In this unusual and much-needed reappraisal of Freud's clinical technique, M. Guy Thompson challenges the conventional notion that psychoanalysis promotes relief from suffering and replaces it with a more radical assertion, that psychoanalysis seeks to mend our relationship with the real that has been fractured by our avoidance of the same. Thompson suggests that, while avoiding reality may help to relieve our experience of suffering, this short-term solution inevitably leads to a split in our existence. M. Guy Thompson forcefully disagrees (...) with the recent trend that dismisses Freud as an historical figure who is out of step with the times. He argues, instead, for a return to the forgotten Freud, a man inherently philosophical and rooted in a Greek preoccupation with the nature of truth, ethics, the purpose of life and our relationship with reality. Thompson's argument is situated in a stunning re-reading of Freud's technical papers, including a new evaluation of his analyses of Dora and the Rat Man in the context of Heidegger's understanding of truth. In this remarkable examination of Freud's technical recommendations, M. Guy Thompson explains how psychoanalysis was originally designed to re-acquaint us with realities we had abandoned by encountering them in the contest of the analytic experience. This provocative examination of Freud's conception of psychoanalysis reveals a more personal Freud than we had previously supposed, one that is more humanistic and real. (shrink)

In retrospect, I think I was right to compose Natural Supernaturalism by relying on taste, tact, and intuition rather than on a controlling method. A book of this kind, which deals with the history of human intellection, feeling, and imagination, employs special vocabularies, procedures, and modes of demonstration which, over many centuries of development, have shown their profitability when applied to matters of this sort. I agree with Booth that these procedures, when valid, are in a broad sense rational, and (...) subject to analysis and some degree of definition. But the rules underlying such a discourse are complex, elusive, unsystematic, and subject to innovative modification; they manifest themselves in the intuitive expertise of the historian; and the specification of these rules should not precede, but follow practice. . . . After the fact, nevertheless, a book like Natural Supernaturalism is subject to close critical inquiry about its methods and rationale. I am grateful to Booth for opening up such an inquiry, and for doing so in a way that is not only disarming, but seems to me to be the most promising of useful results. That is, instead of adopting a prosecutorial stance, demanding: "Justify the rationality and probative force of what you have done; it looks dammed suspicious to me," he has adopted the friendly tactic of saying: "Your book, in my experience of it, has yielded discoveries that I want to call knowledge, by methods, however deviant from standard rubrics of valid reasoning, that it seems irrational to call non-rational. Let's set out to clarify what these methods are, and to see what grounds we can find for the claim that they provide warranted knowledge." M.H. Abrams' contributions to Critical Inquiry are "The Deconstructive Angel" and "Behaviorism and Deconstruction: A Comment on Morse Peckham's 'The Infinitude of Pluralism'". (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:M. C. Henberg GEORGE ELIOT'S MORAL REALISM No moment in the history of ethics could be more propitious than the present for a comprehensive restudy of George Eliot's moral realism. Analysis of the "logic" of moral language has proved barren, prescriptivism is in full flight, and schematic divisions of moral theories into descriptive versus normative, deontological versus teleological, or substantive versus meta-ethical have promised much but delivered little. Such (...) distinctions dominate maps to the modern moral terrain, but awanderer in the land ofchoice itselfstill finds himselfwithout signposts. A particularly unhealthy bias in contemporary ethics has been the belief that moral principles ought to withstand all counterexamples, however plausible or implausible, whether concocted from a sense of men's actual capacities or from a fondness for outrageous possibilities, many of them lifted from the pages of science fiction. If moral rules do not govern in hard cases, it is thought, they do not govern at all. Few philosophers have bothered to distinguish between the hard cases common to men's actual choices and the hard cases confronted by one man in a million or by the imagined inhabitants of some future world. (Witness, for example, the present preoccupation with "lifeboat ethics" and ask yourself how many actual moral choices are so starkly dramatic.) Any logically possible circumstance is too often assumed to qualify as a fruitful area for moral investigation; and any conceivable counterexample, achieved by whatever stretch of the imagination, is assumed to be fair ammunition in the debate over principles. Closely related to this first bad tendency in modern philosophical ethics is another, equally bad. Too often the examples used are of little moral significance, obviously conceived to make a point rather than to direct attention to commonplace but nonetheless important circumstances where informed choice is essential. Philosophy journals have treated us to discussions about whether failing to wear tennis whites is or is not "rude" and about whether a first sinner's crossing of a patch of lawn does or does not have a "threshold-related effect" 20 M. C. Henberg21 which must be considered in assessing later consequences (a bare path ultimately worn in the grass). Such examples rightly earn a contemptuous snort from anyone who expects philosophy to increase our understanding in matters of serious consequence. Whatever her other accomplishments as a moralist and philosophical thinker, George Eliot never commits either of the preceding crimes. Her moral realism constitutes first and foremost an ethics aimed at the bulk of her fellow men. She yields to the theoretic impulse solely in criticizing other theories. When it comes to providing answers, she depicts fictional characters whose struggles, failings, and passions are ultimately akin to what we ourselves are likely to experience. Her ethical precepts are not aimed at proving themselves in every conceivable situation. They are instead precepts which are sometimes susceptible to ruin, just as are the changeable creatures who profess them. To know the natural boundaries of a moral rule, Eliot tells us, is as difficult and important as knowing the rule itself. Moral realism requires a combination of clear-eyed perception and imaginative sympathy—faculties ill-served by lectures on abstract principles. Eliot reminds us that our best moral judgments must be "checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot" (The Mill on the Floss, Book VII, chap. 3). This emphasis in particular—found both in her early essays and early fiction—makes Eliot's moral realism a welcome anodyne to the worst tendencies of modern ethics. The discussion which follows will be confined to early works, including Scenes of Clerical Life, Adam Bede, and The Mill on the Floss. The ruminations of her authorial voice in these novels may conveniently be juxtaposed with her essays, for the works are near to one another both temporally and thematically. Later novels such as Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda—however interesting from an ethical perspective— do not lend themselves to this mode of analysis. To what extent Eliot's views are modified in these later novels constitutes a separate topic whose omission here does not reflect upon its intrinsic interest or importance. Since George Eliot offers no... (shrink)

