In this paper, the authors have detected a new effect in the area of geomagnetism, related to the behavior of a magnetic dipole freely floating on water surface. An experiment is described in the present paper in which a magnetic dipole fixed upon a float placed on non- magnetized water surface undergoes displacement along with reorientation caused by fine structure of the earth's magnetic field. This fact can probably be explained by secular decrease of the earth's major dipole moment. Further, (...) a detailed study of the phenomenon may create interesting premises for its practical use, particularly for the analysis of fine structure of geomagnetic field and its time-dependent anomalies. A strange behavior of some sea fish species prior to strong earthquakes may be explained if the fish are assumed as 'live magnetic dipoles'. (shrink)

We introduce an abstract framework for general rough set theory from a mereological perspective and consider possible concepts of ’a priori’ granules and granulation in the same. The framework is ideal for relaxing many of the relatively superfluous set-theoretic axioms and for improving the semantics of many relation based, cover-based and dialectical rough set theories. This is a relatively simplified presentation of a section in three different recent research papers by the present author.

Matthew arnold maintains in the nineteenth century the renaissance school of the cambridge platonists. for them, reason and religion are by no means at odds: reason is in fact "the candle of the lord." for matthew arnold in "literature and dogma", christianity will prevail only by being shorn of its supernaturalist elements and set on its true rational ground. ernst cassirer has shown how the cambridge platonists bridge the gap between the italian renaissance and the german humanists of the "goethezeit", (...) chiefly through shaftesbury. arnold accordingly finds in herder and goethe the corroboration of his revered countrymen glanvill, whichcote, more and smith. (shrink)

‘Justice’ is spoken of in two ways: the lawful and the fair. The law is a human construct that is devoted to the advantage of all, or to the advantage of the best, or to the advantage of those in power or to the advantage of those representing it – let it be the politician, the media, the TV presenter, the filmmaker. Thus, the law serves the production or the preservation of happiness within politics and business. The law commands us (...) to act according to the mean. A well-written law follows the mean well and a poorly written law does not. On the other hand, fairness is a principle sometimes materialised through the law and the given justice system. Fairness is the ultimate value pursued by both the common law and civil law traditions. However, its distribution through the law and the representation of this delivery varies. Does this mean that a different kind of justice is distributed? Through the teachings of Aristotle, this essay aims to deconstruct the notion of justice, by breaking down its two ingredients, the lawful and the fair, and by analysing the effect of their representation in modern European society. The relativity attached to the notion of justice is not a modern phenomenon, but a philosophical matter that can be analysed and indeed explained through the teachings of Aristotle and its contemporary students. The analysis will be developed in the context of convergent Europe, focusing on the role of the media and courts especially in relation to criminal justice. (shrink)

The theme running through these cooperative studies is the relation between automated fields of communication and control, and the various strata of human behavior. The question of the stratification of behavior is beginning to receive serious attention from the standpoints of ecology and cybernetics. One can only welcome the explorations of this imaginative group of authors in areas as promising as those of form, information, and life ; communication, information, and poetic language ; the role of information in the human (...) sciences ; physics and information ; and knowledge and information. Once again E. Paci is the one who scans the largest territory.—A. M. (shrink)

The author's previous works on Descartes, Malebranche, and other rationalists, as well as her critical editions of the Méditations and De la Recherche de la Vérité have insured the rich documentation and the interpretative density of this little treatise. However, its main feature is not historical erudition because for this author, as for most contemporary first rank French commentators, Descartes is living still in contemporary work through the freshness and renewed relevance of many of his themes. The part of this (...) study devoted to Descartes is centered upon the Méditations though it offers frequent excursions into the methodical works. In many ways it is a scale model of the Méditations, showing the philosophical scope of this inexhaustible metaphysical masterpiece. The second part has chapters on Reason and Method, God, Man and World, and Human Freedom, with an enlightening parallel treatment of these topics in Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibniz. A useful bibliography and a chronology of the principal works studied complete this compact volume.--A. M. (shrink)

