v. 1. God, religion, and philosophy; a historical retrospect. 2d ed. 1971.--v. 2. Purushka and prakrita (God and nature). 1st ed. 1968.--v. 3. God and man (nara and Narayan). 1st ed. 1974.--v. 4. Thought; gems in verse: sayings of great saints and thinkers of India. 1st ed. 1975.--v. 5. Truths stranger than fiction. 1st ed.

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)

Danto contends that a subject matter exists which is irreducibly and autonomously philosophical. That subject matter is the relation between the world and men, when men are functioning as knowers of the world. Put another way, the locus of philosophy is the space between language and the world. This point is obscured for two large classes of philosophers by the frames of reference within which they work. The bulk of the book provides an original discussion in terms of which presuppositions (...) of the philosophy of knowledge can be fruitfully reassessed. It is an important book, written with a conscious effort to unite intellect and sense. Furthermore, Danto is one of the finest stylists in the business today. His theory of knowledge criticizes both Naturalism and the whole line of philosophers who do epistemology by the Cartesian ground-rules, whether these latter are of the variety who are searching for an incorrigible basis for knowledge, or the hardy sort who believe the only intellectually responsible position is irresoluble doubt. Although he challenges the vast number of philosophers who fall into one or the other of these positions, Danto provides support for a deeply held intuition of each tradition--of the Naturalists, the feeling that knowledge of the external world is possible, and the tortured arguments of the skeptics are somehow corruptions--and of the post-Cartesians, the feeling that no amount of scientific evidence can solve the philosophical problems of knowledge. Danto's own theory combines these insights. His concept of semantical vehicle helps him keep clear distinctions between 'descriptive' and 'semantical' notions, and assign a role to experience which avoids the classical impasse. He presents a provocative alternative not only to post-Cartesian epistemology and to the Naturalism which has held out against it only by collapsing philosophy and science, but also to the sad state of affairs in which various active practitioners of philosophy can not talk to each other.--M. B. M. (shrink)

Levinson presents a biographical sketch and selects eight themes from Plato's thought, giving a short exposition of each, and illustrating the points he makes with quite substantial selections of Plato's work. There is a bibliography of secondary material, an appendix each on translation and transliteration, but no index. The order of the themes approximates that of the dialogues in which they are illustrated, with some overlapping and cross-references. They are: Saint Socrates, The Eternal Ideas, The Psyche, Love and Beauty, The (...) Re-formed State, Education, Knowing, Naming, Non-Being, and finally the Cosmic Frame. The Plato selections include all of the Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, most of the Symposium, half the Phaedrus, much of the Republic, and substantial consecutive portions of Cratylus, Parmenides, Theaetetus, Sophist, Timaeus, and Book X of the Laws. Levinson is not aiming at the specialist, and he advises the beginner not to venture immediately or on his own into the strange world of the dialogues. For teachers who share this position, and also share Levinson's preference for the homogeneity and literary qualities of an anthology drawn entirely from Jowett, this book has several virtues as a text. It is readable, contains a brief, useful section on the influence of Plato in Western culture, and gives a lot of Plato for the money.—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 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)

The basic thesis of Skyrms's book is that the nomic necessity of laws should be understood in terms of the ways in which laws are confirmed and applied rather than as some mysterious metaphysical or epistemological quality. Skyrms's account centers around the notions of resiliency, which is a measure of probabilistic invariance, and that of propensities, which he takes to be highly resilient probabilities that figure in laws of nature.

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)

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)

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)

Popular essays and letters by the President of Yeshiva University. The author stresses the relevance of education in the orthodox Jewish tradition to the spiritual and social problems which face contemporary American Jewry. --M. B.