Relativistic mean field theory with mesons σ, ω, π and ρ mediating interactions and nucleons as basic fermions has been very successful in describing nuclear matter and finite nuclei. However, in heavy-ion collisions, where the c. m. energy of two colliding nucleons will be in the hundreds of GeV region, nucleons are not expected to behave as point-like particles. Analyses of elastic pp and ¯pp scattering data in the relevant c. m. energy range show that the nucleon is a composite (...) object—a topological soliton or Skyrmion embedded in a condensed quark-antiquark ground state. Against this backdrop, we formulate an effective field theory model of nuclear matter based on the gauged linear σ-model where quarks are the basic fermions, but the mesons still mediate the interactions. The model describes the nucleon as a Skyrmion and produces a q¯q ground state analogous to a superconducting ground state. Quarks are quasi-particles in this ground state. When the temperature exceeds a critical value, the scalar field in the ground state vanishes, quarks become massless, and a chiral phase transition occurs leading to chiral symmetry restoration. We explore the possibility of a first order phase transition in this model by introducing suitable self-interactions of the scalar field. Internal structures of the Skyrmions are ignored, and they are treated as point-like fermions. (shrink)

In a recent article1 mention was made of a MS. from which Goetz printed selections in Vol. V. of the . This MS. was not used by Goetz. On fol. 81 appears the following entry: ‘Moechus est adulter alterius t[h]orum furtim polluens; inde a m echo dicitur m[o]echanica ars, ingeniosa atque subtilissima et p ene quomodo facta uel administrata sit inuisibilis in tantum, ut etiam uisum conspicientium quodam modo furetur, dum non facile penetratur eius ingeniositas quali ingenio artis candelabrum illud (...) Theodosianum factum legitur.’. (shrink)

Extensively revised and expanded in this fourth edition, Exploring Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology is a uniquely accessible and engaging introduction to philosophy. Steven M. Cahn brings together exceptionally clear recent essays by noted philosophers and supplements them with influential historical sources. Most importantly, the articles have been carefully edited to make them understandable to every reader. The topics are drawn from across the major fields of philosophy and include knowledge and skepticism, mind and body, freedom and determinism, the existence of (...) God, identity and immortality, ethical reasoning, abortion, euthanasia, world hunger, democracy, social justice, art, and life and death. The readings are enhanced by concise introductions, study questions, explanatory notes, and suggestions for further reading.NEW TO THE FOURTH EDITION:* More than fifty new readings greatly expand the book's coverage and its flexibility for course use* More than half of the new readings are "Historical Sources," which introduce students to philosophical classics and help them understand the contemporary selections* Four new sections--Identity and Immortality, Social Justice, Art, and Life and Death--extend the anthology's range into areas that today's students find especially compelling* Study Questions after each reading help students test their comprehension and encourage class discussion. (shrink)