In this Habilitationsschrift a comparison is drawn between the concept of truth in Husserl and in Heidegger in order to elucidate the problem of truth in our time. According to Tugendhat, truth in the nominalistic sense of neo-positivism and truth in the vague mysticism of Heidegger have moved so far apart that it is now impossible to speak of either of them in terms of the other. Furthermore they have both lost their guiding role in human life. Tugendhat is convinced (...) that the reason for this dissolution of truth is the absence of precisely that sense of critical responsibility which he finds so conspicuous in Husserl--and of which the sixth volume of his Logical Investigation is a good example. Though the emphasis on this investigation is fully justified, the promise of far-reaching analysis never materializes. The comparison of logical and linguistic terminology and doctrine is confined to a few side remarks, the most interesting of which are about C. I. Lewis. The treatment of Heidegger is based primarily on Being and Time, On the Essence of Ground, and On the Essence of Truth, with some negligible references to later writings. Heidegger's theory of language is very much neglected. Even the question of propositional truth, which the author is avowedly trying to keep in the foreground, receives keener exposition than commentary.--A. M. (shrink)

In contrast to the systematic development of the previously published La Estructura del Valor, this new work by Hartman proceeds by critical examination of ethical theory from G. E. Moore to the present. If the first work was an attempt to establish on an axiomatic basis a new axiological science, the second intends to confront the paralogisms contained in preceding philosophical discussions of the moral field. Hartman accepts Moore's Principia Ethica as a critique of axiological reason. He also feels that (...) new fallacies other than the naturalistic one have crept into the treatment of morality since Moore. These fallacies affect noncognitivist as well as semi-cognitivist and cognitivist attitudes. In all of these there are dichotomies of the formal/material type which create an impasse in the formation of a scientific, synthetic a priori body of moral propositions. Hartman's critique is better than his own solutions. The most interesting part of this work is that devoted to the measurement of value.--A. M. (shrink)

The work of Hegenberg is more than a simple translation into Portuguese of major parts of the body of current work in the philosophy of science. Behind his thorough work of research and compilation, behind the remarkable clarity and succinctness in the exposition of vast amounts of material, lies an expert organization of theories and problems that promises original contributions by the author in some of the areas here surveyed. After a philosophical preamble on belief, science, and philosophy, Hegenberg advances (...) a general analysis of scientific explanation embracing both deductive and probabilistic explanations. In an extensive third part he deals with the attitudes toward determinism in contemporary science, and with particular kinds of explanation such as teleological, psychological, sociological, and historical explanatory structures. Without abandoning the basic thesis of the unity of science, the author shows in this last part a great awareness of the distinct problems posed by explanation in every one of those fields. The bibliographical references after each chapter are rather complete, though references are missing concerning the most recent work in structural linguistics, economics, and anthropology.--A. M. (shrink)

This study is intended as a part of a larger work containing two more monographs, one on interpersonal relations and transcendence in Romano Guardini, the other on Rudolf Bultmann and his critique of metaphysical transcendence. The thought of Buber is traced here to its historical sources in the Jewish tradition but also in Jacobi and Kierkegaard. These two authors are in fact the only ones who attempt to preserve the finitude of the human subject vis-à-vis transcendence at the very beginning (...) and at the end of subjective idealism. Husserl's establishment of a dialectic between ownness and otherness at the heart of the universal flux of consciousness is the next step in Buber's demarcation of his own ontological posture. In Husserl, the encounter with the other within the sphere of otherness is perhaps contingent, i.e., tied to the mysterious passage from the formal dispositions of transcendental consciousness to the material regions and objects that concretely actualize those formal dispositions. In Buber, as in Landgrege's [[sic]] Phänomenologie und Metaphysik, an "intersubjective reduction" must precede the reflective separation of the spheres of ownness and otherness. Indeed without judgment, there is no full reflection in Husserl, but judgment must be understood as dialogical expression before it can be seen as meaningful world orientation. Buber understood well that the source of dialogical expression is silence, yet instead of using silence as the ground of the existential communication that elucidates the boundary situations of man, he gave a beckoning interpretation of silence that must be seen as a precedent of the openness of the horizon of consciousness in Heidegger's Gelassenheit. Though Babolin does not give any indication here of the direction of the forthcoming monographs, the fact that they are about Guardini and Bultmann may indicate that he is moving away from mysticism in the remainder of this work.--A. M. (shrink)

A sequel to a previous work on Croce's philosophy of history, the present volume contains the author's critique of pragmatic historiography. In Croce's own system, art, law, and religion had been originally differentiated along Hegelian lines. The influence of Pareto and of Marxism brought him to the realization of the autonomy of economics. His Filosofia della pratica put side by side all of these categories of action. For Croce the pure freedom that defines moral action, and the responsibility for evil (...) corresponding to the element of negativity in choosing, belong properly in the social realm. Bausola's interesting and timely book follows closely Croce's long struggle with this antinomy in his constant reworking of his analyses of culture.--A. M. (shrink)

