Joseph Owens has written a superb technical study of ONTOLOGY, the study of "being qua being", from a Christian perspective. That is: Owens proceeds from supposition of Uncreated SUBSISTENT BEING(God)as the source of created, contingent "being" subtending existence and all existents. He further develops distinction between "being"(esse), the IS-ness most fundamentally "actualizing" an existent(an "ens"...thing...res...substance);and NATURE(essentia..."through which and in which a being has its act of existing" p.131).NATURE is not only characterizing(existential particularizing)WHAT-ness of a thing/existent, but is its "formal" cause as POTENTIAL for existence in Reality. That is to say, "Natures" potentially exist as things they may become when actualized by ESSE.(Thus: there is Human Nature that can be actualized/ inFORMED by "being qua being" to become a unique person...known individually as particular man or woman, and collectively(UNIVERSALLY)as Mankind.)

Additonally, Owens discusses notions of "real" being(existents); and cognitional being(ideas).The latter may or may not have NATURES:potency for existence.(Ideas: MAN; table; cars or Time Machines,can/may exist. "Square circles"; "snowballs in hell";or
Heideggerian/Sartrian NOTHING-ness, cannot "exist" outside clever verbal formulation.) Furthermore: It's not that GOD is NO-thing (Medievalists occasionally punned). HE is Ultimate Thing; the
Only Being who IS subsistent; whose being(Esse)and Nature (essentia)are Identical. Defense of valid--truthful and reliable--EPISTEMOLOGY is argued with the notion of INTENTIONAL being. Knowledge itself is Cause(esse)communicated to intellects then actualized as IDEAS in the mind. Intellect "judges" idea/concepts existentially and essentially in what comprises the reasoning process(cf: pp.236-247). This essay is fascinating exploration of fudamental metaphysics from classical(Christian, Aristotelian-influenced)perspective. Key chapters are 6 ...Subsistent Being as FIRST CAUSE...and 9; discussion of Essence(s)...the WHAT-ness...constituting REALITY.The book is highly recommended to students of philosophy and history of ideas,particularly as CONTRA to many nihilistic anti-Metaphysics (with solipsistic "knowledge" theories)comprising POST-MODERNISM.

Fr. Owens truly provides an outstanding work into Christian metaphysical thinking. While this book is titled an "Elementary" introduction and indeed it is, still the subject matter of metaphysics is not easy and hence this material is no cake walk. First time readers on metaphysics should probably read an easier primer, but after doing so they would do well to buy this work of Owens. It is very well done.

If you are a Christian and interested in philosophy, then this book is for you. Owens does an excellent job of introducing the student to the science of 'being as being.' However, it is not elementary as the title might suggest. There is a lot to digest, but the Christian intellectual will find a lot of answers to how a theist ought to do philosophy. The best feature are the footnotes. Owens directs the reader to other interesting pursuits. I cannot not recommend this book enough.

This book has provided me with important information as a consumer of medical services, and has provided my mother peace of mind as someone who has been undergoing a number of medical tests. The book clearly defines various procedures, patient preparation, and often includes comments about tests that patients are seldom told but ought to know. This book has been so helpful. I am a layperson with no medical knowledge. But to be able to describe a test to my mother in advance of the procedure, to let her know when it is non-invasive versus invasive, to know what kinds of physical symptoms or complications may follow a test...this has been invaluable information. I strongly recommend this book for anyone who has to undergo, or has someone close to them who will undergo, medical tests. The price is [reasonable] given how much useful and potentially lifesaving information it contains.

I have a son that suffers from haemophilia and would like to know more about it please

I work as a Triage Nurse in a very busy Family Practice Clinic. We all use this book every day to answer patient questions--it is concise and can easily be explained to all levels of medical sophistication. In fact today I am ordering a second one.

Joseph Owens, Etienne Gilson's most gifted student and without doubt one of the towering philosophical masters of the 20th century, has produced a work which is both an introduction to cognition and a profound philosophical reflection. His ideas are at once new and old, phenomenological yet fully in accord with the principles of Thomas Aquinas.

There is no other book on this subject which approaches its breadth, intelligibility, subtlety and simplicity. This book will someday rank as a classic. It is perhaps among the top twnety books every philosopher must have in his library.

Excellence and the most clear argument I ever read about cognition study, Truly recommended.

No actual series of words can convey the excellence of the scholarship Father Owens' work magisterially sets forth. It is a detached, objective, and eminently instructive account of one of the most difficult and profund works written in the West. It is worth every moment of persual that the book requires of the reader in order that he begin to come to grips with one of the greatest thinkers of our era. I cannot recommend highly enough Father Owens' monumental acheivement, "The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotleian Metaphysics".