This book is a specialized monograph on interpolation and definability, a notion central in pure logic and with significant meaning and applicability in all areas where logic is applied, especially computer science, artificial intelligence, logic programming, philosophy of science and natural language. Suitable for researchers and graduate students in mathematics, computer science and philosophy, this is the latest in the prestigous world-renowned Oxford Logic Guides, which contains Michael Dummet's Elements of intuitionism, J. M. Dunn and G. Hardegree's Algebraic Methods in (...) Philosophical Logic, H. Rott's Change, Choice and Inference: A Study of Belief Revision and Nonmonotonic Reasoning, P. T. Johnstone's Sketches of an Elephant: A Topos Theory Compendium: Volumes 1 and 2, and David J. Pym and Eike Ritter's Reductive Logic and Proof Search: Proof theory, semantics and control. (shrink)

In his report to the Twenty-seventh Congress of the CPSU, M.S. Gorbachev noted that "our philosophical and economic front, indeed the social sciences in general, find themselves in a state … somewhat removed from the demands of life."1 He further pointed out that "the times demand that the social sciences address the concrete needs of practical activity on a broad front, that social scientists respond keenly and deftly to the changes taking place in life, that they not lose sight of (...) new phenomena and draw conclusions capable of truly guiding practical activity". (shrink)

Este trabajo se inscribe en una revisión in progress del Derecho antidiscriminatorio moderno que las autoras vienen efectuando desde hace más de tres lustros. En la primera parte del mismo se examinan los textos de una f ilósofa política y de dos juristas esta- dounidenses (I. M. Young, C. A. MacKinnon y K. Crensahw) que inspiran la propuesta de un concepto de discriminación y de una visión de la interseccionalidad basados en el reconocimiento de los sistemas de opresión. La segunda (...) parte se centra en el análisis del concepto de discriminación múltiple o interseccional propuesto por la doctrina jurídica española a partir de la jurisprudencia referida al caso de una mujer (“La Nena”) casada por el rito gitano que ve denegada su pensión de viudedad. A partir de lo anterior, el trabajo concluye con una serie de propuestas entre las que destacan las referidas a la necesidad de evitar que el discurso sobre la interseccionalidad disuelva la identidad política de los grupos en la individualidad, refuerce el sistema sexo-género y consolide un Derecho antidiscriminatorio de corte excesivamente jurisprudencial. (shrink)

Listening to someone from some distance in a crowded room you may experience the following phenomenon: when looking at them speak, you may both hear and see where the source of the sounds is; but when your eyes are turned elsewhere, you may no longer be able to detect exactly where the voice must be coming from. With your eyes again fixed on the speaker, and the movement of her lips a clear sense of the source of the sound will (...) return. This ‘ventriloquist’ effect reflects the ways in which visual cognition can dominate auditory perception. And this phenomenological observation is one what you can verify or disconfirm in your own case just by the slightest reflection on what it is like for you to listen to someone with or without visual contact with them. (shrink)

This volume offers the first-ever complete English translation of Leibniz’s Dissertatio De Arte Combinatoria together with a critical edition of the original Latin text on fa...

Our research is based on a rather large "library" of various works by M. Drahomanov, which contains his views on religion. Among them: Paradise and Progress, From the History of Relations Between Church and State in Western Europe, Faith and Public Affairs, Fight for Spiritual Power and Freedom of Conscience in the 16th - 17th Centuries,, "Church and State in the Roman Empire", "The Status and Tasks of the Science of Ancient History," "Evangelical Faith in Old England," "Populism and Popular (...) Progress in Austrian Rus, Austrian-Russian Remembrance," "Pious The Legend of the Bulgarians "," The Issues of Religious Freedom in Russia, "" On the Brotherhood of the Baptist or the Baptist in Ukraine, "" The Foreword, " Shevchenko, Ukrainianophiles and Socialism "," Wonderful thoughts about the Ukrainian national affair "," Zazdri gods "," Slavic variants of one Gospel legend "," Resurrection of Christ ", etc. (shrink)

This collection of articles, essays, monographs, and books written over a period of thirty years is a delight. It is very useful for consultation purposes for issues in ontology and contemporary philosophy. The development of thought reflected in these writings constitutes a perfect guide to what is living and what is dead in present philosophical practice. What is unique in Ferrater is the amplitude of the circumstance. Only an extreme methodological flexibility allows him to assimilate such a wide world without (...) abstracting from it. Thus we find in these pages journalism, history of ideas, philosophy of history, science, and ontology. When abstraction is intensified--and this seems to be the inevitable trend as the work progresses--the multiplicity of approach and method remains somehow present; for example, in "Man at the Crossroads," the wealth of historical and cultural data is dominated by a rigorous ontology of historical process and crisis. Conversely, in Being and Death, the already powerful and abstract ontological scheme is enriched by a swarm of data from the sciences and from general and personal experience.--A. M. (shrink)