A significant feature of current intellectual life in Europe is the proliferation of high level colloquia, different from the routine meetings of professional or erudite organizations in that they represent authentic team reflection and common intellectual growth through dialogue among the participants. These Roman conversations sponsored by the Istituto di Studi Filosofici, University of Rome, began in 1945, and their topics have continually increased in relevance for the philosophical community at large as international participation grew and concern for vital problems (...) of contemporary man became the basis for discussions. The contributions in this volume center around problems brought to the fore by the influential work of H. G. Gadamer in Wahrheit und Methode, although this author, a frequent contributor to other volumes in this series, does not appear in this particular one. The papers are all variations on the theme of temporal distance as the ground of constructive comprehension. Paul Ricœur and A. De Waelhens have the least circumstantial contributions in this excellent array of authors, many of whom have been doing concurrent work in hermeneutics long before this method and its philosophical repercussions had any notoriety. Within the vast field of semantic research, which has been crisscrossed in every direction by all schools of thought in modernity, these authors are developing the hypothesis of a transcendentalism without a subject. These studies can be pointed to as palpable proof that the generative transformational tendencies and the symbolic tendencies in linguistics can be integrated. In this sense it is significant that ideas from the Anthropologie Structurale of C. Levi-Strauss come up often in the text.—A. M. (shrink)

Attempts to introduce phenomenology to the English-speaking world have often been hampered by the specialist's tendency to substitute a part for the whole--thereby threatening the delicate balance guaranteed by the transcendental turn and so carefully maintained by Husserl throughout his-philosophical career. Thus some, in their concern to place Husserl in the context of the realism-idealism issue, have stressed the contrast between Ideen and some aspects of Krisis. Others, relying on the illuminating power of the notion of human roles, have devoted (...) themselves exclusively to the working out of a mundane phenomenology with or without ontological pretensions. While there is value to be found in this branching out of the research, it nevertheless needs to be integrated. Because of the character of the phenomenological synthesis, moreover, such integration cannot be achieved simply by generalists. Hence the value of scholars like Kockelmans whose experience in more than one type of reduction permits them to move readily from one level of intentionality to another. As the book amply demonstrates, Kockelmans has acquired this multiple capability by following in detail Husserl's philosophical development as it progressively opens the way to the exploration of all these levels. In commenting upon this development, he is also rendering an invaluable service by bringing to light many of Husserl's writings which otherwise might remain unknown to the interested student. The work is concise, a model of balance between exposition of the doctrine and clarification of the issues; in short, an excellent and welcome addition to the phenomenological literature.-A. M. (shrink)

This is the first of a two part study on Croce that ought to give a significant turn to current interpretation of this author as well as to current opinion about his value. Bausola leaves for the second part discussion of Croce's vitalism in its variations, and also the ethical and political themes in which the Croce-Marx relation finds expression. This first part deals mostly with logical and ontological themes, all of them connected by Croce's constant struggle against any form (...) of transcendence. One would think that what is dead in Croce is precisely his ontological theory, while his philosophy of praxis, because of its emphasis on freedom, would more likely be alive and full of interesting suggestions for the present. The two fundamental contributions of this work are: the new light that it throws upon Croce's speculations on the concept of "concept," and its "phenomenological" understanding of Croce's distinction between the impossibility of transcending consciousness and the impossibility of objectifying it. Since these interpretations are made in the light of Croce's ideas, Bausola's work has the effect of bringing back the voice of Croce into the present dialogue on the question of immanence and transcendence.--A. M. (shrink)

