A highly original reading of Immanuel Kant that demonstrates his interest in the social realm of human interaction.

Bruening describes his book as "an attempt to capture the spirit of the man—not his works and his life considered in isolation from each other, but the person himself as one single human being." For the most part, however, life and works are separately presented, most of the biographical data being concentrated in the first chapter. Thereafter the works are treated one by one, in largely chronological order: "Notes on Logic" ; "Notes Dictated to Moore" ; Notebooks ; Prototractatus ; (...) Tractatus ; "Lecture on Ethics" ; Blue Book ; Brown Book ; Philosophical Investigations ; Philosophische Bemerkungen ; Philosophical Grammar ; Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics ; Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief ; Zettel ; On Certainty. Bruening does not explain his principles of selection. The direction of his interests is suggested by the ten pages on Lectures and Conversations, not written by Wittgenstein, as compared to the mere half page devoted to On Certainty, or by the four pages on a popular lecture on ethics as compared to the single page on Philosophische Bemerkungen. Longer treatments follow the course of the work being glossed and sample its topics, save in the case of the Investigations, where remarks are grouped under these five headings: "Reflections on the Tractatus," "Language Games and Forms of Life," "The Mind-Body Problem and Private Language," "The Nature of Philosophy," and "Seeing and Seeing As." Doubtless beginning readers such as Bruening usually has in view would have found more profit and interest in the coherent development of such themes than in running comments on work after work, especially if they had been shown inside Wittgenstein’s problems and been made to sense the struggle. This seldom happens, however, and the inaccuracies are numerous and sometimes serious. A select bibliography is appended.—G.L.H. (shrink)

Even a decade after the end of the 1914–1918 war, economic theory assumed that the world was tranquil and orderly. By 1939 an economic slump without parallel, allied to the re-emergence of military ambition in Europe, had brought economic theorists face to face with reality. In this classic book, first published in 1967, Professor Shackle provides a study, in exact and professional language, of the precise nature, structure, presuppositions, language and inter-relations of the theories which were formulated in these fourteen (...) years - unparalleled in the whole history of economics except perhaps by the years of the Physiocrats and Adam Smith. These theories are not prototypes on the way to something better but are of essential and permanent importance. (shrink)

A "problem" book which reads, throughout too many of its pages, like an almanac of distinctions. Yet Bunge's discussions of partial truth, causality and chance, and especially of metanomological statements restore the balance and lend support to his thesis: science as a body of knowledge must be regarded as a set of systems of propositions and proposals of many kinds with the aim of "the maximization of the degree of truth."--G. L. C.

Una importante causa filosófica e ideológica de la inhumanidad de la sociedad rusa durante las décadas del marxismo-leninismo fue la obsesiva orientación de los marxistas-leninistas hacia el futuro histórico (futuro comunismo) en aras de lo cual, comunidades, culturas y personas podían ser reducidas a medios para alcanzar ese fin histórico. El autor de los debates apoyándose en los propios pensadores rusos de la "tradición clásica", como por ejemplo Herzen, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, Leontiev y Berdiaev. No se opone a cualquier tipo de (...) orientación de futuro, pero recalca la importancia de las personas actuales. (shrink)

Science, which is guided by reason and not pure intuition, is to be regarded as justifiable opinion. Bunge's sketch of philosophical intuition from Aristotle to Heidegger will probably be of interest primarily to the general reader.--G. L. C.

A distinguished group of linguists examine the present state of theoretic linguistics by looking to the past to see what has been accomplished, and to the future for requirements needed to frame a workable theory of language. The universals of language are taken from phonology, grammar, semantics and psycho-linguists. Uriel Weinreich's paper, "On the Semantic Structure of Language," should be of special interest to philosophers.--G. L. C.

This collection of essays brings together three philosophers, a lawyer, and an economist, who discuss both similar and unrelated points. Of special importance is the treatment of the problem of adjudicating equality and merit. Questions of political, legal, and moral obligation, and of the relationship between justice and the good life are also explored.--G. L. C.

The aim of this study is to understand the place of Aristotle’s dialectic in his overall theory of intellectual activity. On the way to this goal, the reader is treated to a novel and exciting interpretation of the nature of dialectic. Evans argues that Aristotelian dialectic is a method for progressing from what is intelligible to some group of discussants to what is intelligible without qualification. Evans goes behind this distinction to discover how dialectic can be, as Aristotle claims, the (...) road to the first principles of all the sciences. (shrink)