Books in Brief

The God We Seek, by Paul Weiss (Southern Illinois, $5.50). You have to grant Paul Weiss one thing: he sure can count. His Modes of Being was a kind of “four quartets” of metaphysics, each of the four “modes” infinitely subdividing and correlating with the other three. So here. We are given precisely fifteen—count ’em —fifteen ways of making contact with God. But this is only the beginning. One of the ways is “experience,” which has to be sliced four ways according to the recipient (is it focal or peripheral, mine or not-mine, private or public, episodic or constant?) and four ways according to content (material, deontic, intensional, formal). The divisions are dizzying, and arbitrary; announced rather than argued to. This is unfortunate. It gives the book the appearance of a

With inner vision… YOU CAN DO THESE THINGS!

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The God We Seek, by Paul Weiss (Southern Illinois, $5.50). You have to grant Paul Weiss one thing: he sure can count. His Modes of Being was a kind of “four quartets” of metaphysics, each of the four “modes” infinitely subdividing and correlating with the other three. So here. We are given precisely fifteen—count ’em —fifteen ways of making contact with God. But this is only the beginning. One of the ways is “experience,” which has to be sliced four ways according to the recipient (is it focal or peripheral, mine or not-mine, private or public, episodic or constant?) and four ways according to content (material, deontic, intensional, formal). The divisions are dizzying, and arbitrary; announced rather than argued to. This is unfortunate. It gives the book the appearance of a

With inner vision… YOU CAN DO THESE THINGS!