Reid was the founder of Scottish common sense realism, a branch of empiricism which avoids the skepticism inherent in the tradition of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Reid did not attempt to justify the beliefs which fall victim to Humean skepticism--the belief in an external world, in the identity of the self, or in the efficacy of human will and planning--concepts which he found to be present in men's minds from the start of their rational lives. "Men may dispute about things (...) which have no existence," he writes, but "they cannot dispute about things of which they have no conception." The job of philosophy is therefore not to justify beliefs which men cannot help but hold, but rather to clarify what problems are involved in holding these "common sense" beliefs, and to improve upon the assumptions underlying empiricist conclusions when these are antithetical to common sense. Thus, much of Reid's work consists of conceptual analysis, and critical examination of the role of language in creating philosophical problems. As examples: in the fourth essay in this book, he challenges Hume's analysis of "cause," and in his work on the Intellectual Powers he objects to Berkeley's use of one term, "smell," to refer both to the object of thought, and to the object thought of. The Essays on the Active Powers contain Reid's work in theory of action, freedom of the will, and ethics, especially meta-ethics. Reid finds that reason not only can determine the ends to be aimed at in morality, but the ends in other areas of human endeavor as well. M.I.T. has reproduced an American edition of the Essays from 1815. This is an appropriate choice, as Reid's epistemology and ethics had wide and prolonged influence in American philosophy, and both their spirit and substance have been incorporated in pragmatism. Besides their historical interest, the detailed replies of Reid to Hume offer students an instructive example of philosophical argument.--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)

Short, immediately engaging, vigorously competent in analytic technique, this book could be used profitably in a "problems" format introduction to philosophy, as well as for a text in the philosophy of religion. Knowledgeable and at ease with the Judeo-Christian tradition which provides the religious subject matter of his analysis, Ross writes as a philosopher, not an apologist. He does show that certain attacks on religious positions are instances of general philosophical trends, and can best be met with specialized philosophical argument. (...) He treats such classical topics as the existence and nature of God, non-theoretical knowledge of God, the problem of evil, and the current debate, characteristic of 20th century philosophy, on whether religious discourse is cognitively meaningful, examining the claim that religious belief and phenomena can not be taken seriously at all. Besides concise and well-marshalled use of traditional material, Ross includes original material from his recent more technical study Philosophical Theology. In addition to its obvious usefulness for the needs of students, the attention of scholars is warranted by a sketch of a theory of analogy.--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)

This small book of the "Que sais-je?" series, is concerned with the question of after-life. The first half of the book is an excellent historical review of the various beliefs on this subject as held in different ages, in different parts of the world and in different religions. These surveys, though brief, are clear, and the material is tied together by an introduction and conclusion which raise the book somewhat above the "college outline" level.--M. B.

Sellars offers a twentieth-century American Hylas as the adversary to Philonous, the spokesman of the idealist position in Berkeley's Three Dialogues. Hylas is still a materialist, but espouses an evolutionary or "emergent" materialism. He challenges Philonous' assumption that matter is inert, and incapable of giving rise to novelties such as consciousness or life itself. Since Sellars finds Berkeley to be entirely logical in his argument, he tends his hand to the theory of perception. Sellars' Hylas finds Berkeley's analysis of mediate (...) and immediate perception to be inadequate with respect to the complex operation of perceiving. He suggests "direct perception which is mediated by information." Although mediated, direct perception differs from Berkeley's 'mediate perception', as it is not inferred from sensations which were perceived first. It differs from Berkeley's 'immediate perception' in not identifying perceiving with awareness of sensation. In a short epilogue the author looks back on sixty years of American philosophy, concluding that it deviates from the European in having "a certain explanatory openness."--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)

