Paul Gilbert, Jésuites et philosophes. Des origines à nos jours (« Petite bibliothèque jésuite »). Paris, Éditions jésuites – Lessius, 2020, 11,5 × 19 cm, 240 p., ISBN 978-2-87299-382-6

With this book, Fr. Gilbert provides a welcome study of Jesuits in philosophy. Tracing the tradition from the 16^th to the 20^th century, he shows an overarching unity, even amid differences of problems and positions. Indeed, he illustrates, with a characteristically clear style, how their philosophical pursuits mean both to elucidate and to transform the relation between man, the world and God. Given the book’s encyclopedic quality, it is easily recommended as an overview of the breadth of this tradition. Still more, though, its depth might serve to orient others into further work within the task it undertakes. The book follows, in six chapters, an historical development through representative figures. We note here only a few from each chapter, in order to illustrate its general thrust. Let us mark straightaway, however, how Fr. Gilbert continually refers to the origins of the movement in St. Ignatius, his Company, and the Church. For an understanding of the Society’s special mission to care for persons, he turns especially to its expression in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the Constitutions of the Order, and their guide for studies in the Ratio Studiorum; and, of course, for its specifically philosophical dimension, he makes clear the presence of St. Thomas Aquinas as teacher and guide. We thus find, throughout the book, insights into how Jesuit philosophers relate to these, according to their context. So, the first chapter gives a glimpse of the early formation of Jesuit philosophical education and its formulation in manuals of study. It does so by following Frs. Pedro da Fonseca, Benet Perera and Francisco Suárez, all three of which draw deeply from the great Dominican Doctor and his followers. We notice how the metaphysical reflection of Suárez, in particular, has had a lasting impact. His way of thinking, remarkable in the clarity of its systematic presentation, became standard for manuals. In these widely studied texts, the act of the intellect is explicated as a “formal concept” that necessarily corresponds with an “objective concept.” Fr. Gilbert connects this with the modern turn to subjectivity as paired with the sense of philosophical science as a search for necessarily certain foundations of objectivity. We might wonder to what extent its formulation is influenced by the debates surrounding John Duns Scotus and his followers, though this is not pursued at any length here. In any case, the next chapters show some of its effects. The second chapter presents how Jesuit institutions of learning promoted immense creativity in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, both within Society and outside of it. Within the former group, readers are introduced to original researchers like Frs. Josip Bošković, Benedikt Stattler and Sigsmund von Storkenau; with the latter, no less than René Descartes, Gottfried Leibniz, and Blaise Pascal. Although all these thinkers contributed significantly to advances in natural science, it is, as a matter of fact, the non-Jesuits who have become most widely read in philosophical studies. To be sure, Fr. Gilbert gives some insight into the shortcomings of their turn to subjectivity as foundational, whether due to the abstraction of the res cogitans from the world, the isolation of windowless monads from one another, or the apparent tendency to divorce of reason from faith. But he also presents how there is some tendency toward unity with these figures. We find this in examples of working with others, even if entrenched in their own positions (as, say, in the exchange between Leibniz and Fr. Des Bosses or in Pascal’s pseudonymous defense of Jansenist friends and attack on Jesuit colleagues in the Lettres provinciales); or even …