Inasmuch as a good many of the Australian philosophers one would like to see included are not represented, and some of the contributors are no longer teaching in Australia, the title of this volume is somewhat misleading. It contains an introduction by Alan Donagan and the following original essays: J. Passmore, "Russell and Bradley"; L. Goddard, "The Existence of Universals"; B. Ellis, "An Epistemological Concept of Truth"; P. Herbst, "Fact, Form, and Intentionality"; M. Deutscher, "A Causal Account of Inferring"; D. (...) M. Armstrong, "Colour-Realism and the Argument from Microscopes"; K. Campbell, "Colours"; C. B. Martin, "People"; M. C. Bradley, "Two Arguments Against the Identity Thesis"; D. H. Monro, "Mill's Third Howler"; G. Schlesinger, "The Passage of Time." Though the essays are original and admirable, there does not seem to be anything distinctively Australian, rather than American or British, about their contents. Perhaps the most enlightening fact about them is that neither the Andersonian tradition of Sydney nor the Wittgensteinian tradition of Melbourne which dominated the Australian philosophical scene in the early 1950's is pre-eminent any longer, or even in evidence.--A. B. M. (shrink)

Throughout his work, from the logic which first brought him to prominence, through Our Social Inheritance, to the last book he lived to see through the press, Lewis was concerned with what he calls "the whole question of validity at large... the relation between valid knowing and justified self-direction of our activities." Lange, who was Lewis' student, has selected several lectures and papers from the last years of Lewis' life. Because Lewis had been working toward a major statement on ethics, (...) these ten late essays are all on ethical themes. Because Lewis was a constructive, systematic philosopher, his ethical position is grounded in his logic, metaphysics, and epistemology. For example, Lewis characterizes 'truth' as a semantic word designating a relation between the conception in question and existant actuality, NOT a relation between the conception and the evidence. Only two of these papers have already appeared in print; the rest were delivered as public lectures. Some were deliberately not published while he still hoped to improve on them. Acknowledging this is probably only fair to Lewis, but it is not the whole story. Over the years, Lewis has delineated the spheres of the valid, the right, the good, and the imperative, and has worked on capturing the relations between the right and the good, the valid and the imperative, the rational, the consistent and the normative. These papers contain new insights as well as older insights elegantly polished.--M. B. M. (shrink)

This is one of a series providing modest introductions to philosophers and their work. There are some two dozen writers treated in the series, from Lucretius to Sartre. Sarocchi gives a brief biography, stressing Camus' early illness and other experiences which are important for the longer evaluative essay which follows. Camus is considered as a philosopher, a moralist, and a lyrical writer. Because of Camus' character, rather than for philosophical reasons, Sarocchi finds nostalgia to be the secret destination of Camus' (...) "orphic itinerary." About 50 pages are given to excerpts. Passages from various works are grouped by subject matter, giving ten pages or so each to the absurd, Hellenism and Christianity, political thought, art, myth and symbol. Most selections are under two pages long. In light of the brevity of Camus' books, and their wide availability in both English and French, readers might receive a better introduction in comparable compass by reading The Myth of Sisyphus or one of the novels.--M. B. M. (shrink)