This is a classic of Aristotelian secondaries. Owens' (not to be confused with G.E.L. Owen) account of pros hen equivocity and the "as structure" of the science of Being (metaphysics) is a major contribution to Aristotle scholarship and is more than likely the source for G.E.L. Owen's notion of "focal meaning". This is a thematic account of Aristotle's Metaphysics focusing on the role of equivocals. However, Owens does provide pretty close readings of most of the books. He has extensive notes on the other major secondaries (obviously, written prior to 1978) and a bibliography of 608 entries. This is one of the most comprehensive, influential, and refreshingly readable accounts of one of Aristotle's most difficult texts.

Spectacular book; I read this book back when I was bout ** and it just open my eyes to Dread fe real. Anybody who want to read in depth 'bout rasta shold check this out, anyway you can. True classic.

Hats off to Dr. Bradley, whose interpretive, integrative, and deductive abilities are obviously surging, at this early point in his career. Never before have I read anything about De Maistre that pierced so painfully, to the point of seeing his logic as it applies to us all. It made me proud, and ashamed. Compelling.

Although I am an avid reader of American military history, I read few first-person accounts of war because I tend to prefer books about geopolitics, grand strategy, and decisive weapons systems. Nevertheless, I enjoyed this book about a marine officer's experience during the Korean War. It was easy reading, its narrative was straightforward, informative, and, I believe, honest, and it provided some valuable insights into the harsh realities of the first of the Cold War's regional conflicts.

The United States' "forgotten war" began on June 25, 1950, when the People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) invaded the Republic of Korea (South Korea). At the time, Author Joseph Owen was a Marine Corps lieutenant stationed in North Carolina, living with his wife and their two young children. According to Owen: "Nobody at Camp Lejeune had expected a shooting war. Nor were we ready for one." A captain who had been an adviser to the South Korean Marine Corps predicted Korea would be "[o]ne lousy place to fight a war. Too hot in summer, too cold in winter, and straight up and down mountain terrains all year round. Except for those stinking rice paddies down in the valleys. Human manure they use. Worst stink in the world." Nevertheless, according to Owen: "The possibility of American Marines in a combat role excited us." Owen writes: "The North Koreans continued to overpower the meager resistance offered by the South Korean soldiers....Seoul, the South Korean capital, fell with hardly a fight, and the Red blitzkrieg rolled southward. In response, President Truman escalated American involvement in the war. He ordered General MacArthur, America's supreme commander in the Far East, to use U.S. Army troops stationed in Japan to stem the invaders." And: "General MacArthur called for a full division of Marines to help him turn back the North Koreans. According to Owen: "The Marine Corps welcomed the call, but we did not have a full division to put in the field;" and "More than seven thousand of us at Camp Lejeune received orders to proceed by rail to Camp Pendleton. There they would form into companies and embark for Korea." Owen's unit, "Baker-One-Seven became one of three rifle companies if the 1st Battalion, 7th Marine Regiment....Our ranks were filled by 215 men and 7 officers who had never before served together....Many of [the privates] were beardless teenagers with little training beyond the basics of shouldering a rifle and marching in step." While training, there was much concern about the readiness of the Marines for combat. At one point, after a sergeant remarks that the troops need more training in boot camp, Owen succinctly invokes reality: "They are not going to boot camp. They are going aboard ship. And they are going to fight." On September 1, the company boarded a Navy transport for the three-week voyage to east Asia. According to Owen: "Ready or not, we were on the way to war." And, according to Owen, the 1st Marine Division's orders were "to go for the Yalu River," North Korea's border with China. At one point, a veteran officer provides this paraphrase of William Tecumseh Sherman's famous dictum: "War is hell, but you never know what particular kind of hell it's going to be." The Korean War hell was cold and barren. Owen writes: "We were chilled through and bone tired as we slogged our way back to battalion....The bivouac was lumpy with rocks and boulders;" "The cold weather was as formidable an enemy as the Chinese;" and "Rarely did the [daily action] reports exceed zero degrees, and there were lows of twenty below."