This is the first of a series of commentaries on the works of the latest Heidegger; all of Heidegger's works published by Neske of Pfullingen since 1954 will be presented and interpreted in the series. The expository plan announced in the editor's preface calls for three-part commentaries, with the first part summarizing the work in question, the second presenting glosses of lines or paragraphs as required by their respective importance, and the third giving philological exegesis of texts also as required (...) in the judgment of the editors. The interpretative inspiration is generally traditional, with more emphasis given to themes with echoes in medieval and modern rationalism and in Italian and French ontologism. The editors adopt Heidegger's characteristic attitude in his latter period, his relinquishing of all objective or subjective idealistic presuppositions. Ontology thus becomes the unveiling of the conditions of possibility of Dasein's speech as truth-making. In Being and Time these conditions of possibility were given in the fundamental ontology and reached their existential expression in resolve. In Gelassenheit Dasein has become a mere instrumentality for the ultimate sense of Being to come to pass. The conditions of possibility of the new Dasein are well understood and highlighted by Landolt. Their existential expression is a new temporal tension within the Dasein, that of Warten or attending. If resolve was the modal intentionality of authentic Dasein, attending is the modal intentionality of poetic symbolic Dasein. Landolt does not seem to have been sufficiently critical of the reflective character of this new intentionality. Can it adequately ground essence, fact and freedom? The techniques of this commentary often depart from hermeneutical respect for the text.--A. M. (shrink)

This is the first part of a two-volume study which may very well represent a turning point of scholarship on Heidegger and a step beyond his position. Paradoxically this work is outstanding both as criticism and as close interpretation of Heidegger. The critical perspectives on Heidegger developed by Regina carry to their natural conclusion some important analyses of the theme of finitude contributed by his colleague, E. Severino, in the mid-sixties. These analyses made clearer the relationship between finitude and the (...) nihilistic tendencies discovered by Heidegger in Western thought. What Heidegger calls metaphysics is the history of the efforts to negate finitude and contingency by ascribing necessity and original worth to one or another ontic property of beings. Heidegger promised on various occasions a destructive history of metaphysics, but his thought in this respect has developed in fragments--on Nietzsche, Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Plato, Aristotle, and the Presocratics--which require a considerable work of piecing together. Regina's own thesis on finitude, which parallels the important contributions of Michel Henry, makes these pieces fit in what is possibly the best ensemble yet devised with them. A truly brilliant feature of this interpretation is its emphasis on the role attributed to Kant by Heidegger, a role which places Kant outside Western metaphysics and among the pioneers of theoretical investigation of the ties between finitude and transcendence. The direction in which this first part of Regina's work points is that of a possible refocusing on those aspects of Heidegger's work that revalue human dignity. Such refocusing can have so productive an impact on the unification of philosophical work in Europe that the second part of this study should be anxiously awaited.--A. M. (shrink)

This is a well documented study of the Platonic idea of identity as a source for the understanding of the concept of the Whole in Hegel. The search for examples of thematic wholes, i.e., for types of unity such as the unity obtaining in reason, religion, love, etc., is paralleled in Platonic and Hegelian texts. The logical road found by Plato goes from contradiction to hypothesis, to ideality, to participation. The differences between Plato and Hegel are traced to the impossibility, (...) acknowledged in the last part of the Parmenides, of absorbing all hypothetical fragments in an ideal whole. This decisively separates Plato's ἀναιρεῖν from Hegel's aufheben. Some interesting texts of the Neoplatonist Proclus, Aquinas, Eckhart, and Cues complete this excellent research.--A. M. (shrink)

Time has not worn out the urgency and the novelty of these essays on existentialism published first in 1950 and again in 1959. The nothingness on which Paci writes so poignantly here is being as dealt with in the various historico-philosophical positions of transcendence. This suggestion of Paci is Heideggerian in character: being and nothingness are after all identified. But since Paci has in mind the inevitable destruction of human finitude by philosophical conceptions of transcendence, his words of caution apply (...) to Heidegger's intentions as well. Heidegger in fact destroyed metaphysics, i.e., the possibility of enclosing transcendence within any philosophical system. Yet by making this destruction systematic he opened up a new transcendence which encompasses existence as speech oriented in the philosophical mode. For Paci all of these philosophical positions end up identifying being and nothingness precisely because none of their images of transcendence can be properly superimposed upon the freedom and the finitude of man; thus, they become irrelevant, they lead nowhere. Three philosophical directions in Paci's background lead him away from this irrelevancy: the Augustinian emphasis on the existentiell that leads through Kierkegaard to Jaspers; the immanentistic [[sic]] sense of human development that flows parallel in Marx and Croce; the constitutive role of experience and expression in the late Husserl. Concerning the latter, Paci sees some important connections between constitution and myth in the two central chapters of his work, one of which is about existentialism and neo-Kantianism and the other about myth and existence.--A. M. (shrink)

