Abstract

This is a delightful and scholarly work on a little known area in the history of American philosophy. Its appeal will be to Platonists and particularly to those philosophers who have a more intimate acquaintance with the intellectual climate of the American Midwest. Writing as an American philosopher and midwesterner the author states that ‘if we are to understand our heritage... we must seek knowledge of less obvious forces and personalities which have left their unheralded but indelible mark upon our past’. With an abundance of evidence based upon considerable research of the most varied kind, he shows that the real productivity in philosophy in America in the latter part of the nineteenth century was to be found in the Midwest, especially in the contributions of such ‘less obvious personalities’ as William Torrey Harris, Dr Hiram K Jones and Thomas Johnson. After a brief introductory study of Harris and the St Louis movement in philosophy—a movement largely Hegelian in its origins and influence—the author confines the greater part of his account to the work of Dr Hiram K Jones, the founder of Platonism in the Midwest, and to Thomas M Johnson the scholar and bibliophile of Platonism.