In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 135 of his "public philosophy"? The Lawgiver analogy can hardly explain it. Rousseau's Lawgiver is not a philosopher inventing a doctrine but a statesman and educator establishing the reign of law among his own people. Did Rousseau really see himself in this position? The texts do not, in our judgment, support this view. Broome vacillates between seeing in the Lawgiver analogy a doctrinal necessity and an idiosyncrasy (...) born out of Rousseau's near-madness, a consequence of his ambiguous belief that for Rousseau all philosophical problems are personal ones (p. 12). The author is much indebted to current French and Swiss Rousseau studies whose findings he introduces, often with independent, sometimes with wilful adaptations. Since he gives no footnote references to this literature, the reader to whom the book is addressed has no way of distinguishing established critical opinion from the author's own interpretations which have not yet passed the critical test. (The Fall-and-Redemption theme, e.g., is well established, but nowhere has it been made the foundation of exegesis, for the good reason that it is not central enough.) The book should therefore not be taken as a synthesis of current Rousseau research. It is an independent effort to introduce the English student to the new direction in Rousseau exegesis which tries to grasp the unity of the man's life and thought, and seeks to understand him intus et in cute, as he himself had wanted it. GREGOR SEBBA Emory University Alle Origini del Formalismo Giurdico. By A. Negri. (Padova: 1962) In his book At the Origins of Legal Formalism, realizing the problematic nature of the idea of form in Kantian thought, Negri goes back to the origins and the historical, ethical, and political motivations of this ambiguity. Then he examines the prolonging of this ambivalence in the tortuous involutions of the thought of post-Kantian jurists, and points out the consequences. Negri notices how Kant puts form into the frame of reference of intelligible totality and how this leads to very ambivalent interpretations. In fact, as Goldmann too noted, the idea of transcendental totality, when applied to the historical world, becomes a universe that is humanly and concretely dialectical; but at the same time, the idea of form appears in another aspect as a sign of the development of transcendental totality. This means that Kant has both a critical and a metaphysical ideal, and this duplicity is found in the ambivalence of the idea of form, conceived from one point of view as a condition of critical research and from the other point of view as constitutive of metaphysical reconstruction (p. 65). Corresponding to this double conception of form is the ambiguous conception of freedom which Kant uses in legal philosophy. On one hand following Rousseau's opinion, Kant interprets freedom as autonomy of mind, and to this conception of freedom there corresponds the conception of form as constitutive of objectivity. This is developed in the Critique of Practical Reason. But on the other hand, following Montesquieu's opinion, as G. Gurwitch noted, Kant interprets freedom as independence, and, of course, to this conception of freedom there corresponds the conception of form as a "rational structure, as a registration of relations of wills" (p. 74). In this last case Kant appears to accept concretely "legal formalism as a liberal and ideological foundation, rejecting the formative element of democratic ideology to the limbo of a well-intentioned morality" (p. 74). However, these two conceptions of freedom and form complement each other because "independence conditions autonomy, and then reciprocally the autonomous contents of the right are interpreted as independence" (p. 71). But in this way, as Negri subtly notes, independence overburdens itself with that metaphysical character which is peculiar to autonomy, whereas autonomy then loses much of its metaphysical and constitutive importance, because it is used to define individual independence and is therefore bound to a "doctrinaire individualism" (p. 76). These different meanings in Kantian thought are historically justified because Kant as a 136 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY man felt two needs :"the theoretical need for guaranteeing a priori the subsistence of an ethical sphere against the Enlightenment's emphasis on happiness, and the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:272 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY than most that his great original intellects cannot be crammed into any conceptual pigeonhole. By juxtaposing them all as he does he deepens our understanding of each. ALAN B. SPITZER State University o/ Iowa Alla Soglia Dell" et~ Romantica. By A. Pupi. (Milan: Vitae pensiero, 1962. L. 3000.) Pupi's object in this book, At the Dawn o/the Romantic Age, is to recapture the milieu and (...) the personalities of those who had what Kant called "rational faith." The two main issues of the polemics which produced the Kantian theory of the supremacy of practical reason are formulated in Jacobi's and Mendelssohn's philosophies. Jacobi, rejecting Spinozism as atheism, appeals to faith as an element of all human knowledge and of reality (p. 49), using Kant to justify his appeal to practical faith and in this way evading the Kryptokatholicismus of which he was accused (p. 230). Mendelssohn, on the other hand, denies the existence of things in themselves, mistaking, according to Jacobi's version of Kant (p. 210), Kant's theory of the limits of human knowledge for a theory of knowledge as such (p. 279). Meanwhile, in the face of the fall of philosophical reason, Hamann praises reason as "God's original light" (p. 225). These are the terms of the polemic created by Kant's short treatise, What Does It Mean to See One's Way Clearly? We must never forget these sayings because "the Kantian language and other great systematic formulations are always based on them and have an organic continuity through the circular medium of men's daily and concrete speech" (p. 214). Kant intervenes in the dispute with the notion of Vernun/tglaube whose Griinde should be interpreted as the very nature of reason (p. 289). However, while we may interpret the word "opinion" (Meinung) as knowledge (Wissen), when the objective Griinde are given, the VernunItglaube will always be a Glaube because it is based only on "ge[iihltes Bediir[nis der VernunIt," and consequently its Grund must be taken as only subjective (pp. 288--290). What Kant wants to point out is that "thought detached from experience (pure reason) is no longer able to show that it knows reality, but it can see its own way in the sphere of the possible" (pp. 283--284); however, the Vernuntt of the Vernun/tglaube is neither the speculative and demonstrative reason, as Mendelssohn supposed, nor an obscure intuition "without the consent of reason," called "faith" by Jacobi. This is, in short, the theme of the book. I cannot agree with the author's thesis that the Kantian supremacy of practical reason settled the issue in the age-old dispute between philosophy and faith (p. 275). The very protest of Wizemann, which the author cannot omit, is an example of it, and certainly this was not the only protest; it was followed by lively criticism, particularly by Schelling, who soon expressed himself in his Philosophical Letters. See particularly the first letter (on p. 8 of the Italian Edition by G. Semerari, Florence: 1958). I think too that this attempt to make practice the objective guaranty of theoretical philosophy is somewhat problematic, all the more if one admits the impossibility of a theoretic reasoning about God's existence only in practice. It seems to me that the author, whose strict and relevant philology is admirable, leaves out too much of the theoretic problematicity of the subjects he faces, as, for instance, the ambiguity of the talk about faith, which is formally assertive but really hypothetical; the assertiveness, if practical, should be justified in action, not in talk. In consequence of his recourse to practice as a last resort for justification, Kant is compared to Pascal by Goldmann, who sees in both of them the theme of the "wager" (see pp. 445-446, Le Dieu Cachd, Paris, 1955) which shows, to my mind, the problematicity of the whole matter. This cannot be settled merely by historical exposition. The limitation of Pupi's study, though philologically rich and detailed, lies, according to BOOK REVIEWS 273 my judgment, in the fact that he has limited the historical inquiry to the scholarly study of documents and... (shrink)