The vitality of Peirce's ideas has recently stimulated the writing of several books and articles. This is not strictly a revival, but rather the first systematic presentation to the philosophic public of what Peirce hoped was an architectonic philosophy. While some commentators find Peirce's work to consist merely of brilliant fragments of an ultimate failure, Potter believes that Peirce "has achieved a partial synthesis with gaps and inconsistencies, some of which at least can be remedied." In this book Potter distinguishes (...) for study five aspects of Peirce's philosophy, and some of their relations to one another and to the whole Peirce had in mind. The aspects considered are the categories: Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, which can be very roughly characterized as potentiality, actuality, and necessity, or mediating law; the normative sciences of logic, ethics, and esthetics; pragmatism, of which the exposition in the 1870's was only the as yet unconnected beginning; synechism, the cosmology which Peirce thought proved pragmatism; and the Scotistic realism which Peirce felt to be essential to any authentic pragmatism. Peirce's divisions of philosophy correspond to his categories--phenomenology to Firstness and normative science to Secondness. Metaphysics, corresponding to Thirdness, attempts to comprehend the reality of the data of phenomenology and their interpretation by normative sciences. Although in no sense polemical, this careful study contains replies to most standard criticisms of the pragmatic theories of meaning and truth in its explication of the relation of pragmatism to the rest of Peirce's philosophy. In his second section Potter deals with synechism, the principle of continuity, and law, including a strong chapter on "Law as Living Power." The final section treats Peirce's accommodation of continuity and Darwinian evolutionary theory. If growth and development are fundamental throughout the cosmos, Peirce saw that we must admit real chance and its important implications for questions of determinism and mind. Potter makes a close study of Peirce which he shares with the reader, giving insights, and also a glimpse of the process which leads up to them. The concentration on norms and ideals, perhaps less familiar aspects of Peirce's philosophy, may encourage wider investigation of his writings by those who considered him only as a logician or the founder of pragmatism. This is a superior study, and an addition to the scholarly literature on one of America's major thinkers.--M. B. M. (shrink)

This is one of three books edited or written by Rescher to be published in one year's time. Primarily a collection of material from professional literature of the past decade, there are five new pieces. All the essays use logical and conceptual analysis: there is a historical and a systematic section. Some of the historical essays draw on Rescher's scholarship in the history of logic, including Arabic logic. One chapter discusses some logical difficulties of Leibniz' metaphysics. The systematic section opens (...) with two articles written with Carey Joynt on the epistemology of history. New pieces are an analysis of "control," and one on welfare economics. There are essays on innate ideas, truth, and metaphysics. The most recent articles involve probability and the logic of decision; there is an article dealing with Markov Chains and Discrete State Systems. Attractive minor contributions are included as well, giving the book a wide range both of subject-matter and significance.--M. B. M. (shrink)

Since the introduction of the computer in the early 1950's, the investigation of artificial intelligence has followed three chief avenues: the discovery of self-organizing systems; the building of working models of human behavior, incorporating specific psychological theories; and the building of "heuristic" machines, without bias in favor of humanoid characteristics. While this work has used philosophical logic and its results may illustrate philosophical problems, the artificial intelligence program is by now an intricate, organized specialty. This book, therefore, has a quite (...) specialized audience of its own although it can be very valuable to those philosophers who are interested and competent in using this pioneering material. Five scientific papers report attempts to solve five different kinds of problems. Bertram Raphael describes an attempt to build a memory structure that converts the information input into a systematic model by "understanding" the informational statements as they are made. Daniel Bobrow's machine can set up algebraic equations from informal verbal statements. M. Ross Quillan asks: "What sort of representational format can permit the 'meanings' of words to be stored?" Thomas Evans' machine, Analogy, serves as a model for "pattern-recognition" rather than the "common-property" method of semantic memory. Fischer Black has developed a logical deduction mechanism for question-answering which keeps track of where we are and avoids endless deduction. The editor and John McCarthy contribute more general chapters, providing the historical background of cybernetics, and dealing with the problem of formalizing a concept of causality. Minsky ends the volume with his view that our convictions on dualism, consciousness, free will, and the like are used in the attempt to explain the complicated interactions between parts of our model of ourselves.--M. B. M. (shrink)

Martin Foss tells us that the job of the mature man is to use his gifts of reason and imagination to confront the world and death, and the job of philosophy is to replace for adults the myths which satisfy children. In our times, when, "absurdity, loneliness, death and isolation are the sinister themes," our lack of reflective insight into life and our failure to understand the interplay of process and structure result in a despair for which modern man must (...) blame himself. Foss is replying directly to the message of the poets and artists of the absurd, and to the challenge of existentialism that death is indispensible to authentic existence. His philosophical position owes much to Hegel, even more to the Christian mythos and symbolism. The author calls on a lifetime of familiarity with Western philosophy and literature to provide the vocabulary and illustrations of his theses: Emptiness and meaninglessness are the only death we can possibly experience; the essence of mortality is the exhaustion of the physical in spiritual sublimation; the free decision of the sacrificial act as the destiny of man has changed self and world; sacrifice as a creative element in human life is of fundamental importance.—M. B. M. (shrink)

