Abstract

If this book had been edited by Feigl rather than as a Festschrift for him it might well pass as Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, IV. There are twenty-six essays by as many contributors, most of whom are familiar faces in collections of this sort: Carnap, Scriven, Sellars, Meehl, Smart, Hanson, Popper, Salmon, Mehlberg, and the editors, to mention a few. Whenever the essays do occupy themselves with a discussion of Feigl's work, it is his work on the mind-body problem and probability and induction that come in for the most extensive treatment. Of the essays taking off from Feigl's "The 'Mental' and the 'Physical,'" Meehl's "The Compleat Autocerebroscopist" is the best, being an exhaustive and often valuable re-consideration of some of the difficulties surrounding the identity theory of the mind-body problem. There is a good deal of less productive re-hash in the other essays, and one wonders whether the creative spurt in the philosophy of science in this country which owes as much to Feigl as anyone has started to wane.—E A. R.