By the time Owen's outfit arrived in Korea, he writes, "we were making bets that the war would be over before we got into it." Owen's Marines could not have been more wrong. While Owen is inspecting his men's weapons, a private asks: "Think we'll get shot at today, Lieutenant?" Owen replies: "We're taking the point for the regiment. If the gooks are there, they'll be shooting at us." A few pages later, after the outfit's first experience in combat, Owen comments: "We were fortunate that the enemy had not chosen a "fight-to-the-death" defense of this hill, as they would when we advanced farther north." But some fighting was hand-to-hand. At one point, Owen writes: "Judging from the noise they were making, and the direction of their grenades, the North Koreans were preparing to attack, not more than thirty yards away." The Captain tells Owen and the other subordinate officers: "The Chinese have committed themselves to this war....The people we will fight are the 124th Division of the Regular Chinese Army....They're tough, well-trained soldiers, ten thousand of them. And all of their officers are combat experienced, their very best....A few hours from now we'll have the Chinese army in our gunsights. We'll be in their gunsights. You damn well better have our people ready for some serious fighting." The combat was, indeed, brutal. According to Owen: "The Chinese attacked in massive numbers, an overwhelming weight, but they also endured terrible casualties." Owen recalls that, while waiting for one Chinese attack, the "men stacked Chinese bodies in front of the holes for greater protection." And the fighting around the frozen Chosin Reservoir may have been the most brutal of the war. Owen ultimately suffered wounds requiring 17 months of treatment, and he never regained full use of one arm.

A few months ago, I reviewed James Brady's wonderful The Coldest War: A Memoir of Korea here. This book has different charms. Whereas Brady is a gifted professional writer, there is no elegant prose here. But Owen provides an equally vivid account of this ugly war. Big, sophisticated studies of military history focusing on geopolitical principles and grand strategy rarely offer narrative moments like the ones in this book. Reader are unlikely to forget the Korean War after reading Joseph Owen's Colder than Hell.

When preparing to travel to an Asian country on business, I seek context by reading of the wars the U.S. has fought there. When I look in those Japanese, Chinese and Korean eyes, I see the children of old enemies and old friends. While plowing through Fehrenbach's canonical Korean War history, "This Kind of War", I took a break and lost a weekend of yard work to "Colder Than Hell" which I ordered based on the praise given by my fellow Amazon reviewers. My thanks to the other reviewers, for this is a superb first person account of a Marine company fighting it's way up and then back down the Korean peninsula in 1950. Marines of Baker one-seven fought and froze to the death too often, but their sacrifice has let 47 million Koreans in the South build a democracy and learn the meaning of freedom. The price of freedom was huge for Baker one-seven, but the esprit de corps so crisply described by ex-Second Lt. Owen carried his Marines from hill to hill. This is an excellent book and a must read for fans of first person stories of war and sacrifice.

Colder than Hell: A Marine Rifle Company at Chosin Reservoir. By Joseph R. Owen. Reviewed by Mike Davino

Army Korean War expert Lieutenant Colonel Roy Appleman has called the 1st Marine Division of the Chosin Reservoir campaign "one of the most magnificent fighting organizations that ever served in the United States Armed Forces." The remarkable and inspiring story of the division at the Chosin Reservoir has been the subject of numerous books and several films. During their fighting withdrawal, the Marines decimated several divisions of the Chinese People's Liberation Army while at the same time fighting an exceptionally harsh winter environment.

Joseph Owen's new book on the subject tells the story from the cutting edge perspective of a rifle company. The author served as a mortar section leader and rifle platoon commander in Baker Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines from its activation in August 1950 through the Inchon-Seoul and Chosin fighting where he was severely wounded.

There are many reasons given for the outstanding performance of the Marines in northeast Korea during the winter of 1950. It is clear from this book that a large measure of the credit goes to the Marines and their leaders at the small unit and rifle company level.

Owen's narrative covers the hasty activation and training of the company, its brief participation in the fighting north of Seoul after the amphibious assault at Inchon and the details of its intense fighting at Chosin. He candidly discusses the mistakes made by the leaders and Marines of Baker Company, to include his own. More importantly, Owen covers what they learned from these mistakes and how they used that knowledge to defeat the Chinese in a series of intense actions.

Although focused at the company level, the author frames his story with the overall conduct of the campaign. Refreshingly, unlike many books about the Chosin campaign, it is free of partisan sniping about the contributions made by the various services involved. Owen gives credit to the Army units that fought at Chosin as well as the contributions of naval and air forces and our British allies.

This book is rich in lessons about small unit leadership, training and combat operations. It is an excellent addition to the personal narratives on the Korea War.

This is a great set of books for the serious Hebrew student. but not for the Bible teacher or pastor who is rusty on Hebrew.

There are two flaws in these books. One is that the editors have taken so much trouble to give so much information about the structure and meaning of the Hebrew, and yet have provided often mediocre, and even often, lousy, inaccurate translation. They have relied on the RSV, and have stated that where they felt necessary, they have given a more literal meaning. The interesting fact is that in many cases, they have let stand those translations of words which have NO basis in the Hebrew text. They have, in fact, gone beyond dynamic equivalence (conservative paraphrasing), and used straight paraphrashing. Why would one go through so much trouble to get to the root of the langage, and then provide a translation that misses the mark virtually or totally. So keep your Hebrew lexicons available, because you are going to need them.

