^[1] This book is an heroic attempt to bring Thomas Aquinas to bear on the post-Wittgenstinian world of philosophy of language. O’Callaghan’s main contention is that Aquinas is not subject to the same charge of ‘mental representationalism’ as earlier figures, and thus escapes the criticisms of such views made by contemporary philosophers of language. In order to do that, the author engages the recent work of Fodor, Putnam, and other contemporary figures, modern philosophical accounts of language and representation in Locke, Berkeley, and Hume, and develops a careful interpretation of Aquinas.

^[2] The author’s attempt to stand Aquinas up as a real interlocutor in the contemporary debate hearkens back to the project of Thomists of the 1950s. Some might want to reject such a project out of hand on the premise that it is anachronistic as an interpretation of Aquinas and unsuccessful as an attempt to convert analysts into Thomists. I am skeptical about this kind of project, but I don’t reject it out of hand—after all, what use is reading figures in the history of philosophy if we don’t take them to speak, somehow, to contemporary issues? My difficulty with Callaghan’s book is more practical; the book cannot quite unify the two things it is attempting—presenting an interpretation of Aquinas and entering into the debate of contemporary analytic philosophy of language. It simply becomes too difficult to keep track both of O’Callaghan’s views of Aquinas and his arguments against various interpreters of Aquinas, as well as his arguments explaining and objecting to the views of contemporary philosophers of language. One gets down many layers into an argument about the internal inconsistency of Putnam’s views on essences, for example, and loses track of how all this relates to Aquinas. Since Putnam criticizes an Aristotle-like position on essences, in refuting Putnam, O’Callaghan is showing that some such position can perhaps be reconstituted. But this is a bit of a stretch. Moreover, the author’s view of the relationship between Aristotle and Aquinas – sometimes assumed to be identical, sometimes not – is not really clear or clearly argued for.

^[3] However, on these two different tracks, Aquinas interpretation and contemporary philosophy of language, a number of good points are made. First, contemporary philosophers of language are brought into dialogue with the wider philosophical tradition and problems in the history of philosophy. O’Callaghan shows the way in which philosophers like Putnam and even McDowell try but do not escape thinking in the terms of modern philosophy. Second, Aquinas’ account of knowledge is re-interpreted in such a way as to free it from some of the projections of modern philosophy. Thus, for example, O’Callaghan’s account of abstraction, the intelligible species, and the nature absolutely considered are helpful and illuminating.

^[4] Further, O’Callaghan’s joint consideration of Aquinas and contemporary philosophy does get to a very important insight about the difference between Aristotelian and Putnamian essences. ‘For Putnam,’ he writes, ‘essence if it has any place at all, is a fundamental part of a classificatory scheme, a special set of abstract properties under which the values of the bound variable of a conceptual scheme formally considered (a science, for example) may fall;’ whereas, for Aquinas and Aristotle, ‘essence is an intrinsic principle of a being, its actuality limiting but also enabling the being to be as it is…’ (271) O’Callaghan asks whether Putnam can achieve his goal of saving Aristotle’s ‘common-sense world’ without committing himself to Arisototle’s metaphysics. O’Callaghan’s answer seems to be that if Putnam wants his Aristotelian cake, he has to eat it too. I think it is probably right that he is going to have eat some kind of cake, i.e., commit himself to something more than he wants to epistemologically or metaphysically in order to leave the world of ordinary experience standing.

^[5] In the end, O’Callaghan wants to align Aquinas with the later Wittgenstein in terms of the ways Aquinas sees language use and understanding within the context of human life as whole. The ‘more perfect existence’ of the title is a quote from Aquinas referring to ‘that very social and political existence made possible by language.’ (289) While O’Callaghan is unwilling to reduce understanding and thereby rationality to language use as McDowell, following Wittgenstein, seems to do, he finds in Aquinas a model of the way in which those activities are seen holistically, as is the human being him/herself. If connecting Aquinas to Wittgenstein is a way of restating in a more contemporary way Aristotle and Aquinas’ hylomorphism and their view of the essentially social/political nature of human beings, I can agree, but more than that will not wash.

^[6] O’Callaghan makes his case that Aquinas is no modern philosopher but in the end cannot convince me that Aquinas alone among philosophers from the ancient through the modern world survives 20th century debates in philosophy of language.