SUMMARIES AND COMMENTS 881

the greatest flourishing.” Although this thesis, which we might call “the
spontaneity view of temperance and fortitude,” is not original with
Lombardo (versions of it can be found in the works of G. Simon Harak,
Diana Fritz Cates, Jean Porter, among others), he should be praised for
having articulated it with unique vigor and clarity.
Yet, for all its inherent interest, there are reasons for doubting it.
Notwithstanding the points in its favor, Lombardo’s interpretation is
weakened by the fact that he takes up very few objections that one could
imagine being raised against it. To mention just one example, if virtuous
passions can arise independently of reason’s control, as they must on
Lombardo’s interpretation, then we should expect temperance and
fortitude to come into conflict with prudence when circumstances
demanding unusual affective responses arise. But this would be to
suppose a potential disharmony among the virtues that is fundamentally
at odds with Aquinas’s explicit teaching to the contrary.
The big picture is important, and Lombardo is right to frame his study
within Aquinas’s larger theological vision of man’s supernatural calling.
Closer analysis of the way the virtues affect the subtle and complex
interplay between reason, will, and emotion, however, as well as a more
thoroughgoing engagement with rival interpretations, would have helped
to round out this admirable book. Even in this, however, Lombardo
performs a valuable service, reminding us that the mind of the Angelic
Doctor is often in the details.—Giuseppe Butera, Providence College.

LUFT, Sebastian. Subjectivity and Lifeworld in Transcendental Phenome-

nology. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011. xii + 450 pp.
Cloth, $89.95—In recent decades, the scholarly reception of Husserl’s
Nachlass has produced a robust vision of his phenomenology,
discrediting several misconceptions in the process. Luft’s study certainly
contributes to this reception. It contains a subtle presentation of key
features of Husserl’s thought in light of the development of his oeuvre.
More importantly, however, Luft incorporates this robust vision of
Husserlian phenomenology into a broader program of transcendental
philosophy committed to the Enlightenment ideals of self-critique and
justification. By bringing Husserl’s mature approach into cooperation
with the systematic concerns of German idealism, the Marburg school’s
philosophy of culture, and twentieth-century hermeneutics, Luft’s work,
at his most ambitious, outlines a prolegomenon to a future transcend-
dental philosophy.
Luft’s general understanding of phenomenological reflection is more
Kantian than Cartesian, an approach that allows him to defuse mistaken
views about the reduction and the “rigorous science” it initiates.
Phenomenological reduction does not lead the world back to the Ego,
882 BLAISE BLAIN AND STAFF

