Its wisdom and sensitivity make Personal Knowledge required reading for epistemologists. By stressing the active components in scientific knowing--appraisal and commitment--Polanyi shows that knowledge is less "objective," more complex, and more widely distributed in nature than is tacitly supposed by most epistemologies. Knowing implies a foundation in skills, a confidence in one's ability to judge beyond the range of well-formulated rules, and a commitment to the existence of an answer to one's questions before the answer is in sight. Like a (...) Platonic dialogue, this book conveys more than it states, and the broad foundation of insight embodied in the examples would support more conceptual superstructure than Polanyi provides. But that serves to make it an instance of its thesis--that we know more than we can now say.--R. F. T. (shrink)

A text for an undergraduate problems course placing special emphasis on a wide selection of texts for students to evaluate: in a treatment of teleological ethics the authors include Nietzsche, R. B. Perry and G. E. Moore; the section on political philosophy presents a range of authors from Mill to Mussolini. Perhaps its chief virtue is that it relies almost exclusively on modern writers and yet manages not to be parochial.--R.F.T.

Working within the framework of Ryle's "knowing how-knowing that" distinction, Hartland-Swann argues that all knowing involves a decision and that "knowing that" is a special case of "knowing how": knowing how to say what is the case.--R. F. T.

A warm portrait of Gilson as historian, educator, and Thomist drawn from his own writings and lectures. The selection is well made and includes several pieces previously unpublished in English; Pegis contributes an introduction in which he explores Gilson's attitude toward Christian philosophy and the Middle Ages.--R. F. T.

Windelband's History, the most popular of the manuals at the turn of the century, is reprinted in the Harper edition, while the Dover reprints the considerably expanded version of part of the History's first volume which appeared in Iwan Müller's Handbuch der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft. The Harper edition is more smoothly translated, and the pages are better designed, while the Dover is better bound and somewhat more detailed. Both are rather wooden, and the bibliographies are badly out of date, but on (...) the other hand they have never been really adequately replaced. --R. F. T. (shrink)

A reprint of the 1901 first edition. Albée's history traces two phases of Utilitarianism: "First, the gradual development of the theory in the direction of formal consistency down to about the beginning of the nineteenth century; and secondly, the later development, often at the expense of formal consistency, but always in the direction of doing justice to the concrete moral ideals which had been partly lost sight of in the earlier, more abstract form of the theory". The school is traced (...) from Cumberland to Sidgwick.--R. F. T. (shrink)

Burke and his predecessors seem to be most before the mind of the editor in his long introduction to this standard eighteenth-century work: he traces the growth of Burke's ideas on art and compares them with contemporary investigations. The sections examining the doctrines themselves are somewhat vague, and those tracing the philosophical reaction to Burke rather too short; however the study of Burke's influence on artists is fascinating reading. The text is done with care, and the footnotes include excerpts from (...) the reviews of the Enguiry's first edition where these seem to have guided Burke's revisions.--R. F. T. (shrink)

The translations from Hindi which make up this collection of discourses by a contemporary sanyasi are smoothly done; the discourses themselves are primarily moral and devotional. --R. F. T.

The Bahá'i faith, a savior religion incorporating beliefs of most of the world religions, was founded in Persia in the 19th century. Ferraby gives a clear and readable exposition of its tenets.--R. F. T.

The manifest destiny of Israel runs through this uncritical, popular history like the manifest destiny of the sheriff through a Western movie, and the Israeli-Arab dispute is traced back ultimately to the characters of Jacob and Esau.--R. F. T.

The sub-title, "Essays on the Common-sense Background of Philosophy," gives a clear picture of this prolix work: it is episodic and common-sensical. But the episodes do not seem to be chosen with a single effect in mind, and the common-sense serves not as a ground for dialectical argument against the philosophers but as just one more philosophy.--R. F. T..

In this thoroughly documented doctor's thesis, van Buren explores Calvin's doctrine of Christ's role as a substitute for men.--R. F. T.

A mathematical theory of society, built around a concept of quanta of human energy, and applied in support of a social order combining capitalist and feudal features. "For those impatient of minute analysis," the jacket assures us, "the first 80 pages or more can be read lightly..."; to those impatient for such analysis, this is good advice regarding the whole book. --R. F. T.

An introductory text which relies on the intrinsic excellence of short pieces. Husserl, Bergson, Whitehead, Quine, Lewis, Tillich, Scheler, and Sartre are represented by ten-to-fifteen-page excerpts or articles.--R. F. T.

Basson's introduction to Hume follows the pattern which has led to successful treatments of Aquinas and Kant in this series: he limits himself almost exclusively to exposition and minimal criticism, apparently assuming that the reader will not be able to obtain or to follow the original text.--R. F. T.