Erikson is Professor of Human Development at Harvard, a psychoanalyst, and the author of the widely influential books, Young Man Luther, and Childhood and Society. What is the relevance of his latest book to philosophy? One answer is that Erikson deals with several concepts of personal identity which philosophers will recognize as corresponding to historical philosophic positions. He does not choose between these disparate views, but correlates them, treating each as partial, and learning about his complex subject from the habits (...) of syntax appropriate to each. Erikson divides personal identity into the "I," the "selves," and the "ego," on the grounds that these terms provide a way to distinguish roles and "counterplayers" of various functionings of human personality. We need these various terms to designate identity as viewed from without and from within. Erikson's "selves" are what the "I" reflects on when it views the body, the personality, or the social roles to which it is attached. The counterplayers of the "selves" are the "others" of Existentialism. Erikson's reflective "I," like the subject of Descartes' cogito, is "the center of awareness in a universe of experience in which I have a coherent identity... am in possession of my wits and able to say what I see and think." With Descartes, Erikson finds the unique counterplayer to the "I" in the Deity; the repository of the vitality which is being affirmed of itself in each awareness of the "I." Erikson's "ego" corresponds to the Self of Hume's Treatise, undiscoverable beneath its particular perceptions. The "ego" is necessarily unconscious; we are aware of its work but never of it. As of Hume's self, we can say of it that it has the task of turning passive into active, screening and organizing the impositions of the internal and external environment in such a way that they bring about volitions. Like Hume, Erikson feels philosophers and psychologists have "created nouns such as the 'I' or the 'self', making imaginary entities out of a manner of speaking" and that we would be mistaken to give ontological status to these particles. Perhaps Erikson would accept a statement of the contemporary philosophical form: "The several designations of 'selves', etc., are instrumental in explaining complex personal identity feelings or events." In other parts of the book Erikson uses William James as an example of creative identity, discusses the concept of "negative identity", and in the last three chapters discusses aspects of personal identity in the disequilibrium of the young, the races, and women. The book contains Erikson's writings on identity over a twenty-year period. However, in areas of common interest to psychoanalytic theory and philosophy, the requirements of Erikson's clinical work have suggested relationships between concepts different from the relationships often assumed by philosophers. Thus, on personal identity, criteria of ideological soundness of a society, and the determinants of empirical perception, the addition of Erikson's insights may give the philosopher a multidimensional glimpse of the field wherein he labors.--M. B. M. (shrink)

The disadvantages of both the historical and the "problems" approaches to a first course in philosophy are all too familiar. Beck's proven introductory text is organized according to "perspectives" or schools, a loose grouping in terms of "continuity of intention," so that versions of the same attitude are presented ranging in time from Plato to Gilson for realism, or Lucretius to Nagel for naturalism. This second edition differs from the first in the inclusion of a greater variety of statements on (...) the nature of philosophy, and a fuller treatment of the mind-body problem in keeping with its contemporary ascendancy. Perspectives are introduced in a generally chronological order: Realism, Naturalism, Idealism, Positivism, Linguistic philosophy, and Existentialism, with selections in each on epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, esthetics, social philosophy of man, philosophy of science, and philosophy of religion. The rationalist-empiricist division, and Kant's attempted resolution do not fit the perspectives selected--Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz and Kant appear only peripherally. But for those who concur with the author's emphasis or intend to supplement the text, Beck's Perspectives offers advantages of teachability, size, and price.--M. B. M. (shrink)

