Roslynn D. Haynes, From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994. Pp. ix+417. ISBN 0-8018-4801-6, £16.50.George Levine , Realism and Representation: Essays on the Problem of Realism in Relation to Science, Literature and Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993. Pp. xiii+330. ISBN 0-229-13630-2, £40.00 ; 0-229-13634-5, £19.00 .Sherry Turkle, Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. Cambridge, MA: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Pp. 347. ISBN 0-297-81514-8. No (...) price given.Despite the alarming drop in numbers of students studying science throughout the Western world today there is no more important subject in our time than science broadly construed, and these three books provide some of the reasons. Their diversity indicates the shape of the debates occurring about the scientist in Western culture, science's tortured philosophical realism and representation as troubled categories, and, most predictably, life on the screen in the age of the Internet. (shrink)

_The Languages of Psyche_ traces the dualism of mind and body during the "long eighteenth century," from the Restoration in England to the aftermath of the French Revolution. Ten outstanding scholars investigate the complex mind-body relationship in a variety of Enlightenment contexts—science, medicine, philosophy, literature, and everyday society. No other recent book provides such an in-depth, suggestive resource for philosophers, literary critics, intellectual and social historians, and all who are interested in Enlightenment studies.

_The Languages of Psyche_ traces the dualism of mind and body during the "long eighteenth century," from the Restoration in England to the aftermath of the French Revolution. Ten outstanding scholars investigate the complex mind-body relationship in a variety of Enlightenment contexts—science, medicine, philosophy, literature, and everyday society. No other recent book provides such an in-depth, suggestive resource for philosophers, literary critics, intellectual and social historians, and all who are interested in Enlightenment studies.

Glum defends two theses: that Rousseau's political philosophy can be understood only against a religious background, and that Rousseau can supply the West with the democratic theory of the state which it is now lacking. To support the latter claim, he attempts a detailed refutation of those commentators who regard Rousseau as the father of totalitarian regimes and doctrines.--R. G. S.

J. G. Merquior is a moderate democrat and a moderate empiricist. As a democrat, he holds that political authority is legitimate only when it is controlled by widespread and egalitarian political participation; but such participation must not be allowed to obstruct individual freedom. As an empiricist, he holds that the business of the social scientist is to develop causal explanations and not only to interpret cultural significance; but such explanations must not be expressed as deductions from universal laws. In this (...) book, a "slightly different version" of a London School thesis written under Ernest Gellner, Merquior attempts to show that Rousseau and Weber, properly read, both support, or at any rate do not oppose, his own political and methodological preferences. (shrink)

Della Volpe was a professor of philosophy, one of the leading theoreticians of the Italian Communist Party in the 50s and 60s, and one of the few prominent intellectuals to retain party membership following the Hungarian revolt. Nonetheless, his Marxism is distinctly heterodox. The main thrust of Rousseau and Marx, which contains an essay of that name as well as several short papers on Soviet legality and "materialist methodology," is to establish certain continuities between Marx’s thought and earlier philosophy. (...) Marx is here depicted as attempting to solve a problem first stated by Rousseau, the problem of egalitarian liberty, and as applying the logic of modern experimental science to moral and political questions. (shrink)

The title of this interesting study may be misleading; Crocker's subject is not Rousseau's or Hegel's conception of liberty considered in contradistinction to, say, Locke's or J. S. Mill's. The philosophy of Positive Liberty is strictly English-speaking and its intention is to argue against those within the Lockean tradition who would claim that personal liberty can only be limited by deliberate human action. Crocker is in full agreement with his opponents in holding that passion or irrationality is in no (...) way an obstacle to liberty, but he wants to persuade negative libertarians that disabilities like poverty, powerlessness, physical handicap, and manipulative information management are conditions as seriously preventive of liberty as are forcible coercion and legal prohibition. His argument is that increasing liberty requires maximizing the range and desirability of opportunities and choices rather than simply minimizing deliberate or overt restraint. The consequence for political philosophy of this position, which Crocker calls left-libertarian, is that a social commitment to personal liberty may require extensive and costly positive redistributive policies. According to Crocker, positive liberty is not a new conception of liberty, but rather a novel and more inclusive sense of the obstacles to freedom: "the emphasis shifts from the constraints to the alternatives and such matters as their range and desirability. The absence of interference by other persons appears as but one feature of liberty among several". (shrink)