The Philosophy of John Henry Newman and Pragmatism: A Comparison. By MarialCorona. Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2023. Pp. xvi, 216. £75.00.

If there has been a more engaging and interesting book concerning the philosophy of John Henry Newman published since the appearance on the scene of John Crosby's The Personalism of John Henry Newman in 2016, then it has escaped this reviewer's attention. Described in the foreword by Frederick Aquino as being possessed of a tone both ‘refreshing and exploratory’, The Philosophy of John Henry Newman and Pragmatism is just that. It is not simply the novel partners in dialogue and the therefore unfamiliar material with which it engages that makes it so. Marial Corona's manner of expressing herself and the bold structure of the book supply the main drivers of both the exploratory feel and the refreshing approach. By way of example of the latter, such was the sense of completeness of the treatment of Newman's claim to be a philosopher supplied in the first half of the book, I felt that, on p. 103, at the beginning of chapter 3, I was starting to read a second book, itself also more or less self-sufficient. Yet, taken together, the two halves reveal themselves to be deeply interconnected and interpenetrated. The result is a symphonic whole consisting of an impressively accessible synthetic analysis of Newman's thought, undertaken so as to enable a genuine dialogue with the thinkers, and primarily Charles Sanders Peirce, of the American pragmatist tradition. It is no mean feat to construct a work of such scholarly thoroughness which simultaneously presents itself both as two self-contained extended essays, and one consistent and coherent whole. Add to this the sense that at all times Corona is inviting her reader to enter into a reflective engagement with Newman's philosophy viewed through lenses supplied by the thought of the American pragmatists, and what is presented to us is a very impressive first book indeed. Not untypically for Newman, the genesis of the extended epistemology outlined in his 1870 An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, is to be found in the intense interest he took in the questions raised in his intercourse with close personal friends. In 1859 and 1860, he became engaged in correspondence with William Froude, the brother of Richard Hurrell Froude, who, prior to his death from tuberculosis in 1836, had been one of Newman's closest friends and his companion on the Mediterranean voyage of 1832-33. That journey proved to be not only the impetus for the composition of the hymn, Lead kindly light but also provided Newman with the catalyst for many of his early Tractarian initiatives. On Christmas Eve 1859, Newman wrote to Froude to inform him that he had that very day received Froude's son, named for his brother and Newman's late friend, into the Catholic Church. Newman was rightly concerned that such an action would cause a breach between father and son, and also between Froude and himself. What followed was a correspondence in which Froude laid out a position of a radical inability to accept the demands of what Newman had called dogmatic religion, on the grounds that such certitude as was required was contrary to the principle of probability and required levels of proof that were simply not available in the field of religious belief. Froude was a naval architect and has been called ‘the father of hydrodynamics’, but he was also the son and brother of Anglican clergymen. His approach to religion was that of the scientific mind, for whom proof was conceived in terms of the tools of scientific materialism: logical inference, empirical evidence, falsifiable hypotheses, and probability. His concern, too, was with practicality. On these bases, he judged the religion to which his son had converted and to which Newman had by then adhered for a decade and a half, as simply requiring more than could be shown in proof of its doctrines and less in its conformability with the demands of practical living. There is more than a little sense of two men talking past one another in this correspondence but it left Newman with a sense that he had to provide a religious epistemology that could demonstrate its methodological rigour and provide the basis for practical action. What emerged from a long period of gestation in 1870 was the Grammar of Assent, containing a treatment of the faculty of the imagination, the development of the idea of the illative sense, and the elaboration of the distinction between assent to propositions between the purely notional and that real assent which could provide both the underpinning for dogmatic faith and the legitimate certitude necessary for action. It is this synthesis, what can reasonably be claimed to be Newman's most significant original contribution to the philosophy of knowledge, that enables Marial Corona to place Newman alongside Peirce and others (William James and John Dewey) in identifying five ‘affinities’, as she calls them: a shared familiarity with ‘the methods of inquiry in the natural sciences’ and a commitment to realist epistemology in the Aristotelian tradition that enables them to ‘overcome a reductive conception of reason’; the centrality of the knowing subject, the person and the unity of knowledge; ‘the search for truth as a collective pursuit through time’; the role of error in taking forward knowledge; and, finally, the affinity between Newman's ‘illative sense’ and Peirce's ‘abductive reasoning’. In a book of four relatively short chapters, Marial Corona marshals an impressive breadth of material and does so without that breadth coming at the expense of depth. Starting with a chapter entitled ‘Focusing the Lens’, she artfully sketches the outlines of both Newman's life and the field of pragmatist thought. In truth, several of the terms used in the biographical material, adopted presumably for the sake of the comprehension of what the publishers justifiably judge will be a predominantly American-based readership, jar rather, but this is a minor criticism that in no way detracts from the value of this part of the book. Neither does the qualification the author feels constrained to add in a footnote at the beginning of her outline of pragmatism, to the effect that whilst she will demonstrate congruities between Newmanian thought and Peircean pragmatism, significant incongruities remain (p. 32). The second chapter concerns itself with Newman as a philosopher before exploring the affinities between Newman and the pragmatists in chapter 3. The book's final chapter is one which merits Aquino's description referred to above on its own. Engagingly entitled, ‘Prospects that emerge from this comparison’, chapter 4 is at once refreshing and exploratory, laying out how the affinities provide helpful and original aspects from which to consider the thinking of Newman, Peirce, and others on the genuine utility and importance of liberal education, the role of personal influence, the operations of conscience, and the matter of error and pluralism. Be assured that I have my doubts and difficulties as other people. Perhaps the more we examine and investigate, the more we have to perplex us. It is the lot of man: the human mind in its present state is unequal to its own powers of apprehension; it embraces more that it can master. I think we ought all to set out on our inquiries, I am sure we shall end them with this conviction. (p. 102) Perhaps this is a sixth affinity.