In this revised edition of his 1934 work, Kraft takes up the themes of authority and scientific method, concluding that the Geisteswissenschaften are not a homogeneous group and hence have no single method or principles.--R. F. T.

While claiming merit primarily for pedagogical clarity and usefulness, this exposition of St. Thomas' opinions on knowledge and truth also tries to delineate the boundary between neo-scholastic, and Cartesian and Kantian epistemology.--R. F. T.

The editor's historical and critical introduction to the Letter is quite good--particularly for readers unfamiliar with British politics of the period. German and English texts are printed on facing pages.--R. F. T.

The "History of Ideas" mode of presentation here finds an especially congenial application to the notion of evolution. Among the fifteen papers, five of A. O. Lovejoy's on the idea of evolution are reprinted with some modifications. Glass contributes a long study of seventeenth and eighteenth century theories of species.--R. F. T.

Written in the genre of Windleband's histories, this text is designed for use in a course in which the students have little or no access to primary sources, or as a reference work. The translation is rather less ponderous than the original, and its supplementary readings have been altered for American students.--R. F. T.

A non-technical exposition of the proof and related questions in the foundations of mathematics is presented here. The work is built around the authors' study which appeared in Scientific American.--R. F. T.

Like so many amateur adventures in philosophy, this work is marked by extreme breadth and by failure to state either problems or solutions with any precision.--R. F. T.

Moritz collects a number of rather elaborate bits of empirical evidence to refute Berkeley's subjectivism.--R. F. T.

A popular philosophy based on popularized science. Viscount Samuel puts forward a common-sense realism, but defends it with little more than the assertion that scientists cannot decide among themselves precisely what they want to put in its place. --R. F. T.

The first volume of this French textbook series to appear in English. Gardeil's exposition is usually in the form of a paraphrase of Thomas' conclusions on questions raised by Aristotle's De Anima, but he also treats the more peculiarly thomistic problems of knowledge of individuals, the soul, and God. The Value of this work as an introduction to Thomas' psychology is enhanced by the inclusion of almost sixty pages of texts in an appendix.--R. F. T.

The acquisition by the Bodleian Library in 1948 of the Lovelace papers has made possible a number of historically oriented papers on Locke and his philosophy, e.g., J. Yolton's John Locke and the Way of Ideas, J. W. Gough's, Locke's Political Philosophy, and W. v.Leyden's publication of the Essays on the Law of Nature. Cranston's biography is a distinguished addition to this list: it makes full use of the source material and is as thorough as one could ask in revealing (...) the concerns--especially political concerns --of Locke's life. It is rather less satisfactory in its treatment of his epistemological development. --R. F. T. (shrink)

In preparing this second edition of his commentary, Weldon has left the historical sections materially unaltered but has almost tripled the critical treatment. This leads to a far more valuable book, particularly since he has replaced long summary passages with systematic treatment of the issues Kant raises.--R. F. T.

This balanced and thorough study of the loyalty programs reviews the history of prosecutions and the dismissals under them, and makes detailed proposals for their revision.--R. F. T.

Molesworth's elementary text covers a good deal that would usually be called epistemology, treating logicians as varied as Socrates, Locke, and Russell. It tends to be conservative and sympathetic to the "classical" logic of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.--R. F. T.

Exercises in symbolization and problem-solving are provided in a format which allows space for completing the exercises and removing pages for easy correction.--R. F. T.

Taking Locke's epistemology as a starting-point, Maine de Biran elaborated the notions of expectation of resistance and kinaesthetic response into a theory which attempted to account for the origin of our ideas of personal identity and causation. In this clear and intelligent study, Hallie compares Maine de Biran to the British empiricists, finding him most in sympathy with Berkeley; he also assesses the importance and limitations of this internal critique of empiricism for both empiricism and later French philosophy.--R. F. T.

This spirited work is better Milton than ontology, cosmology and physics. Milton drew on many sources for the cosmic imagery of Paradise Lost, but he did not unite the traditions thoroughly. Curry is rather too kind to Milton, calling him syncretic when he is merely eclectic.--R.F.T.

Why Christianity, with its conception of agapé was successful in winning the allegiance of the late Romans is the question which leads Ferguson to his examination of the Homeric virtues and the Stoic morality. He finds the classical virtues are incapable of "providing that basis for an universal morality for which people were seeking" because they were each linked to a vanished society or failed to reach to the heart of men's moral strivings. His analysis of the pagan virtues is (...) less than sympathetic, though thoughtful and based on considerable learning.--R. F. T. (shrink)

In this group of well-written essays Randall discusses explicitly the group of ideas which have been implicit in his earlier works in intellectual history. The first section, which deals with the philosophy of history, argues that particular things have particular histories, and that these histories belong to them on the basis of what they are taken to be and expected to become. The metaphysics of the second section is a pluralistic analysis of actual experience and its symbolic representation.--R. F. T.