This book is not what one might expect from either the title or the author. It is not about the sociological or philosophical doctrines which are associated with the title, and although Piaget's long work in human development is the basis for the views of this book, it is not the subject matter. The book is a reflective essay on structuralism as a method, and a call for a comprehensive science of man using that method. Traditionally, "Structuralism" had both positive (...) and negative meanings: positively it stood for the ideal of intelligibility; as a critical position it is allied with specific oppositions to a wide variety of atomisms and compartmentalizations. Piaget's characterization of "Structuralism" is deliberately broad, in order to capture the notion common to linguistic structuralism, Gestalt psychology, and the concepts of structures employed by logic, mathematics, physics, biology, and the social sciences. Minimally, a structure is a totality involving a system of laws for transformations; it is self-regulating, preserving and enriching itself through the exercise of its transformations without losing its unity or appealing to external elements. A living organism, the prototype of a structure, is simultaneously one physico-chemical system among others, and the source of its own activities. A structure can be formalized, and is adaptable to models of various sorts, logico-mathematical, cybernetic, etc., but it is independent of the theoretician's choice of the formal system in which it is expressed. When we can reduce a field of knowledge to a formalization of a self-regulating structure we will feel we are nearing the inner motive force of the system; this is what is important about structuralism, and what raises our hopes. But we are not nearly at that point. An authentic biologically-based structuralism is only beginning to take shape after centuries of either a simplifying reductionism or a vitalism more verbal than really explanatory. Piaget tells us that the comprehensive science of man which we need, based on structuralist ideals, and not recognizing separated disciplines, can only be achieved via thoroughgoing structuralist method.--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 volume contains reports on work sessions sponsored by MIT. Participants include distinguished neuroscientists and specialists in communications and psychology from North and South America and Europe. Of particular interest to philosophers are reports on the biology of drives and on neural coding. In the former, evidence is presented to show that the same unfamiliar stimulus may elicit either curiosity or fear behavior in members of the same species, and that fear responses, for example, may be elicited either by discrepancy (...) with a neuronal model, or by concordance with one. Moreover, there is evidence that these responses may be acquired independently of experience of those stimulus conditions. The authors suggest that generalizations cannot be made on the basis of a single behavior type paradigm, like feeding behavior, for example. The report on neural coding reviews work on such questions as: What counts as a code in the context of a nervous system? What modes of representations are theoretically plausible? Are there rules about the kinds of codes and the domains in time and space where they are used? It is now held that the nervous system uses neither an infinity of codes nor just a few, but many. In both work sessions the definition of key terms poses an important, and unsolved problem.--M. B. M. (shrink)

This book contains the following essays: Conjectural Knowledge: My Solution of the Problem of Induction; Two Faces of Common Sense: An Argument for Commonsense Realism and Against the Commonsense Theory of Knowledge; Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject; On the Theory of the Objective Mind; The Aim of Science; Of Clouds and Clocks; Evolution and the Tree of Knowledge; A Realist View of Logic, Physics, and History; Philosophical Comments on Tarski’s Theory of Truth; The Bucket and the Searchlight: Two Theories of (...) Knowledge. There is a considerable overlap of material and recurrent themes. No attempt has been made to edit the material into a coherent whole. (shrink)

This collection of eleven essays, four of them previously unpublished, extends from specific problems in metaphysics and epistemology to Lazerowitz' hypothesis about the hidden nature of philosophy. The book concludes the program of two previous books, The Structure of Metaphysics, and Studies in Metaphilosophy. The hypothesis was developed to explain a puzzle for both its friends and foes, that while it has always commanded great intellectual efforts, "in its 2400 years of existence, technical philosophy has not produced a single uncontroverted (...) proposition." Lazerowitz agrees that the essence of philosophy is not in the descriptive function of its statements. Using some Freudian insights, he helps to show that philosophy is one of those creative activities of man whose matter is language, and that it is similar to and distinguished from poetry and religion. The essays can be read independently of one another and each provides the reader a brisk workout in both scholarship and argumentation, with a provocative application of Lazerowitz' explanatory hypothesis at the end. Although he claims to be exposing what technical philosophers are really up to, and anticipates rejection of his thesis by those whom it most truly describes, this is a book to be enjoyed by accomplished philosophers, who have the erudition and technique to keep up and to appreciate the exercise.--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)

Readable, knowledgeable, and above all, eminently timely, this book is intended for the general public. It is written by a college professor and chaplain whose substantial background in the philosophical and theological bases of ethics enables him to show that the pervasive problem underlying the causes, symptoms, and effects of today's unease is essentially moral. Conover deals with the coequal focal points of moral man and moral society. He has chapters on the self, interpersonal relations, and the meaning of the (...) moral in impersonal relations. His definition of morality is a naturalistic one; its purpose is to regulate personal and group relations with other persons and groups. He finds our greatest obstacle to be the exclusive or "closed" nature of the moral community, which frustrates the accomplishment of moral purposes just at the points at which our conflicts are most difficult to resolve. He is able to place current issues of race, student disaffection, personal alienation, international conflict, and changing sexual standards in the unifying context of our need to protect both the personal and the corporate life of mankind. Therefore, the book stands a good chance of helping those interested in closing the generation, or other gaps. It is recommended for study and discussion groups of adults, college students, and perhaps advanced secondary school students. Helpful to educators and educational for parents, the book has particular merit for students because it avoids oversimplification.--M. B. M. (shrink)

