Infidels and Empires in a New World Order: Early Modern Spanish Contributions to International Legal Thought by David M. Lantigua (review)

diversity” (132). The principle of “analogical similarity enables the mind to transcend duality and diversity, to perceive unity in bipolar tension”; through analogy “opposites are not rescinded nor tension abandoned” but enabled to display “mutual enrichment, allowing reciprocal comparisons and the exchange of attributes” (161). As O’Rourke astutely shows through careful analysis of a judiciously selected set of passages from Joyce’s fiction, the philosophical thought of Aristotle and Aquinas informs Joyce’s reflections on a wide array of topics, including “authentic selfhood and authorial identity” (4). The poet W. B. Yeats once remarked that “Joyce’s work incites to philosophy” (7). Yet that does not mean that we should go to Joyce expecting extended philosophical arguments or that what is of value in a literary work is its residue of philosophy. As O’Rourke wisely notes, “a writer who overtly uses his medium to convey a philosophical message will damage his art” (234). Too much emphasis on philosophy makes for either bad literature or bad readings of literature. Joyce came of age as an author in a period in which artistic and literary theory began to flourish, an era in which theory seemed at least as important as the text or work of art itself. Yet his accent on the mystery of concrete reality lends an anti-theoretical bent to his writings. As he puts it in Finnegan’s Wake: “let us leave theories there and return to here’s here” (109). That places Joyce comfortably within a broadly Aristotelian approach to human action, one that had already been revived by John Henry Newman, an important influence on Joyce, and that would soon become a feature of an Anglo-American movement in ethics informed equally by Aristotle and Wittgenstein.