By "scepticism" Naess means an activity or characteristic attitude, anti-conceptual, non-assertive, and ad hoc. The real sceptic has not yet happened on an argument with no countervailing ones, but he is a "great champion of trust and confidence and of common sense in action." This sceptic is the Pyrrhonist as pictured by Sextus Empiricus; the sceptic of twentieth century epistemology, who asserts that we don't know what we think we do, would be called an Academician. After chapters on historical, psychological, (...) and psychiatric aspects of Pyrrhonism, the author illustrates the Academic-Sceptic distinction in a closely argued chapter on the Ayer-Chisholm analysis of "S knows that p." Naess holds that the applicability of a claim to know is a function of the definiteness of intention. Therefore, there are conditions under which the know-don't know distinction cannot be usefully applied. It is one thing, with Moore and Pap, to agree that one has got his right hand, and another to assert that "I know physical objects exist." Naess' sceptic does not commit himself when both assertion and denial involve doctrinally contaminated ways of expression.--M. B. M. (shrink)

The body of this book consists of facing English and Latin versions of Scotus' treatise prepared by Father Wolter from study of existing manuscripts. Textual variants are marked in frequent notes, but, perhaps because he doubts that one correct or personally written version ever existed, inconsistencies in the argument or apparent errors in the text are unremarked by the editor. Included as a 30 page appendix is Wolter's translation of Scotus' commentary on Peter Lombard's work, Two Questions from Lectures on (...) Book I of the Sentences. Wolter considers this to be an early version, of which the Treatise is the definitive argument. Scotus' demonstration intends to overcome two classical problems afflicting other proofs of the existence of God: the conclusion that the universe is eternal, and that either God's omnipotence or man's moral freedom is limited by His necessary inclusion in the causal order of the world. These metaphysical difficulties are avoided through Scotus' skilled use of modal logic. The book should be of great interest to students of logic and analytic philosophy on account of the display of technique in the logic of contingency and necessity, as well as to medievalists, for reasons of its substance. Wolter performs a real service in making available this workmanlike edition of a powerful and ingenious original.—M. B. M. (shrink)

Convinced that "the role of philosophy in the advancement of science is to make trouble," Erwin Straus has led an informal group of college professors, permanent research staffs of the Lexington's psychiatric hospitals, and a parade of young government doctors, to challenge the foundations of their disciplines to come up with a synoptic view of psychiatry. In this book a French psychiatrist and an American philosopher join Straus in issuing the call to a wider audience. Straus finds that psychiatry grew (...) up within the mechanist tradition, with its split between mind and body. He urges the replacement of this model by a phenomenological one. This point of view is one link among the essays of the book. Another link is their prior publication in Psychiatrie der Gegenwart, Band 1/2, an international work intended to breach the walls between Continental and Anglo-Saxon psychiatries. Straus' paper is translated from the German by E. Eng, and Ey's from the French by S. C. Kennedy. Ey contributes a summary of his thirty-years work: to formulate an organodynamic conception of mental disease. Nathanson considers such questions as, What is the epistemic root for the concept of "normalcy" which psychiatry uses and builds upon?, and How is it possible that human reality has as one of its major expressions, the "abnormal"?--M. B. M. (shrink)

This is the English translation of volume V, originally published in 1930, of Bréhier's History of Philosophy. A revised and enlarged bibliography has been prepared by Wesley P. Murphey. Bréhier's History is a standard work in Europe, and its translation permits English speaking readers to become familiar with the background which continental colleagues bring to their work. This is not just a survey of selected philosophers presented in chronological order. It is a history of philosophy, its major and minor trends, (...) contributing influences, its effects and relations with other cultural and historical phenomena contemporary with it. Bréhier sees the eighteenth century as having three philosophical periods. The first, 1700-1740, is "a moment of relaxation for the synthetic and constructive mind." The great systems of Descartes' heirs were collapsing, Newton's doctrines took over the imagination and instruction of scholars, and a radical dualism of mind and nature dominated thought. In the second period, 1740-1775, "an interested and impassioned society," and even the public powers of church and state, are intimately involved in the issues on which the philosophers, were just then publishing their major works. The dominant philosophy, convinced that any ordinary mind when properly guided could penetrate every subject affecting the happiness of man, was both the agent and the result of the great social movement to which it gave expression. These writers came largely from the middle class, they desired to be useful and to make their reputations, so they shunned technical language. The third period saw a return to sentiment and immediate intuition, and the infusion of religious mysticism and elitism which produced great metaphysical systems up until the mid-nineteenth century. Here Bréhier treats Lessing, Herder, and others, concluding with fifty pages on Kant.--M. B. M. (shrink)

