Book reviewed in this article: Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry. By James Turner Johnson.

J. M. Cameron; XII—Poetic Imagination, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 62, Issue 1, 1 June 1962, Pages 219–240, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristote.

J. M. Cameron; XII—Poetic Imagination, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 62, Issue 1, 1 June 1962, Pages 219–240, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristote.

Book reviewed in this article: Just War Tradition and the Restraint of War: A Moral and Historical Inquiry. By James Turner Johnson.

Mr. Gellner’s book achieved a succès de scandale before it had been out very long. Professor Ryle’s refusal to have it reviewed in Mind on the ground that it was abusive and levelled accusations of disingenuousness against identifiable teachers of philosophy provoked in the columns of The Times an impassioned exchange of letters in the course of which a great many issues were firmly knotted together beyond all reasonable possibilities of disentanglement. The Thunderer summed up in favour of Mr. Gellner (...) and Lord Russell in what must be the first leader devoted to a philosophical topic within living memory. Such a hubbub could scarcely, in our culture, have been provoked by purely philosophical differences. It has in fact been a party fight in which much more than philosophical differences have been at stake. The position of Oxford in relation to the provincial universities and the University of London; the connexion of philosophers with the cultural ‘establishment’; the obscure mechanisms by which reputations among professional philosophers are made and marred and advancement secured or frustrated; all these and other issues have been caught up into the controversy. All these issues are in fact raised by Mr. Gellner in his book, and legitimately enough from his point of view—he is a philosopher who is now professionally concerned with sociology—; but the nature of his book, as a critical account of certain philosophical doctrines and simultaneously a treatment of these doctrines as ‘ideology’, that is, as in some sense doctrines the rationale of which can only be understood in terms of obscure social motivations, presents the philosophical reviewer with some difficulties. Any such reviewer is bound to rise up from a reading of Words and Things with strong feelings of sympathy for Professor Ryle, even if he takes the view that the refusal to arrange for a review in Mind was, so to speak, strategically wrong and tactically absurd. (shrink)

Any review of philosophy since the eighteen-forties is bound to raise some challenging questions of a kind very different from those that would be raised by a consideration of, say, the development of physics or history during the same period. The story of the latter subjects would be an account of steady advance. It is true, certain puzzling problems would appear on the margins of both subjects, problems such as those concerning the meaning and range of applicability of physical concepts (...) and those concerning criteria of truth and certainty in historical investigation; but these would of course be problems in philosophy, not in physics or history, and as philosophical problems they would display that peculiar recalcitrance that has marked such problems since they were first discussed in the cities of Ionia. (shrink)

Professor Hospers has produced a most competent text-book, with ‘selected readings’ and ‘exercises’ added to each chapter. He has in mind in the first place undergraduates in American universities; but anyone who wishes to familiarize himself with the methods and approaches to philosophy current in universities in England and the United States will find in this book a useful guide. Philosophy is seen as a critical and purgative activity. It is assumed that if we become clear about the logic of (...) our language a great many of the traditional problems of philosophy disappear or look very different. At least one is inclined to suppose that this is Professor Hospers’s assumption, though he is on the whole a little cagey about showing his own hand; and it may be significant that the name of Wittgenstein does not occur in the Index and that there is no discussion of Professor Ryle’s Concept of Mind—in particular, one is surprised to find no extended discussion of dispositional concepts. The section dealing with ‘the mental and the physical’, admirable though it is, has thus a somewhat old-fashioned appearance. (shrink)

Max Picard (1888-1965) was a Swiss-German writer, who converted to Catholicism from Judaism. A doctor and psychologist, Picard worked in Berlin but retired in the 1920s to Switzerland. He is often regarded as a "wisdom thinker," and his rich and penetrating writings continue to speak to us in the twenty-first century. The Flight from God is an incisive, profound description of many of the problems facing modern culture, and its analysis resonates with us more today than when first published in (...) 1934. Picard illustrates that modern culture is essentially in Flight, and so the individual is under pressure to make a choice; in earlier generations only an individual could be in flight because the culture itself was not in flight but in Faith. The flight does not require courage or guilt; yet it is to be found in, and is often destructive of, many facets of life including human relationships, art, economics, science, entertainment, even religion. Because of this it leaves many in anguish, from which we seek alternative avenues of structure and meaning. Yet, in every person there is a residue that will not yield itself to the flight, and this is bound up with love, which reminds us of God. Picard shows how God is always somehow present in the flight--just when we think we are arriving from the flight, we find that God is already there. Picard's identification and discussion of the roots of the distresses of modern culture, and its attempts to grapple with the spiritual dimension of human experience, along with tensions created by freedom and individuality, are clearly still of the greatest relevance for us today. (shrink)