Abstract

This book, consisting of documents of all sorts and an assortment of interpretations of the famous Battle of the Multiversity, is edited by two men on the Berkeley faculty with differing attitudes toward the event. The philosophical interest of this volume lies principally in the confrontation between statements of participants in a historical event of some magnitude, interpretations of the event by outsiders, and surveys by social scientists of student opinion and other factors relevant to the crisis. While the final verdict of history is by no means yet in, it would appear at this date that the Berkeley uprising was at most the 1905 rather than the 1917 of the Great Revolution in the American academic world; from this point of view the present work may be of interest to philosophers qua academicians.—J. J.