible. One may choose to reduce the scope of one's solidaristic

576 Dialogue XXVI (1987)

commitment so as to prescind from the victims of history; but this undercuts the
possibility of communicative action by eliminating its necessary precondition.
Or one may choose to remain committed to universal solidarity, notwithstanding
the apparent futility of such a commitment; and exactly in and through one's
experience of taking the latter course, Peukert argues, there is disclosed an
unlimited, mysterious, and liberating reality by virtue of which the death of
every innocent victim ultimately is definitively overcome, such that in consequence the futility of one's commitment is manifested as merely apparent. The
latter course alone preserves the presupposition that is essential to concrete
communicative action. Peukert illustrates this second step of his argument
through reference to developments in a second line of theology that culminate in
the work of Bultmann, Rahner, and Metz.
Precisely as an inquiry into the foundations of theology, Peukert's book
illustrates an increasingly widespread phenomenon, namely, the emergence of
issues that historically have been called "philosophical" in academic disciplines
other than explicit philosophy. Whether recognized and labelled as such or not,
basic epistemological, metaphysical, and axiological issues are surfacing at
every turn in the attempts of physics, psychology, sociology, historiography,
literary criticism, etc., to make explicit their primary grounds of meaning and
elemental criteria of justification. One of the greatest merits of Peukert's book is
the clarity with which it manifests that an encounter with the full range of these
basic philosophical issues through inquiry into the foundations of academic
disciplines will be complete only insofar as the foundational study of any given
discipline eventually becomes at least virtually a foundational study of all the
disciplines, including theology. My principal criticism of the book is that the
level on which it finally roots the philosophical issues is not, in my judgment, the
truly fundamental one. Peukert correctly points out that basic philosophical
questions ultimately are matters not of theory but of practice. The practice to
which he refers, however, is already intersubjective, linguistically constituted,
essentially public: he gives no standing to mental practice that is individually
subjective, often pre-linguistic, radically personal. I would argue that this Wittgensteinian stance reflects an insufficient knowledge of one's own subjectivity.
Except at the price of operational self-contradiction, one cannot deny a certain
methodological priority of individual cognitional and moral practice over that of
the community; and the level of such individual practice is the fundamental level
on which philosophical issues emerge.
MICHAEL VERTIN

St. Michael's College, University of Toronto

Order and Organism: Steps to a Whiteheadean Philosophy of

Mathematics and the Natural Sciences
MAURICE CODE
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1985. Pp. x, 265. $39.50,
$14.95 paper
A problem facing the philosopher of mathematics is to explain how mathematics
can play such an important part in our knowledge of the world. How, for
instance, can one make a connection between the increasingly abstract notions