This text is designed to introduce undergraduates to metaphysics, but the authors suggest that with supplementary readings, it can be adapted for higher level courses as well. As a method aiming at both academic objectivity and personal engagement, the authors confront the students with the problems of metaphysics as formulated by Heidegger, Marcel, and Camus, and then, accompanied by these contemporary spokesmen, set their readers to the task of historical "retrieve" of the problems and convictions of ages past. There are (...) three chapters and a long appendix. The first chapter identifies metaphysics as "man's search for the meaning of being," stressing that meaning will include both descriptive and evaluative elements. It deals with the role of freedom in human life and in the origin of metaphysics. The existentialist position contributes these points: the rejection of the simplistic dichotomizing of reality into subject and object, the incorporation of affective, nonintellectual elements into metaphysics, and a use of elements from phenomenology successfully blended with a sense of historicity and dialogue in man's achieving of truth. The second chapter, drawing on Heidegger, poses metaphysics' double problem, the search for a unifying value, and speculation about the nature of being. For the former we are offered an answer in terms of communicable personality, inviting one to authenticity through spiritual love. Chapter three brings in Marcel, beginning with his distinction between the notion of "problem" and the notion of "mystery." The problem approach has three characteristics: the model of the relationship between investigator and data is that of subject and object; the influence of the investigator is minimized and his role reduced to passive observer and annotator; the problem is to be overcome. A "mystery" on the other hand, "is a problem which encroaches upon its own data, invading them... and thereby transcending itself." Since metaphysics falls within the scope of mystery, no problem-solving technique would be appropriate. The authors recommend instead Marcel's reflective philosophizing, to which the remainder of the text is devoted. The appendix consists of excerpts from Jowett's Platonic dialogues, and sets of questions of two kinds: the first aims at eliciting accurate understanding and stimulating critical reflection on the thought of Plato. The second set gives an example of the process of reflective philosophizing.--M. B. M. (shrink)

The author briskly gives the principles of criticism which he will follow in examining Kant's theory of time, and the distinctions between absolute time, psychological time, and the duration of events and processes which must be made in order to deal with the time theories of Kant and his great predecessors Newton and Leibniz and their defenders. Al-Azm then follows Kant's writings from 1747 through his brief conversion to the Newtonian "receptacle" theory, through the critical period. He considers the Dissertation (...) of 1770, at least in so far as it deals with space and time, to belong to the latter. The principles of criticism are especially relevant to Al-Azm's interpretation of Kant's time doctrine in the critical period. He holds that we must carefully bear in mind Kant's alternation of analytic and synthetic methods, and their dialectic interplay. If we do so, we can explain away the "patchwork" theory of Kemp Smith and others, as the obscurities and apparent inconsistencies and paradoxes which are resolvable in the light of the roles played for Kant by the approaches he employs. Within the first Critique, the teachings on time in the Aesthetic and the Analytic constitute a "genuine dialectic of a highly complex order." Thus, Kant's final position should be sought in the progressive modifications of the preliminary position. Al-Azm regards the Aesthetic as offering merely provisional statements on the subject of time, reached by a process of analysis, at an early dialectical stage, and offering a starting point for a fresh stage in analysis which aims "at the unveiling of the synthetic processes of the understanding." This is accomplished in the Analytic. In a last section, on the first Antinomy, the author considers Strawson's essay, The Bounds of Sense, published in 1966, and cites passages which he feels defend Kant's theory of time, seen in its relation to the critical philosophy, as successfully against Strawson's interpretation as against the claims of its Leibnizian and Newtonian rivals.--M. B. M. (shrink)