The second error shows up mainly in the verb descriptions. Just looking at the 7 major verb stems, they are clearly classified in error quite frequently. I have found that this is usually between the Qal and Hiphil stems, and often on weak verbs which loose a consonant (e.g., hollow verbs). The pointing of the text will usually be a clear Hiphil, but the editors have classed it as Qal. This is quite a problem, both for understanding the emphasis of the verb stem, and at times the actual meaning of the verb.

I do not recommend this set except for those who are studying Hebrew seriously, using, for instance, Waltke & O'Connor, Gesensius, and other authoritative works. One without a decent knowledge of Hebrew grammar already in the brain will end up teaching inaccuracy in certain areas.

Moving through every Hebrew word from Genesis to Malachi, this work provides for each word its grammatical identification, its page number in the BDB Lexicon, and its English translation.

If you are like me, your Hebrew skills aren't where you would like them to be. Owens gives an abundance of help in this area.

Word-by-word, the masoretic text is analyzed and translated. Especially helpful is the verb analysis. However, one should not expect to see any commentary, since that is not what these volumes are designed to give.

This set of books won't teach you Hebrew, but it you are a little weaker in that area than you would like to be, these books will help you out greatly.

An alternative title for this novel could be Amayer's rut.
For that is the situation that the main protagonist in this novel finds himself in. Almayer is a European trader living in a
trading post somewhere in Indonesia or Malaysia with his daughter,a product of mixed marriage.
Almayer dreams of escaping to Europe after making himself wealthy and bringing his daughter with him also.
But as time drags on it becomes obvious that he is going nowhere with his life. He is not getting richer nor is he getting any younger. His own daughter ends up deserting him by eloping with a native who takes her to his own village.
Not being a pure European by blood she realizes that she would never be accepted as an equal among Europeans or the whites.
For this reason she chooses instead to live with the natives.
As for Almayer he remains as he was.
He is an example that one can find everywhere in the world.
Someone stuck in a situation going nowhere but always dreaming of getting out and changing his life.

Almayer's folly is a powerful beginning to Conrad's second profession, writing. Since the story was written so close to Conrad's adventurous youth (the spring for his most powerful works), it provides the rawest expression of Conrad's views. Almayer, the prototype of Tuan Jim, takes the "leap" when he marries the Malay captive for promised wealth. This transgression drops his character into contact with the cold truths of nature; truths which dispel any artificial illusions or meanings. For Almayer, these illusions entailed sucess and fame in Europe, a place that he had never visited but only heard about from his mother. Superficially, this journey towards inner truth involves a journey into the wilds of Borneo, but,like in future Conrad works, we quickly realize that the journey is inward into the pysche of Almayer. Overall, an excellent introduction to Conrad.

Loosely based on the life of a Dutch merchant, setting up a trading post along a river in the interior of Borneo, Conrad's novel 'Almayer's Folly' is actually about man's alienation from his environment and eventually himself.

Written during the heyday of western imperialism, when the great powers of Europe subjected the tropics to their rule, the tale of Almayer explores how the tropics actually devoured the individual westerner.

The main character of the book is a man obsessed. Chasing a dream, he completely loses touch with reality. Although on the surface it may seem that he is a white man gone native, Almayer hasn't got a clue what he is dealing with. He is blind to the schemings of his Malay wife and equally oblivious to the fact that his daughter is drifting away from him.

Admittedly, the book has 'orientalist' overtones but, then, Joseph Conrad is both a man of his time and a master of poweful prose, not a politically-correct scholar. The stereotypical mystique of Asia and the inscrutable oriental are exploited as a literary means to descend into the deeper levels of man's psyche. Just like the 'true heart' of Borneo and its inhabitants is hidden under layer upon layer of deceiving images, so is the core of each and every individual. The scariest place to travel is not the interior of an Indonesian Island, but the inner reaches of our own soul.

Almayer's Folly is one of the best novels ever written. Not only because of the author's masterful portrayals of character, but also due his astounding command of English. It is hard to believe that Conrad's first and second language were Polish and French: he only learned English as an adult. It is this combination of psychological understanding and extraordinary use of language that make him into a literary genius.

Owen Lattimore's own testimony confirms that he used a Soviet Diplomatic pouch. A leading Soviet General who escaped to the
West confirmed also that Owen Lattimore was a Soviet Spy.

Only idiots and communists believe the lies.
Senator Joseph McCarthy was right about Owen Lattimore !

This is one of the most important books ever written about the horrible social and psychological consequences of being a slander victim. "Tail Gunner" Senator Joe McCarthy radicalized his Communist paranoia hysteria to such an extreme in the 1950's that he attempted to destroy the lives of some very innocent people.