The philosophy of Max Scheler is hardly of the type that can stand compendious presentation. Obsessed by such clear distinctions as the analytic vs. the synthetic, mind vs. matter, and metaphysics vs. science, Scheler proposed still further ontological distinctions which often presented more problems than the distinctions they were designed to replace. Moreover, having renounced any diagnostic use of scientific materials, Scheler had to resort to tedious descriptions that would allow him to bridge the gap between common sense and rational (...) consistency. When the presentation of his doctrine is simply outlined, as it is in this book, the play with alternative ontological distinctions becomes conspicuously irrelevant. The rich insight so frequently hiding in descriptive detail and suggesting a myriad of fertile directions, cannot be reduced to the outline's topic headings. One wonders if any critical examination of Scheler in these terms can be fair, or even if it is worthwhile to know only that much about Scheler.--A. M. (shrink)

This volume forms part of the series of the Princeton Studies in Humanistic Scholarship in America, under the general editorship of Richard Schlatter. Uitti's exposition of theories of language and literature from ancient Greece to contemporary America is oriented toward the proposal for a coordination of studies of language and literature in a sort of modern trivium of grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic. In the first part of the book, the author concentrates on Platonic "symbolic" and Aristotelian "analytic" ideas about language, (...) and then traces these two currents throughout the Middle Ages, paying special attention to Priscian, Anselm, Abelard, Petrus Hispanus, Dante, and the grammatica speculativa. He then brings the survey up to modern times, examining Descartes, the Port-Royal grammar, Du Marsais, Diderot, and Rousseau. Condillac and Coleridge are treated in detail as representing two modern theories of expression/communication, the one analytic and linguistic, the other synthetic and aesthetic. The second part of this work deals with a history of both linguistics and of American literary criticism, stressing I. A. Richards' descriptivism, new critic theories of metaphor and irony, and Wellek and Warren's Theory of Literature. Uitti singles out Roman Jakobson as being most prophetic in outlining future cooperation of linguistics and literary theory, and in this light analyzes various papers in Style and Language, in particular C. F. Voegelin's and Michel Riffaterre's. This survey of the contemporary American scene points to the fact that ours is a sign-oriented culture, and that recent studies in linguistics and in literary criticism of the poetics type have been sharing the same philosophical assumptions. The author thinks that language and literature studies would function best in the future as disciplines united in the broad matrix of cultural process, and using linguistic categories. He thus shares an oft-expressed hope for a cumulative literary "science," in which individual studies are oriented toward the broader construct. This book is addressed to the nonspecialist, but the expert will profit from Uitti's generous style which opens up new vistas on every page.--C. M. R. (shrink)

The first six chapters of this book present and criticize six views of the nature of proper names, among which are theories that proper names have no meaning or connotation, that proper names have more meaning than other signs or that their meaning is infinite, that ordinary proper names should be analysed into "logically" proper names, etc. This part of the book is the best. One may find in these chapters several well-reasoned arguments which seem to totally demolish the theories (...) under investigation. Chapters seven to nine present the author's own solution to the problem. Sørensen holds that a proper name does have a meaning—otherwise it would not have been a part of language at all. The meaning of a linguistic sign, he argues, is a set of conditions to be satisfied by an extra-linguistic entity, such that this entity may be identified as denoted by the said sign. A proper name is an individual name, and its meaning is a series of necessary and sufficient conditions for the identification of the individual entity which this name is intended to denote. It is Sørensen's view that this series consists of a definite description of final length including space and time indicators. The definiens formula for proper names is thus 'P' = 'the x that... t... p....' The discussion of this proposal is, however, greatly impaired by Sørensen's utter disregard for the rich philosophical literature existing on the subject: no attempt is made to confront his view with the now standard arguments against theories of that type. Even many inner difficulties of the proposed solution are ignored. E.g., one may ask what values do 't' and 'p' take in the definition of 'Zeus'. Or take the following puzzle: are 'The x that taught Aristotle in p at t' and 'The x that studied with Socrates in p at t' both the meaning of 'Plato'? Sørensen's view that "A national register may be looked upon as a dictionary of proper names" suggests a positive answer, but surely R and S cannot be the same meaning. Many similar problems bother the reader of Sørensen's book, but, unfortunately, they are nowhere discussed.—E. M. Z. (shrink)