Selections from Hume's major writings are grouped under the headings: Reason and Experience, Reason and Sentiment, and Reason and Religion. There is also a short conclusion entitled "Skepticism." A Treatise on Human Nature, An Enquiry Concerning the Human Understanding, and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals are from the 1962 and 1947 translations by André Leroy. The Dialogues on Natural Religion were translated in 1912 by Maxime David. Part I gives Hume's account of impressions, ideas, and their relations. Also (...) covered are the crucial arguments on causality from the Treatise and the Enquiry Concerning Understanding--including the role of experience of constant conjunction and the role of instinct in our construction and use of the notion of causality. Part II contains the famous statement from the Treatise that moral matters are "more rightly felt than judged of" and a treatment of the natural and artificial virtues. Considering its central place in recent ethics, the English-speaking reader would miss the familiar lines remarking the passage from "is" to "ought." Part III and the Conclusion are drawn entirely from the Dialogues on Natural Religion.--M. B. M. (shrink)

Rescher has prepared this book for use as a text in upper level courses in value theory, and as supplementary reading in courses in normative ethics, methodology in economic theory, and methodology in the social sciences. Some sections have been published previously. More than half the chapters are new material. Reference tools are provided in 50 pages of bibliography and indexes. The values studied are the ordinary ones of life situations. Rescher takes an essentially objectivist view of values; they are (...) either well- or ill-founded, they are shot through with factual considerations, and they are either right or wrong. After treating the nature and role of values, in the middle third of the book, he deals with problems of axiology; the grounding of a generic conception of Value to provide a unified basis for the wide diversity of contexts in which evaluation takes place, the study of the phenomenon of valuing, and a codification of the rules of valuation. There is some quite technical material, especially the chapter on Evaluation and the Logic of Preference, and the two appendices. Rescher's intent is to bridge the logico-philosophical, and the mathematico-economic traditions. The final third of the book concerns value and social change.--M. B. M. (shrink)

Nissen draws on Logic: The Theory of Inquiry, and also uses quotations from four others of Dewey's books, mostly in the section on truth. The monograph is an unrelenting attack on Dewey's theories, following the lead of Bertrand Russell's criticisms in Schilpp's The Philosophy of John Dewey. Nissen takes key terms of the theories, renders each into a form which he finds clearer, and comparing this form with other statements from Dewey, judges the results Dewey achieves to be incorrect, trivial, (...) or absurd.--M. B. M. (shrink)

The body of this book contains four original papers, comments, and author's replies, from a conference on the Logic of Decision and Action held at the University of Pittsburgh in March 1966. The principal authors are Herbert Simon, N. Rescher, Donald Davidson, and G. H. von Wright. Commentators are R. Ackermann, A. R. Anderson, N. D. Belnap, R. Binkley, H. N. Castañeda, R. Chisholm, J. Robison, and the late E. J. Lemmon. As appendices, there are articles by A. R. Anderson (...) "The Formal Analysis of Normative Systems," and Rescher's very brief scheme for the classifications of "actions" according to five key generic elements. Problems of decision and action are important for all philosophical critique of norms; in ethics, philosophy of science, of the social sciences, and so forth. The task of a comprehensive logic of action is to describe or prescribe the rules that govern reasoning about the occasions for action, the discovery of action alternatives, and the choice of action. In "The Logic of Heuristic Decision Making," Herbert Simon continues to support the view presented in his earlier work, that "ordinary mathematical reasoning, hence the ordinary logic of declarative statements, is all that is required," as relevant imperatives can be brought into normative systems via correspondence rules for conversion of existential statements. In "Semantic Foundations for the Logic of Preference," Rescher starts from the familiar semantical notion of a "possible world," offering the valuation-measure for such worlds as a determinant of preferabilities, and hoping to show that divergent approaches to problems of preference may be reconciled in this way. Davidson's article, "The Logical Form of Action Sentences" analyzes concepts of agency and intentionality. G. H. von Wright sees a logic of change to be necessary in order to formulate a logic of action. His essay elaborates some of the ideas in his book Norms and Action, but also gives essential modifications of his earlier views.--M. B. M. (shrink)