This is one of the best and most complete treatments of Wittgenstein's philosophy written thus far in any language. The seven chapters of this substantial work mark the various stages of Wittgenstein's evolution giving appropriate attention to each of them. Gargani's analysis leaves unexamined few, if any, concrete issues where the ambiguity of Wittgenstein has provoked current discussion. Objects, properties, relations, complete definition and the determinateness of symbols, general propositions, language in the Tractatus, the object-designation scheme, imagination and thought, the (...) role of sense data, the concept of rule: these and other issues are all scrutinized in dialogue with the great wealth of existing opinion. But the author is never lost in questions of detail nor in polemical support of his interpretations as is so often the case with commentaries of this sort. Using Wittgenstein's methodological variations as a guiding thread, Gargani puts the above issues in perspective but, most importantly, he makes a thorough rational reconstruction, including continuities and discontinuities, of Wittgenstein's thought. One of the best features of this work is that it shows the intimate relations of Wittgenstein's work with Frege, Russell, Moore, Ramsey, Hertz, Schlick, Carnap, Neurath, and others.--A. M. (shrink)

With this study of the phenomenological idealism of Husserl, in all of its dimensions and phases, Giorgio Baratta places himself within the ranks of a new type of student of Husserlian phenomenology. Representatives of this type are R. Boehm, I. Kern, and L. Kelkel among others. They do not feel the need to apologize for Husserl’s conceptual awkwardness, an awkwardness that reflects growth; nor are they overafflicted by Husserl’s sin of idealism, nor embarrassed by his recourse to the bewildering realm (...) of the transcendental. They do not need to profit from claims of close discipleship, or from iconoclastic feats; thus they are able to show us a Husserl who lived in constant struggle with the conceptual issues of his time, and who created perhaps the broadest matrix for the reconciliation of these issues. In Baratta’s work we are told of Husserl’s nationalistic speeches to the troops during World War I; of his search for the identity of Germany during the Weimar years; of his idealistic desires to influence, if only remotely and indirectly, education and politics ; of his preoccupation with the issue of the decline of the West widely discussed after the publication of Spengler’s popular work; of his personal eclipse, with many of his disciples turning away, as a consequence of his idealistic confession; and finally of the ostracism in which he lived during the Nazi years. Against this background, certainly not larger than life, we are given clear view of the major thrusts of Husserl’s effort to preserve human subjectivity and its values by placing it under the influence of classical German idealism. The Scylla and Charybdis of Husserl’s position were: 1) the propensity of his scientific objectivism to become either Platonism or psychologism; 2) the propensity of his philosophical foundation of subjectivity to turn into subjective idealism. The response to these dangers within Husserl’s own system was, on the one hand, an objective idealism in the tradition of Plato and Leibniz and, on the other hand, an honest effort to rescue creative intuition from the realm of the mundane. This surprisingly eclectic response exposed Husserl to attacks from all sides, from positivistic psychologism, from neo-Kantian operationalism and from the more extreme forms of idealism and materialism. Also, because of the vulnerability of this response, the core of Husserl’s eclecticism broke easily down into the Platonic descriptivism of the advocates of Ideenschau and the mundane ontology of the early Heidegger. In two concluding essays, which are as effortlessly insightful as the initial two, transcendental phenomenology is presented by Baratta in the context of the historical justification that Husserl gave it in his mature years. As this historical justification receives further support from an overlapping philosophy of history, phenomenology takes on some bright ideological colors. Husserl’s pages in the Crisis open up a wide panorama of philosophical responsibility: science urgently needs the influence of human goals, and humanity itself cannot remain entrapped in worldly goals without gradually reducing the life of the common man to a state of complete reification. Baratta’s work owes much to Boehm, and Kern and Kelkel, nevertheless it is a work of maturity, surely in possession of the thematic undercurrents of Husserl’s thought which themselves underlie, because of their eclecticism, all the major themes of the main schools of thought today. This work should be read as a contribution to the study of phenomenology and as a further step in our understanding of the predicament of contemporary thought.—A. M. (shrink)

