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THINKING BEING: INTRODUCTION TO METAPHYSICS IN THE CLASSICAL TRADITION, Eric D. Perl (Leiden: Brill, 2014), pp. 215, $141.
All teachers and serious students of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Aquinas and of metaphysics and epistemology in general should read Perl's study, which rightfully challenges the commonplace readings of these philosophers that set them at odds with each other and reduce their thoughts to curious museum pieces in the history of philosophy. By contrast, for Perl the classical understanding of being is the cure for ontotheology (that God is the primary instance of being) and for the modern divide between subject and object. Perl argues that if mind and being are separated into subject and object, existing completely independently of each other, then being becomes unintelligible and thought unmoored from reality. Modern philosophy denied that we are capable of thinking being and the result is contemporary nihilism. Contrariwise, we find in classical metaphysics the central insight of phenomenology, that thought by its very nature is intentional and being by its very nature is intelligible, such that thought and being are inseparable and exist for each other. This insight was first expressed enigmatically by Parmenides, 'For the same is for thinking and for being (to yàç aùtô voetv eotLV te xal eLvai,)' (13), and was then richly developed by Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Aquinas, whose metaphysics are presented by Perl as complementary variations on this theme. In seeking the causes of the existence and intelligibility of sensible reality, they argued that sensible reality is in fact dependent upon and the image of incorporeal paradigms in which thinking and being are perfectly united. This paradigmatic union of thought and being is the ground of human cognitive ability. Whether the ground of all reality is Divine Mind or beyond being and thought is the main difference between Aristotle and the other philosophers.
Perl presents...