Given the tremendous burst of activity in the philosophy of science during the last quarter century, the number of books by trained philosophers dealing with the logic of biology is surprisingly small. Simon’s book resembles Morton Beckner’s The Biological Way of Thought in its comprehensive ambitions: "trying to discover what, if anything, is distinctive about biological science, its concepts, and its mode of explaining." The most obvious difference of the two books is Simon’s long central chapter on "Theories, Models, and (...) the Concept of the Gene," which deals with the history of genetics from Mendel’s predecessors to the successors of Watson and Crick. Beckner paid little explicit attention to the history of biology. Another difference lies in Beckner’s dogged assessment of all problems in the logic of biology from the perspective of what he called the Humean Pattern of Explanation—a detailed and difficult variant of the approach of Hempel, Oppenheim, and Nagel. Simon’s philosophical position is more flexible than Beckner’s. He provides an acceptable review of the literature of the last decade and a half; some of his conclusions are most interesting—even when incompletely supported by his arguments; and the utility of his book is insured by the fact that it is necessary to go back over twelve years to find another with which it can be compared. The first chapter contains a very effective critique of J. J. C. Smart’s thesis that biology is no more an autonomous science than is electrical engineering, but is merely applied physics and chemistry. Smart had argued from the grounds that all biological generalizations implicitly refer to terrestrial evolution and are not truly universal, and Simon demonstrates the general lack of success of all efforts to demonstrate a difference in kind between so-called laws of nature and empirical generalizations of the sort found in biology. The second chapter continues in this same vein, drawing an interesting contrast between phylogenetic explanation in biology and the explanation of individual events in human history, and claiming that ‘explanatory’ status may be granted to accounts which do not meet the requirements of the deductive-nomological model, as in the case of Darwin’s theories of the geographical distribution of plants and animals and the persistence of rudimentary organs. The author’s negative reaction to much of the recent philosophical literature concerning the role of functional analysis in biology seems particularly well placed. Following Hempel, most philosophers writing in the past ten years have regarded the occurrence of the item whose function is in question as the event to be explained. Simon correctly points out that in the biological literature, statements indicating the presence of this item are part of the explanans, usually one component in an explanation of the normal functioning of the organism. He also insists that functional or teleological statements cannot effectively be replaced by nonteleological ones. A functional account is one that relates an entity to the role it plays in an organized system. In the first of several serene non-sequiturs which mar the latter half of this book, Simon insists that the above account shows that the notion of function is essentially an "extrinsic" one and that teleological principles generally cannot be used to account for experience. No better argument than an appeal to Kant’s authority backs up this conclusion. The third chapter deals with the recent history of genetics; its summary makes the claim that "at no time during this history was it correct to say that one model was replaced by another one; rather, the development appears to have been one involving successive correction and refining of earlier conceptions. There has been no revolution: geneticists have always succeeded in either repelling or accommodating critical attacks on the model." The evidence presented earlier in the chapter confers some plausibility on this conclusion, but no more: Simon takes no notice of the controversy surrounding Kuhn and the notion of scientific revolutions, and provides no criteria by which to distinguish "revolutions" from "accommodations." The precise nature of the methodological continuity to be found in the history of genetics is crucial for the view that "biology, or at least genetics, must be regarded as incapable of yielding a complete explanation of the phenomena that come within its purview; if the ultimate principles appealed to are not those of chemistry and physics and hence essentially nonbiological, the explanation cannot be regarded as complete." The text does not clearly indicate the extent to which the author agrees with the statement just quoted; perhaps he only attributes it to "many biologists" impressed by the successes of molecular genetics. It is clear the Simon regards something he calls the "Cartesian attitude" as pervasive in biology. "Biologists are committed to attempting to explain the phenomena of life in terms of the nonliving... The property of being alive or being associated with a living system is simply not treated as a logical primitive within biological science." But this seems to take us back full circle—to the position of Smart, that biology is no more than applied physics and chemistry. Simon disagrees with Smart. How does he stand vis-a-vis this last statement of the Cartesian spirit he finds so pervasive in biology? I think he disagrees with it, but it is very hard to tell. Perhaps the answer is that the resolution of the issue of the autonomy of biology is a pragmatic matter, relative to a complex set of needs and commitments: the sorts of things that determine life styles, political attitudes, and religious points of view, as well as the growth of scientific understanding. The question of the precise configuration of Simon’s pragmatism remains very vague indeed—a consequence of his over use of the style of impersonal attribution rather than direct assertion. Simon says generally sane and familiar things about Biology and the Idea of Progress and about Biology and Ethics. The really startling assertion of the penultimate chapter, that "consciousness" is neither a biological nor a behavioral predicate, and that its foundations are essentially moral and legal, is unfortunately supported by no argument whatsoever. Instead, the reader is urged to examine two of the author’s previous articles.—E. M. (shrink)

A mimeographed book on the philosophy of "Being" from Thales to Aristotle. The author states that the book has evolved out of his lectures in an introductory course on metaphysics. Almost half the pages are devoted to Platonism. The whole treatment is somewhat repetitious and is more pedagogic than scholarly, making relatively free use of terminology.--M. G.