Though the book pretends to be little more than a sampling, Caturelli's intention is to philosophize while engaging in exposition. This means that the presentation of authors and schools—a vast array from logical positivism to Thomism—attempts to recover the dialectic of contacts and reactions actually at work in the unfolding of contemporary thought in Argentina. This intention, however, does not mar the author's objectivity. More importantly, all schools and all authors are treated on a par in terms of the importance (...) of their contribution. The reason for this is that national thought is considered as a unity resulting from the impact of all its sectors; not as a mere plurality of factions seriously engaging in mutual ignorance or insistently trying to be different. Refreshing—A. M. (shrink)

The inevitable illusion referred to in this title is the result of the mixture of the logical effort, which produces forms, and the critical effort, which destroys them. Such antagonism of logic and criticism is most acute in aesthetics. The produced forms, when taken as concepts, become illusory forms, predominantly poetic. While the idea is worth pursuing, the work is marred by an overly rhetorical mode of expression, reflecting a precipitous dialectical démarche and an indiscriminate accumulation of sources from all (...) quarters of the history of philosophy.--A. M. (shrink)

In a book in which the severity of the critique betrays some iconoclasm, Statera first examines the three-way discussion of Schlick, Carnap, and Neurath concerning protocols and verification, then describes the systematic goals of the Encyclopedia of Unified Science, and concludes with an exposition and appraisal of Neurath's work in the philosophy of the social sciences. The selection of Neurath for this preliminary study is a happy one. Neurath's efforts to overcome the gap between sciences of nature and sciences of (...) man are central for an understanding of the complementary and conflicting aspects of the main trends in the philosophy of the social sciences in our time. These main trends are: the historical sociologism of Dilthey and Weber, Marxism, Logical Positivism, and Pragmatism. These four schools, while autonomous and even antagonistic in their work, have nevertheless interacted with each other more than is commonly known, or accepted, in certain quarters. In particular, in the case of Neurath, his association of Logical Positivism with Marxism first, and later with pragmatic notions, is an eloquent proof of the impossibility to dissociate these viewpoints altogether.--A. M. (shrink)

The thesis of this work may be summarized in the words of its author: "... the Social Sciences, which heretofore have wavered between literature and an impossible positivism after the fashion of the Natural Sciences, could establish their own scientific statute if, aided by special techniques, they began discovering their hypotheses and interpreting their observations in the light of the partial overlapping of objective man and subjective man within the idea of Universal Man possessed by all". Parain makes use of (...) the Cartesian idea of the Universal Man in her efforts to provide a solid foundation for the Human Sciences. In her dissatisfaction with procedures basing the human facts solely on scientific method, she frankly demands a framework that is truly ontological. She is confronted here with the same difficulties experienced by all those trying to define as facts our knowledge of self and our knowledge of other minds. Her solution, as in the above quote, constitutes a compromise between subjectivity and objectivity, between the lived and the reflective, between a postulated universal and an interpretative schema. The author is quite conscious of the special difficulty presented by passions and ideological biases in the definition of human facts. Here her attitude is resignation with the inevitable: an empirical observer will never quite do as a transcendental observer. In spite of this the author maintains and illustrates that we know a great deal more about man than we might suspect.—A. M. (shrink)

As the title indicates, the purpose of this book is twofold. First it offers a brief exposition of the fundamental doctrines of the Philosophical Investigations; secondly, it attempts to use some important concepts of the Investigations to justify religious language. The emphasis in the expository part is on language games as communication media, leading directly to forms of life as agreement situations, which would make indispensable the intervention of agents here conceived as persons. The application of these ideas to belief (...) statements is made in the course of analyses distinguishing first person from third person belief statements, assimilating the former to performatives, and then relating them to "believe in" assertions different from inductively justified "believe that" propositions. This study is interesting mostly as analytic argumentation reinforcing well known ideas and distinctions. A subservient attitude towards Wittgenstein leads to an unnecessary extension of his doctrines to cover intellectual achievements of various authors and even original insights of High himself. The final critique of Barth, Tillich, and Bultmann, all grouped under the sin of fideism, is a bit excessive. Better reasons might be found to show them as exponents of the symbolic ways of expression that High has so appropriately defended.--A. M. (shrink)