This volume collects fifteen essays written for popular readership during a span of thirty-five years. The title essay, two on mysticism, and one on the status of belief in the survival of the soul are basically metaphysical. There are three on values, and four essays on philosophy and science. Two themes, the purposeless universe and the problems of moral materialism, recur in various relations throughout most of the essays. The reader may be puzzled by what appears as an explicit denial (...) of connection between the essays. In "Man Against Darkness," the scientific revolution is described as a change of beliefs: in exchange for belief in a cosmic plan, the belief-setting of the ancient religions of East and West and of the Christian religion which superseded them in European civilization, science substitutes the belief that the universe is meaningless. In other essays Stace urges his readers to come to grips with life in the post-religious world. He asks what the role of the philosopher can be when "not moral self-control but the doctor, the psychiatrist, the educationalist must save us from doing evil." In "Why Do We Fail?", considering the charge of materialism leveled at America, he agrees with Plato that the love of luxury leads to war. It is taking "materialism" as the notion that everything, even our thoughts, is really composed of atoms, that permits Stace to say: "putting things of the body higher on the list than things of the spirit has nothing to do with any such scientific or metaphysical hypothesis." Drawing on his familiarity with Eastern culture as well as philosophical sources, he shows that men's plans are efficacious, and thus, that scientific explanation in materialistic terms, rather than teleological ones, does not logically require moral materialism. Man can still create value and purpose in the post-religious world. The other four essays include one on poetry, one on "The Snobbishness of the Learned" and two on political subjects.--M. B. M. (shrink)

This latest in attempts to collect statements from living American philosophers presents thoughts and interests of those writing in the "middle decades," the fifty years from 1920 to 1970. The editor has restricted himself to America’s senior philosophers asking each to reflect on "the things that matter most," or "to share the motifs in their work and to present concerns about their world". Although some influential elders are missing from this collection, an interesting variety of viewpoints and styles of American (...) philosophizing are represented. Especially interesting are the reflections of Brand Blanshard, Edwin Burtt, Herbert Feigl, Charles Hartshorne, Stephen Pepper, Roy Wood Sellars, and Herbert Spiegelberg. Blanshard traces his development from the influences upon him of Bradley, and describes his own rationalist ethics and humanist religion. Herbert Feigl in an even more autobiographical vein relates how he came under the important influence of Moritz Schlick and to be a member of the Vienna Circle. Also included in his article is a summary of his views on the issues of induction, scientific explanation, the mind-body problem, determinism, and some matters of practical philosophy. Pepper explains how he originated the idea of world hypotheses, and how he believes these hypotheses themselves originate and function, and Spiegelberg sketches an intriguing "ethics for fellows in the fate of existence." In his essay Hartshorne mixes comments on pragmatism, idealism, and the "linguistic turn," with explanations of his own "neoclassical metaphysics."—B.M. (shrink)

Grice tells us that the grounds of judgments of obligation are the fundamental principles of morals, and that it is on these that judgments of moral good depend. He offers a double theory of obligation: basic, grounded in social contract; and ultra, grounded in the character of the particular moral agent. The book presents this case attractively. Although character is thus given a central role, Grice has very little to say about it. He discusses several related problems in ethical theory, (...) as derived from Mill, Sidgwick, and G. E. Moore, and brings to bear considerable analytic technique; a strong example is the distinctions drawn between a motive and a reason for acting, and between a reason for acting and a reason for a judgment. Despite convincing use of examples, and competent reasoning, the upshot is yet another attempt to "ground" morals on a principle from which "moral scientists" can deduce the details. The opposition Grice presents to "the mistaken and almost universal assumption that the ground of moral 'ought' judgments must be some quite simple proposition to the effect that something is good," is his proposal that such grounds are the two simple propositions that some things are obligatory. His characterization of science as "a systematic body of knowledge" completes the nineteenth century flavor of the book. Missing are the concepts of interaction between the character of citizens and the goals of the society in which their contracts and obligations take place, and of the unique contribution of science to morals, that heuristic method which forces change of the body of knowledge, the techniques of investigation, and appropriately to Grice's case, of the character of its practitioners.—M. B. M. (shrink)