An interesting book by a theoretical physicist. M. Mercier is on the whole a neo-platonist with his postulation that "Being" is fundamentally transcendent and infinite. The book also contains very illuminating insights on knowledge and the relation of knowledge to "Being."--M. G.

A simple exposition of Wittgenstein's two main works together with a brief discussion of Ryle, Strawson, Hart, and Urmson. This work does not enter into philosophically deep enough waters to interest the advanced student.--J. M.

This text is designed to introduce undergraduates to metaphysics, but the authors suggest that with supplementary readings, it can be adapted for higher level courses as well. As a method aiming at both academic objectivity and personal engagement, the authors confront the students with the problems of metaphysics as formulated by Heidegger, Marcel, and Camus, and then, accompanied by these contemporary spokesmen, set their readers to the task of historical "retrieve" of the problems and convictions of ages past. There are (...) three chapters and a long appendix. The first chapter identifies metaphysics as "man's search for the meaning of being," stressing that meaning will include both descriptive and evaluative elements. It deals with the role of freedom in human life and in the origin of metaphysics. The existentialist position contributes these points: the rejection of the simplistic dichotomizing of reality into subject and object, the incorporation of affective, nonintellectual elements into metaphysics, and a use of elements from phenomenology successfully blended with a sense of historicity and dialogue in man's achieving of truth. The second chapter, drawing on Heidegger, poses metaphysics' double problem, the search for a unifying value, and speculation about the nature of being. For the former we are offered an answer in terms of communicable personality, inviting one to authenticity through spiritual love. Chapter three brings in Marcel, beginning with his distinction between the notion of "problem" and the notion of "mystery." The problem approach has three characteristics: the model of the relationship between investigator and data is that of subject and object; the influence of the investigator is minimized and his role reduced to passive observer and annotator; the problem is to be overcome. A "mystery" on the other hand, "is a problem which encroaches upon its own data, invading them... and thereby transcending itself." Since metaphysics falls within the scope of mystery, no problem-solving technique would be appropriate. The authors recommend instead Marcel's reflective philosophizing, to which the remainder of the text is devoted. The appendix consists of excerpts from Jowett's Platonic dialogues, and sets of questions of two kinds: the first aims at eliciting accurate understanding and stimulating critical reflection on the thought of Plato. The second set gives an example of the process of reflective philosophizing.--M. B. M. (shrink)

There has been a most deserving movement in the last years to unite in one volume the most important scholarly articles written on the same topic yet published in different learned journals. The present volume is devoted to the problems of medieval German and Dutch mysticism from its beginnings to The Imitation of Christ. The selection is interesting and varied yet a certain technical narrowness pervades the whole volume. Instead of sharing the pages somewhat equally between philological and philosophico-theological articles, (...) there is a heavy preponderance of the purely philological and of the strictly historical. Moreover, the papers of a more philosophical character talk less to the philosophically interested reader than to the specialist in the history of medieval philosophy. Of course, there are welcome exceptions like the fine study of Joseph Koch on Eckhart's doctrine of analogy or A. Ampe's article on the "essential return of the soul to God according to Jan Van Ruysbroeck"--but the general tone of the volume is such that the non-specialist would have difficulty to be interested in many of its chapters.--M. J. V. (shrink)

Even though the last decade has seen more original and significant work on Fichte, the flow of studies on his rival and "successor," Schelling, seems to continue uninterrupted. Beyond so many short and often quite modest writings, Kasper's huge book is towering, and not only because of its size. Kasper, like Horst Fuhrmans to whom he seems to be the most indebted and who is not in Schelling studies, is a Roman Catholic theologian who commands an immense and impressive knowledge (...) of the history of theological speculation from the Greek Fathers to the nineteenth century school of Tübingen. Like most major studies on Schelling, the present one must struggle its way through the evolution of the many phases of his thought before getting down to the more systematic investigation. Such an endeavor must express a "preference" for one of those phases, and, as is usually the case today, the greatest appreciation is directed towards the Spätphilosophie. The core and kernel of the book is the beautiful and highly concentrated exposition on "God as the ground and the Lord of history" where historicity itself receives its ontological deduction from the premisses of theism. The book concludes with the concrete modalities of the divine mediation of history through the great issues of the fall, mythology, and revelation. For more than a decade Walter Schulz's interpretation of Schelling's late philosophy has seemed to overshadow, and to dismiss, all more Weltanschauung-orientated research. It has long been time for a study focusing on Schelling, the philosopher of Christianity, which is what Schelling considered himself to be for the last forty-five years of his life.--M. J. V. (shrink)