There have been many devastating arguments against Fichte. Kant, Reinhold, and Schelling, among others, point to flaws in Fichte's ideas and in his logical support of them in the Wissenschaftslehre. Other criticisms are directed against his alleged plagiarism and lack of originality. Julia's work is in the line of brilliant studies on Fichte initiated in France by Léon and including well known works by Guéroult, Vuillemin, and Philonenko. It does much toward the rehabilitation of Fichte, without ignoring the above mentioned (...) criticisms. "The sudden relevance of Fichte for our time has been caused by his response both to our need to philosophize and to our aversion to Hegel's totalitarianism." Because of his opposition to all of these factors, Fichte becomes a powerful source of inspiration in today's thought. His ontology remains a critical ontology, while his basic humanism does not evade the problem that lies at the root of the present ontological revolution, i.e., the problem of ground. From these initial exciting suggestions, Julia goes on to write a book which manages to be both historically faithful and systematically sound. Its rigorous scholarship does not detract from its speculations about the future. Chapters I and II show that Fichte's formulation of the problem of ground in his Wissenschaftslehre of 1804 has, of necessity, a recurrent impact in all subsequent scientific and philosophical positions. Chapter III shows that the above formulation focuses upon the problem of ground with a depth and analytical clarity unequaled by any previous formulations whether by Fichte himself, or by any of the history-centered thinkers such as Kant, Schelling, Hegel, or Husserl. Chapters IV and V set forth in detail Fichte's theory of the ground of philosophizing. The conclusion sets forth synthetically the question of man: it deduces the principles of philosophical anthropology from the ground revealed by transcendental thinking. The index and bibliography are outstanding.--A. M. (shrink)

A central theme of the contemporary French school of epistemology is the evolution of the philosophical basis of scientific knowledge from the rationalistic stage to the present relativistic-structural stage. This transition is also the topic of this small but rich book. The purpose of the work is neither historical nor informative, but interpretative. The author discusses one of the main tensions in the theory of knowledge, viz., that between formalistic trends with their correspondent phenomenalism, and the attempts to give a (...) unified outlook to human reason on the basis of linguistic and phenomenological descriptions.—A. M. (shrink)

Current philosophy of science seems to be giving an increasingly historical emphasis to the hypothetical character of its theoretical constructs and to the consequent penetration of facts by theory. This tendency has not been fostered by the influence of Whewell. He remains isolated in his historical period, a figure left behind by the progress of philosophy and science. Yet there are two important lines of thought that have considered themselves in continuity with Whewell. One runs through French positivistic neo-Kantianism to (...) Emile Meyerson, the other derives from Mach's studies in the history of science and has some important repercussions in the Vienna Circle, particularly in the work of Otto Neurath. Marcucci seems to be more aware of the former line of thought than of the latter. However this circumstance does not affect the excellent quality of this historical exposition since its author is not aiming at a rational reconstruction of Whewell's philosophy that might be marred by a distortion in perspective. The need for such a serious reconstruction is however urgent; this study, with its emphasis on the problems of induction and idealization and on the mathematics of teleology, will certainly stimulate the present demand for further work on Whewell.--A. M. (shrink)

Fifteen years after the first edition of this comprehensive work, German historicism remains largely and conspicuously in the shadows. The great historico-philological and historico-sociological work produced by, and on the fringes of, this school has given way to specialization. Great polygraphs of the caliber of a Meinecke, a Vossler, a Curtius, a Cassirer, a Croce, or an Auerbach seem to have completely disappeared from the scene. But is the necessity for cultural synthesis that these men stressed any less urgent today (...) than before? One of the major tasks envisioned by thinkers of the early twentieth century was the development of a philosophical anthropology which would consolidate all the preceding work of cultural synthesis. Today this task remains in the far horizon after a series of distinguished but discontinuous achievements. Thus the reappearance of the ambitious work of Professor Rossi is a welcome event. There are now indications that sociology is moving away from the neutral functionalism of the consensus years and is beginning to show some interest in the subconscious and in concrete constellations of values representative of communal forms of consciousness in a situation. Post-industrial society can no longer be examined with the rough tools of micro- or even macro-analysis. Because of their refinements in quantification and their awareness of the most specific features of every particular form of group consciousness, the new middle range methods are akin to the synthetic spirit of the historical school. As middle range research progresses, its results can provide the ontic ground for an ontology of the human condition in its adjustment to the world, and in its communicative-transcendent goals. For this reason, Rossi’s work, though excellent in its expository aspects should be read with care to avoid overemphasizing, as he does, the distance between rationalism and irrationalism that was apparent in the main tendencies of the historical school. Surely it is a worthwhile thing to show the tensions between the relativists such as Simmel and Spengler, the intuitionists such as Windelband and Rickert, and finally the neo-idealists such as Troeltsch and Meinecke. The tension that pulled apart these intellectual currents shows by contrast the great synthetic force operative in the systems of Dilthey and Weber, which provided the dominant inspiration for the whole school. But the fundamental perspective in today’s reconsideration of historicism need not be the tempering of any search for ideals through the insistence on sober methodological limits. A more fruitful emphasis can be placed today on action as a mediator between thought and adjustment, on community as a mediator between society and individuals, and most of all on expression and adventure as mediators between survival and moral absolutes. With his neo-Kantian insistence on the historical method, on the discovery of the historical horizon of the human condition, and on the establishment of the institutional connections within historical periods, Professor Rossi: a) misses the point of the anti-mechanistic efforts of modern philosophy, i.e., the constitution of synthetic a priori judgments in their true home grounds, the field of spontaneous human communication and action; b) restricts the ability on the part of the historical method to penetrate and elucidate the areas of the unconscious and of passive syntheses ; c) both presupposes and trivializes the definition of freedom. Freedom in Rossi’s interpretation of historicism, seems to result from the objective displacement of values, rather than from the dramatic insufficiency of every finite person as it transpires in the highest forms of symbolic communication and interaction.—A. M. (shrink)