Freedom and unity are the values James most wanted to protect and to extend. Roth agrees with this choice, and recommends James to his readers as the moral philosopher who can best show us how. James is presented as combining a principled morality with the responsiveness to particular cases characteristic of existentialism and situational ethics, and his ethics is found to yield what John Wild would call a "primary existential norm": Act so as to maximize freedom and unity. While the (...) philosophical foundations of James' theory are generally secondary to Roth's advocacy of it, the author shows how the norm is based on the following Jamesian concepts: human consciousness is selective and efficacious; the universe is unfinished; value is rooted in consciousness and choice; and the goal of ethics is to achieve unity or harmony among personal and communal choices. Roth mentions problems for James--for example, pointing out that the principle of satisfying as many value demands as possible while frustrating a few as necessary does not handle qualitative differences in demands, and showing how James' later work emends this principle. He also touches on the tough problem, developed by others following James, of "unity" as an ideal in a system in which both meaning and value are rooted in feeling, and feelings are "owned" by individual selves. The book is simply written and should present no difficulty for the reader with little background in philosophy.--M. B. M. (shrink)

This book by an economist might seem to claim the attention of philosophers, as its chapters include "The subject and methods of inquiry," and "The problem of induction"; important topics in the philosophy of science. In fact, it is a superficial and pretentious essay on science as a social system. Few facts are offered. The generalizations distort. Probably due to the imprecision of their statement, the premisses often contradict one another. A disproportionate percentage of the book's length consists of various (...) forms of the first person pronoun. The chapter on induction, which Mr. Tullock calls a digression, characterizes induction, also called Hume's problem, twice; once in terms of the popular misconception, as a process of going from the particular to the general, second, as the process whereby "a pattern of the whole problem appears in the mind and is then tested by working out.... The patterns must be directly perceived by the mind, since no 'intellectual' explanation is available." The author seems unaware that Hume's problem, and the justification of induction, are never mentioned.—M. B. M. (shrink)

Olthuis makes a singular contribution in bringing the "Philosophy of the Law-Idea" to the attention of philosophers who lack other access to this development in contemporary Dutch thought. His presentation concentrates on applications to ethics. He begins with a thorough exposition of G. E. Moore's ethical theory, to which he applies "history's critique"--a resumé of Ayer and Stevenson, of Oxford meta-ethics, and of the "new wave" of naturalism set in motion by Anscombe and Foot in 1958. Olthuis finds that neither (...) Moore nor the subsequent philosophers could long stave off the irreconcilable extreme of absolute value or absolute relativism. "... the main source of difficulty in the constrictive nature of the... ontological schema," and, underlying that, in the claim that theoretical thought is neutral. In a valuable final chapter, he presents a "perspective for a way out" based on work by H. Dooyeweerd and D. H. Th. Vollenhoven. One key to their Philosophy of the Law-Idea lies in "norm-laws." Like "natural" laws, what is subject to them cannot withdraw. Unlike "natural" laws, they demand human acknowledgment to be fulfilled. He rejects both "ought" and "goodness" as adequate primitive concepts for ethics in favor of stress upon its irreducible "sphere-sovereignty." The cosmos stands under a structural law-order, made up of many modal laws determining the many modalities of reality. Within the normative, ethics is only one special modal science. Its job is to investigate the ethical norm-law, that which is subject to it, and the correlations between these two.--M. B. M. (shrink)