This excellent short book has come only belatedly to our attention. Unlike the more recent work of J. Schlanger, Meier's aim is not to revise, even less to revolutionize, our understanding of the young Schelling. He is following the classical interpretation--from Hegel to Kroner--that already the early Schelling displayed unmistakable signs of an ontological dogmatism. Indeed, with the exception of the ethical inspiration of the celebrated Letters on Dogmatism and Criticism and the gnoseological investigations of the Treatises, the early Schelling (...) is concerned with the issues of ontology--this is at least the author's thesis. The hollow majesty of the System of 1801 is foreshadowed by innumerable passages in the writings on the philosophy of nature. It is true that the System of Transcendental Idealism does display a certain parallelism between the gnoseological and ontological elements--but the balance is quickly broken. Under the appearance of the reconciliation of dogmatism and criticism in the doctrine of absolute knowledge via intellectual intuition, Schelling completes the restoration of ontology in the Bruno, in the Lectures on Academical Studies, and in the System of Würzburg. All this is expounded in clear, precise, well articulated chapters which enable the reader to attain a unified view of the central themes and inspirations of the immense literary production of the early Schelling.--M. J. V. (shrink)

This volume is the reprint of perhaps the best study of Goethe's philosophy. Its importance lies in its method. Instead of trying only to collect material pertaining to traditional, philosophical problems, it makes a deep-reaching attempt to grasp and to extricate the metaphysical foundations and basic themes of Goethe's Weltanschauung. There is a thoroughgoing analysis of his "morphological" method and excellent, long passages on his magnificent studies of the life and the structure of plants. The culmination of the whole work (...) is its third part: on the symbol considered what it truly is, not a merely esthetical [[sic]], but an essentially metaphysical notion. The book is not easy to read and it does presuppose a certain familiarity with Goethe's whole oeuvre. Those interested in the history of German idealism will certainly appreciate the parallels with Kant, but unfortunately Weinhandl omits the important parallels with Schelling.—M. J. V. (shrink)

The first part examines the basic postulates of logic, logistics, and theory of science. These the author designates as non-object sciences or meta-sciences which make judgments on judgments of objects. The foundation of meta-science precludes its being sought in a particular region of science; instead it must be found in the structure of knowing itself—in an investigation of the transcendentality of knowing. Next he takes up the task of describing the structure and elements of a transcendental theory of consciousness. Husserl (...) and particularly Fichte, provide the main articulation. Finally, on this basis, the author evaluates the claims of cybernetics. The limitations of the argument are those of Husserl himself; their elucidation would require confronting Heidegger of whom no mention is made.—M. M. (shrink)

This is a monumental work. The author's aim is to follow the destiny of the self-explicitation [[sic]] of western thought from the concept of substance to that of structure. Authentic philosophical thinking has always been ontological, and structure, no less than substance is a form or species of being. System too is a species of being which leads from substance to structure. Structure is only an articulation and intensification of substance. The concept of structure is the central notion of contemporary (...) thought; it is at the focus of the natural as well as of the social sciences and it alone can bridge the gap between the "two cultures." It alone can pave the way for a new philosophical humanism which, without abandoning the claim to universality and "objectivity," retains the thinking man as its focus. The author's contention is that the concept of structure is far from being a newcomer on the scene but it has been rather ripening slowly throughout the great systems of the last six centuries. Without being in any way a treatise on the history of philosophy and on the history of science, the present book describes with great competence and persuasiveness the evolution of "structure" from Nicholas of Autrecourt via Cusanus and early modern science to Descartes. Next comes an extraordinarily rich and insightful analysis of the world of Pascal. Finally the conclusion is reached through a discussion of Leibniz and Kant. This is a difficult book, a long and complex one. It might well belong to those writings which reshape our understanding of the past, and through it, contribute to our expectations of the future.--M. J. V. (shrink)

This recent monograph on the famous head of the Protestant theological school of Tübingen is a mature and well-documented writing, despite a certain circularity and many repetitions in its argument. What Geiger tries to expound above all is Baur's speculative basis—or bias. Baur began with Schleiermacher, but the major and striking influence on Baur's thinking was exerted by Hegel. His books on the history of dogma are a theological counterpart of Hegel's phenomenology. But in his last writings, the speculative schemas (...) are quietly effaced, and we read suddenly that the essence of Christianity is the "pure moral conscience and the autonomy of the subject."—M. J. V. (shrink)

