This addendum non-trivially strengthens one of the six claims of my two-part paper 'The Equivalence Myth of Quantum Mechanics', published in this journal in 1997.

The purpose of this book is to give a complete scientific notion of generation, and its implications for virtually all historical and philosophical disciplines. Generation, as a biological notion, is as old as mankind, but as a scientific notion, it is as recent as in the nineteenth century. The authors of that century, however, who have something to say about the matter—and Marias studies all of them—are incomplete, superficial, and even mistaken. The philosopher who developed a complete and definitive theory (...) of generations was José Ortega y Gasset, who derives it from his philosophy of radical reality or human life considered both individually and collectively. Briefly and very incompletely, a generation can be defined as constituted by those who are not only contemporary but also coetaneous, i.e., who have the same beliefs, problems and ideas and consequently contribute to the formation of the world in an equal or similar fashion; a generation lasts fifteen years, and in a given period of time there coexist three generations, the young, the mature, and the old. A chapter follows about the vicissitudes of the generations theme in our century, and again, in spite of Ortega’s comprehensive analysis, the authors who deal with the theme are found wanting. Finally the problems involved in the theory of generations, particularly the question concerning the empirical existence of generations and the way of determining their succession, are discussed and an attempt is made to solve them. Prescinding from whether Marias’ treatment of the concept of generations could well inaugurate a new movement in contemporary philosophy, his work will serve as a useful corrective to the many superficial treatments of the ‘generation gap’ that have been published.—F. A. (shrink)

This book, outstanding in its field, presents in a clear, impressively thorough way the philosophical problems concerned with relativity theory and the topology and metrics of space and time. Many of the author's points will be familiar to the readers of his earlier articles, some of which this work is meant to supersede. Unifying all the many discussions is a rigorous and thorough-going empiricism that relies heavily on the results of investigations of physicists and mathematicians and that masterfully clips the (...) wings of those who would take flight from these results into the airy realms of speculative cosmology.—A. E. F. (shrink)

Poetry is frankly regarded by the author as a mode of knowledge; as such, it presupposes a mediating principle, by means of which the mind, in a poetic act reducing experience to meaning, is able to overcome the "tyranny" of the senses. But the dissipation of "tradition," the unavailability of mediating symbols, as once Christianity afforded, has left the modern poet experience only with which to mediate experience; perception itself must somehow be rendered creative of an order at once mimetic (...) and synthetic. It is as venturers in such "unmediated" vision that the subjects of Mr. Hartman's study are taken; he interprets their work with sensitivity and craft.--A. F. (shrink)