A collection of articles centering around the analysis of the category of possibility. Most have been previously published; an English translation of one, "Scienza e Liberta," appeared in this Review V, p. 361. The treatment is in the contemporary existentialist manner, freedom being presented as based upon possibility, as existentially relevant, as finite and conditioned, yet effective in human affairs. Possibility and freedom, and their interrelation, are discussed from the point of view of their function and value within the philosophical, (...) scientific, artistic, historical and linguistic disciplines. The last three articles deal with the problem in relation to Dewey, Wittgenstein and Croce respectively. --M. B. (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)

The book argues for realism defined as the assertion of the self-subsistence of entities. Trigg rejects Rescher's conceptual idealism, which maintains that since without mind there would be no way of distinguishing, and mind only sees a chair from a perspective, we cannot say what a chair is "in itself." This view keeps us on one side of the correspondence relation, Trigg says. He proposes that our concepts are "a window on reality." Peirce's "Final Agreement," what reality corresponds to, is (...) an attempt to bring together realism and idealism, but "final agreement" is an ideal limit to enquiry, not a future event. It is epistemologically, not ontologically, realist. (shrink)

With the addition of the words "Anglo-American" after "Contemporary," the title of this book could serve as its review. The emphasis of the collection is on analytic British and American ethical theory since 1950, although the editors do dip back into 1903 for G. E. Moore. There are five sections: Moral Reasoning and the Is-Ought Controversy; Rules, Principles, and Utilitarianism; Concepts of Morality; Why be Moral?; and Normative, Religious, and Metaethics. The editors have kept their explanatory material to a minimum, (...) three pages serving to introduce most sections. The eleven pages of bibliography list selections of the same genre, mainly from the 1950's and 60's. Comparing this book with Philipa [[sic]] Foot's 1967 Theories of Ethics, which has the same emphasis, almost the same contributors, and several of the same articles, Pahel and Schiller give us a longer, more substantial, hard-cover book, and in this larger compass are able to provide more examples of dialogue between authors, critics, and replies.--M. B. M. (shrink)

Written with sincerity and understanding, this book advocates a new and creative approach to the parent-child relationship. --M. B.

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)

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)

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 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)

This book contains a long introduction by MacKinnon, and 12 articles on various aspects of the problem of realism, all contemporary sources with the exception of two selections from Aristotle and Newton. In addition, there is a bibliographic essay. MacKinnon’s introduction contains a historical introduction to the problem of scientific realism followed by a systematic analysis of some of the basic issues. The introduction is designed to illustrate "the intimate relation between theories of knowledge and philosophical positions defending or attacking (...) a doctrine of scientific realism." What is the problem of scientific realism? MacKinnon claims that in practice, scientists tend to favor some form of realism. This functional pre-critical realism generates, but does not solve a critical problem. The problem is whether the conceptualizations used by scientists "represent the really real, the world as it actually is." This is a metaphysical issue and raises the question of whether "a successful solution of the critical problem yields a metaphysical realism that, in turn, supplies an ultimate basis for interpreting" the functional realism implicit in scientific practice. MacKinnon’s assessment is that there is at present no such adequate metaphysical realism. He suggests that contemporary Thomism might, despite some fundamental inadequacies, not the least of which is the apparent irrelevance of scientific results in the determination of the ultimately real, provide such an analysis. He makes some tentative suggestions as to how this might be done. The selected articles form a mixed bag. Included are selections by Aristotle, Newton, Carnap, Hempel, Nagel, Quine, Harris, Einstein, Sellars, MacKinnon, Bunge and Heelan. These present an introduction to the vast number of approaches that can be taken with the problem of scientific realism, but despite MacKinnon’s introduction it seems that we are continually losing sight of just what the problem is, let alone what its solution, if any, may be.—M. B. (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)