Wölfel's study is a very technical enterprise, profusely endowed with footnotes and making little attempt if any at reaching the nonspecialist. Yet the subject matter of the work must be of concern to anyone interested in philosophical theology and the history of Christian speculation. Two seemingly very distant topics, those of the Trinity and of natural theology are brought together by the author and the point of departure for this rapprochement is the univocal concept of being, one cornerstone of Scotism. (...) This is why a book almost entirely devoted to an investigation dwelling on the inner structure of the being of God can have relevance to general ontology.--M. J. V. (shrink)

In this important work, Professor Walter M. Elsasser attempts to evaluate the status of one of the most puzzling scientific and philosophic problems of our time: How the basic ideas or categories of biology relate to the fundamental concepts of physics. In particular: "Is biology reducible to physics?" In turn: "Are social and mental phenomena reducible to biology?," as some of the new school of sociobiologists contend.

An attempt to argue apodictically for the existence of a provident Creator in the spirit, but not the letter of Aquinas. Attempted proofs which depend on Platonic ontology, including Thomas' Fourth Way, are rejected outright, along with other considerations which are considered to have psychological, but not logical force, such as the widespread belief in God. Thomas' other four proofs, described as of the cosmological type, in distinction from the author's metaphysical proof, are criticized, not for being fallacious inferences, but (...) for being incomplete, that is, for proving the existence of something less than a provident Creator. The metaphysical proof which is offered seeks to overcome this defect by taking as its starting point, not the material world, but finite existence as such, and developing the antithesis between finite and absolute being. Two special features of the book are its extensive argument for the independence of metaphysics from all physical science, and its discussion of the problem of evil, which ultimately appeals beyond philosophical arguments to theological considerations.—M. W. (shrink)

This is a translation of another volume of the monumental history of philosophy published in the 1930s by Bréhier. The bibliography is brought up to date by the translator with help from Wesley Piersol. Bréhier writes history of philosophy in the broad sense, showing the social, literary, and political forms taken by philosophical trends of the period. Many of the writings treated in this volume will be unknown to students trained in the Anglo-American tradition. There are only fifteen pages on (...) Scottish realism and British utilitarianism, and a page or so each on Kierkegaard and Emerson. In the substantial chapters on Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and the trends in German thought following Hegel, one can find summaries of the positions of such philosophers as von Humboldt, Schleiermacher, Herbart, Feuerbach, Stirner, and others. There is a rich section of over a hundred pages on French social philosophy: Fourier, Saint-Simon, Comte, and Proudhon. Early work of Engels and Marx is mentioned, but fuller treatment belongs to the next volume. A chapter on Italian idealism is also included. This period saw the flowering of vast constructive systems. A sense of history and development transformed philosophical problems, and faith in the rational, reflective initiative of human wills was replaced by faith in a mysterious historical force, an immanent law which makes sport of efforts to resist it. The difference in substance is reflected in differences of style. The clarity and naturalness with which eighteenth-century men of action wrote for a general educated public was replaced by constraint, effort, conventionality, and above all, a prophetic and apocalyptic tone in the works of this time.--M. B. M. (shrink)

Is it a mistake to use "true" or "false" in certain contexts? White sets the stage for dealing with this issue by laying out a field of usages. He develops his position by characterizing and criticizing contemporary treatments of these data, moving rapidly from case to case. His numerous summaries and conclusions, obviously based on a wider view of the material than is presented in the text, may leave the uninitiated alternately puzzled, bristling, or suspicious. While White's data are expressed (...) clearly, the goal of his arguments and his organizational principles are frequently less apparent. White's discussions of fiction and modality are of particular historic interest. Here we find Frege and Russell arguing about whether they can argue about the King of France. We meet with Aristotle's ancient problem of the future naval battle, witness latter-day skirmishes over the nature of moral language, and find Leibniz, Hume, and Kant debating the logic of necessity and contingency. Are there really different types of truth which correspond with different modalities and existence presuppositions, as White seems to assume? This question, harking back to books 5 and 6 of Plato's Republic, is passed over by White in his usage-oriented quest for the sense of "truth." Truth will suit both student and researcher alike and is to be recommended for its breadth of concern and for its 18 pages of bibliography.--M. D. P. [[sic]]. (shrink)

Limited to a review of Kant's classification of imperatives, Morritz focuses on the hypothetical forms. He offers an emotivist interpretation of such characteristics of imperatives as "being commanded by reason." --S. M. W.