but rather exposes the conditions of possibility for the experienced

world, and it is this shift from the pre-transcendental to the
transcendental that is marked by Husserl’s doxa/episteme distinction.
The scientific aim of phenomenology “is not to move away from a
standpoint . . . to no standpoint, but from our standpoint to standpoint-
as-such.” The standpoint-as-such discovered in the reduction Luft calls
the “one structure,” the a priori intentional correlation of subjectivity
and world. Already in the early chapters, Luft’s account of intentionality
indicates the hermeneutic dimension of Husserl that he will emphasize.
Husserl’s developed view of intentionality structurally embeds the
presentation of an object in a pregiven horizon of possible presentations
that has its noetic correlate in an interest-driven attitude. Lifeworld and
natural attitude thus form an encompassing correlative whole: the
horizon of horizons and the general interest in the world. Focusing on
the temporal character of the horizon as pre-given, Luft shows how
givenness and act refer to a depth-dimension of past acts accessible in
historical reconstructions in the transcendental field that transgresses
the apodictic sphere of immanent perception.
Luft’s account of genetic phenomenology in this context clearly
distinguishes factual history from the depth-inquiry made possible by the
reduction, while simultaneously confronting the difficult problem of the
relationship between these two histories, which is ultimately the
relationship between the empirical and transcendental Egos. Luft avoids
placing the transcendental Ego “behind” the empirical Ego as the source
to which it “owes” its being. The empirical Ego is rather an abstract
mode of the transcendental Ego, while the latter ceaselessly “enworlds”
itself as natural-factical. Phenomenological reflection simply under-
stands the worldly as worldly, which requires, however, that it be
“recognized in its transcendental origin.” Discovering its absolute and
hidden life, the reflecting human being “acquires more of this life and
hence becomes ‘more absolute’ while at the same time never leaving the
relativity of the situated bodily existence in the lifeworld.” For Luft, it is
the “transcendental person,” the concrete subject of all potentialities of
experience, who bears this complex dialectic and the tasks of rational
culture it implies. This stance on subjectivity informs Luft’s critiques of
psychologism, anthropologism, and the putative “fundamentality” of
Heideggerian Dasein.
These investigations prepare a history of ideas that motivates a
systematic alliance between Husserl’s mature program and the neo-
Kantian philosophy of culture that culminates in Cassirer. Luft traces
the influence exercised upon Husserl by Natorp’s aborted efforts in
transcendental psychology. While Husserl’s reduction wins direct access
to the lived subjectivity that, for Natorp, could only be indirectly
reconstructed on the basis of its objectifications, Natorp would provide
(or should have provided) Husserl with an orientation toward the
different “special worlds” that function as pregiven horizons in which
transcendental subjectivity enworlds itself. Genetic investigations into
SUMMARIES AND COMMENTS 883

the field of transcendental tradition implied in the horizon should thus

find a structuring guide in the noematically oriented philosophy of
cultural forms. Turning to Cassirer, Luft shows why this rapprochement
is only phenomenologically acceptable if the notion of “spirit” is stripped
of its mysterious force and interpreted as “the totality of subjective
activities in different attitudes.” The Husserlian approach to culture
“keeps spirit alive” by retracing all its forms to constituting inter-
subjectivity. Luft advocates a noetic complement to Cassirer’s approach
that reconstructs the depth-dimension of cultural horizons in the
certainty that this dimension consists only of sedimented intentional acts
interrelated according to eidetic laws of genesis. Luft concludes with a
presentation of his position in terms of a Gadamarian hermeneutics
shorn of its Heideggerian fatalism and grounded in genetic
phenomenology. Once effective history is recognized as passivity,
phenomenology becomes the “continuous self-alienation” from
prejudices, not to reach an unprejudiced foundation, but “in order to
understand them . . . from the ‘deepest sources,’ which lie in subjec-
tivity.”
Two critical remarks: Except for the final chapter, the volume consists
of already published materials supplemented by transitions that hold the
text together. The study succeeds in mapping a coherent terrain, but
there is some unnecessary repetition, and Luft’s contribution loses some
force for lack of a systemic presentation. Second: Luft perhaps
downplays what is lost by a phenomenological philosophy of culture that
so minimizes the Cartesian elements of the reduction. Seeking a way
between existential finitude and Hegelian mediation, Luft envisions
enlightened culture as a space of trans-generational projects through the
critical appropriation of which the individual transcends her finitude and
becomes human by “fitting herself into” history. The performance of the
epoche, however, discovers an Ego of absolute singularity who does not
fit into any system of pronominal declination or social reciprocity. This
Ego, as Luft says, is but a point on the map of the lifeworld. Still, the
enworldment of this discovery is not insignificant for shaping a common
life between transcendental persons.—Kenneth Knies, Sacred Heart
University.

MACKEY, Louis. Faith, Order, Understanding: Natural Theology in the

Augustinian Tradition. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval
Studies, 2011. xxiii + 170 pp. Cloth, $80.00—This book is a posthumous
work in which Louis Mackey provides a reading of the natural theology
of the “Augustinian Tradition,” which for him includes St. Augustine of
Hippo, St. Anselm of Canterbury, St. Bonaventure, and Blessed John
Duns Scotus. These figures all argue for the existence of God by
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