The latest book of Buchler is certainly in continuity with his previous work on philosophical method and on judgment, which commands serious attention outside the circle of those having close affinities with his thought. This work deals with the problem of the one and the many from various refreshing angles. The purpose of the study is to outline a fundamental ontology through the deduction of categories all referent to complexes. Such are: integrity and scope, prevalence and alescence [[sic]], ordinality and (...) relation, possibility and actuality. The method followed to define the categories is that of description followed by comparison with various concepts occupying a parallel position in other philosophical systems. While the principal characteristic of a category is its recurrence, it remains unclear whether the deduction is transcendental or only transreferential. In any event, the method lends itself to a transference of sense from the clear and distinct traits where analysis stops to the main categories to be defined. Under these conditions it is difficult at times to decide whether the clear and distinct notions need further clarification, or whether circularity has been thoroughly avoided in the transference of sense. Such difficulties are offset by Buchler's tenacious hewing of determinateness. And the admirable part of it is that his categories manage to perfectly carve the statue without ever having to crack the marble. One finds himself with solid gains in the clarification of the meaning of these categories, with a certainty that the framework used is not going to introduce a bias, and with a suspicion that the author has stood quite at ease "on the shoulders of giants."—A. M. (shrink)

Though hardly more than blown-up lectures, the three essays contained in this volume show a unity which might be a clue to future, larger scale investigations. Departing from the present confrontation between positive sociometrical and phenomenological definitions of power, Bagolini examines the conditions for objectivity in the determination of power in both schools. He concludes that it is impossible to define power at all without the cohesive element of interaction and dialogue among the various interests, goals, and ideologies in a (...) society. The interference of ideology and myths with this dialogue points to the communication problem as central to the core of power in present social life, and to the need for equality as a condition of communication. The final essay deals with temporality as an ingredient in the definition of liberty, and thereby of responsibility. The common intention of these essays is to find a passage from empirical to eidetic research concerning social facts. The perspicacity of the strategy and the ease in handling of sources of the most diverse extraction exhibits the agility of Bagolini's mind.--A. M. (shrink)

It is regrettable that of all the wealth of available philosophical materials from the Spanish American area, publishers select for translation and diffusion in the U.S. only works of specialized interest. The change of the title of this book from the original Spanish one: Studies in the History of Mexican Philosophy, into the English Major Trends in Mexican Philosophy, is unjustified. This group of studies, which was given untranslated to the participants in the XIII International Congress of Philosophy at Mexico (...) City, constitutes a basic sample, by no means exhaustive, of what could be a collection of erudite sources for the study of Mexican philosophy. Because of the makeshift nature of a work thus conceived, the reader should not expect the periodization of historical trends to be adequate; it only reflects the specialized areas of the contributors. The study of pre-Colombian thought makes no use of modern methods of symbol interpretation and the parallel between thought structures and type of civilization. Also, research about post-scholastic logic, so intimately related to present logical work, is not reported. The best study deals with ideological trends of the independence period, and is a perfect illustration of the fecundity of historical states of collective puzzlement. The beautiful portraits that graced the Spanish edition have been removed.—A. M. (shrink)