In this loosely organized study Hyma undertakes to correct almost every misstatement made about Luther in recent years. Although some of the individual items will be of interest to Luther specialists, the work as a whole makes no clear impression.--R. F. T.

In examining Kant's Foundations for the Metaphysics of Morals, Duncan contrasts his own, Critical interpretation with the Ethical interpretation which is far more common. His principal contention is that the Foundations is not an exposition of Kant's ethical views but a "partial critique of practical reason"; Kant's object "is to understand the nature of morality and to state its principle, that is, the principle which describes what morality is." The net effect of this approach is to take the emphasis away (...) from the categorical imperative as a criterion of morality and to place it on parts of the Foundations which are inherently stronger, particularly on Sections I and III. At the same time it brings the Foundations closer to the first and second Critiques and makes it a sounder and more thoroughly Kantian work.--R. F. T. (shrink)

Taton's study is very poorly organized, aiming at no particular thesis. Nevertheless, the individual examples of reason and chance are intrinsically interesting, and many are made available for the first time in English.--R. F. T.

Three things make Father Ong's work on the sixteenth-century dialectician Peter Ramus an important contribution to the history of logic and letters. First, he has prudently avoided the temptation to make Ramus a hero or villain and to evaluate his work on its logical merits. His treatment is therefore balanced and well-directed, for Ramus was neither a great thinker nor a great man. Ramus's reforms appear here as epiphenomena of the humanistic reform of pedagogy, and the connection between logic and (...) the demands of the university curriculum thus receives much needed attention. Finally, this book marks one of the first important attempts to apply the contrast between the personal communication through dialogue with the objective, impersonal conveying of information by the written word to the history of philosophy and the interpretation of the Renaissance.--R. F. T. (shrink)

By dramatizing Spinoza's relations to the Jewish community in Amsterdam and filling in some of the historical background. Feuer has made the story of Spinoza's life a commentary on the situation of the liberal in modern America. As an appraisal of Spinoza's political philosophy, however, the work suffers from the extreme vagueness of categories such as Liberal Republican, Scientific Philosopher, and Mystic.--R. F. T.

"I...brought out my wife to see this silhouette... made on the clean concrete by the oil dropping out of the engine... and we all remarked that this was 'the Christ'." But when the newspapers took their pictures, Mr. Baillie remarked it was a pity that the picture had not been taken the day before, when it had been so perfect.--R. F. T.

After a short argument for the Reformation reduction of the sacraments to two, this book treats the variations in practice among the Reformed Churchs.--R. F. T.

Father Owens suggests the outlines of a renewed Thomist attack on the post-Cartesian metaphysical questions and positions which would take advantage of the "analogical," "Platonic" and "existentialist" interpretations of St. Thomas' thought.--R. F. T.

After pointing out that Augustine's appreciation of Aristotle is narrowly limited by the former's religious interests, Mr. Schneider argues that in the realms in which their interests overlapp--theology and psychology--Augustine may be fruitfully regarded as carrying to completion the principle lines of Aristotle's analysis, and that this is due to a common basic interest in and body of opinion on ontology.--R. F. T.

The "perspectivism" of the late Dr. McGilvary's 1939 Carus Lectures has two moments. On the one hand it is an examination of the implications of physical relativity for epistemology. In this area McGilvary is at his best--particularly in clearing up misunderstandings of Einstein. But perspectivism is also a revival of the "man the measure" doctrine, and this has less happy results. Viewing the philosopher's task as the making clear of his own postulates, McGilvary is led to beg many of the (...) questions one would like to see him discuss. If a philosophy is put forward postulationally and is to be more than an abstract schema, it must be formulated positively and it must be applied at every opportunity. Perspectivism does not meet either test very well.--R. F. T. (shrink)

"Confrontation" is a misnomer for this work; the duel is fought entirely by the seconds: quotations from Gilby's book of paragraphs from St. Thomas on the one hand and restatements of Margenau's 1935 theory of science on the other.--R. F. T.

"Pure" capitalism is the remedy for the country's ills, Kelso holds. Its chief ingredients are distribution of the proceeds of labor according to ownership of the means of production, and a broadening of the ownership base.--R. F. T.

The "first year" of the lectures making up Saint-Simon's Doctrine is here translated for the first time. The editor's introduction places the work in its context of nineteenth century French social theory and traces is connections to Comte and Durkheim. --R. F. T.

Claudel's last work, J'aime la Bible is an appreciation of great feeling at its best and a kind of muddy carping with the Bible's detractors at its worst. The translation, by Wade Balkin, is idiomatic rather than poetic, and reads smoothly and easily.--R. F. T.

A short study of the techniques of geochronology.--R. F. T.

This second volume contains a section on American philosophy by D. A. Gallagher. --R. F. T.