On May 24, 1995, the American Medical Association Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs issued a rather controversial opinion that it is ethically permissible to use anencephalic infants as living organ donors. Approximately 1,000 to 2,000 infants are born each year in the United States with anencephaly, a congenital birth defect whereby the infant has no forebrain and cerebrum. Without higher brain functions, the infants can never experience consciousness, thoughts, emotions, or pain. Fewer than half survive more than a day, (...) and more than 90 percent die within one week. However, by the time brain death occurs in anencephalic infants, their organs are no longer suitable for donor purposes because they have deteriorated beyond use.In 1988, the AMA Council declared that it is ethical to use the infants as organ donors only after they have died. Now the Council has revised that opinion, and it proposes to allow removal of organs before death, as long as the parents consent and two doctors concur in the diagnosis of anencephaly. (shrink)

A re-issue of Darwin's pioneer work on expression. In addition to the text, this edition includes a brief preface by Margaret Mead and added illustrations meant to show the results of some recent work in the field established by Darwin's inquiry.---R. B.

A provocative interpretation of Freud's views on civilization, incisively presented. The author offers an extended argument for the possibility, on Freudian grounds, of a civilization which is non-repressive, and he tries to adduce Freudian evidence against Freud's own view to the contrary. Two concepts central to his analysis are surplus-repression, "the restrictions necessitated by social domination," and the performance principle, "the prevailing historical form of the reality principle." Marcuse differentiates his interpretation from that of the traditional neo-Freudians, whom he attacks.--R. (...) B. (shrink)

The author of this rather lengthy book proposes another way of obtaining a glance at the "heretofore rarely seen unity of the Kantian system." He suggests a common theme present in and often foundational for, many of Kant’s reflections, the notion of "action" ; more generally the notion of the human subject itself as a kind of Handlung. Such a project is certainly a plausible one. Kant’s frequent use of notions like spontaneity, self-legislation, freedom, and others make the prospects for (...) the author’s ambitious attempt at least relatively reasonable. Often, though, instead of a unified interpretation of various texts, we find here just isolated interpretations of Kantian issues, some indeed intimately connected with the theme of action, many tangentially related, a few not at all. The author’s whole approach also causes some difficulties. His style can most charitably be described as idiosyncratic; neologisms and odd contructions abound in every section: "transcendental constellation," "transcendental motion," "world projection," "practical being," "practical apperception," and so on. References to philosophers whose doctrines could, by contrast or similarity, help clarify Kant’s, are almost nonexistent. There is little reference to Leibniz, only a few references to Schelling and Hegel, and no discussion of Fichte’s theory of Tathandlung. Indeed there is no reference to any recent or classic secondary Kant literature. There is also a curious, brief, sweeping dismissal of all "analytic" philosophies of action as all committed to a thoroughly "causal" interpretation of action as observable behavior, predicable of a subject. (shrink)

Three lectures, in which the author argues that God must be conceived of as a personal being. Analogy offers a way of approaching the paradox of God's immanence and transcendence.--R. B.

An examination of the influence of the philosophy of existence on contemporary theology, with particular reference to Heidegger and Bultmann. The author's analyses of two difficult thinkers are clear and perceptive. He is interested not only in the question of historical influence but explores the more basic issue of what are the advantages and dangers of an existential approach for theology. He concludes that Bultmann has made the Christian understanding of man intelligible to contemporary philosophic thought while remaining loyal to (...) its source in the New Testament.--R. B. (shrink)

Professor MacIntyre has here collected twenty-three of his essays. They range in topics from discussions of psychoanalysis to the relation between reasons and causes in accounts of human action. Indeed, the very range of such issues is part of the point of the book itself. In part 1 of the book, MacIntyre has collected some of the articles he has written over the last fifteen years or so for Encounter, New York Review of Books, and Partisan Review; in part 2, (...) the more traditionally philosophic pieces which first appeared in Philosophy, Philosophical Review, and Journal of Philosophy; by collecting both sets of essays within one set of covers, he has tried to make a point about the relation between such apparently different intellectual contexts. Most broadly, that point has to do with the common problem of "ideology" as it is found in each arena, whether as some explicit, historically achieved "self-image" by means of which individuals struggle "to provide the light that our individual and social lives need", or as the problem of the general role beliefs, reasons, desires, and the like should be said to play in human action, in what way such factors are related to causal explanations of action, and how decisions about such questions affect any view of what a social science is. MacIntyre believes that these somewhat more practical and more theoretical contexts need to be thought together, first because reflection on current, dominant ideologies greatly needs the benefit of "detailed, analytical conceptual inquiries," and because that analysis itself has often paid insufficient attention to its own broader, historical, even ideological context, and the effect such a context can have on methodology. Thus, while it is of the utmost importance to analyze thoroughly and as clearly as possible the language of morals, the methodology of that analysis alone cannot help in determining whether such a language is indeed the language only within which moral discourse can take place, and might also fail to appreciate historical alterations in the meaning of important terms. (shrink)

This book has the virtue of sketching what might seem the implications of a Gricean theory of meaning. Mr. Landsman explicitly accepts the psychologism of Grice’s approach: the attempt to explain linguistic meaning by nonlinguistic, psychological notions, i.e., speaker’s intention that hearers have certain beliefs, etc. What turns out universal are actions, of which linguistic actions are a non-basic kind. Landsman is to be complimented for emphasizing that a Gricean account is psychologistic and that it loosely implies non-linguistic universals of (...) action, which are to provide the principles of individuation for beliefs, intentions, propositions, sayings, etc., which are the "connate accusatives," or adverbials, of action universals. He does not, I think, do much to rid Grice’s account of its fundamental difficulty: viz., that what is to do the explaining seems less clear and less well individuated than what it is to explain. It does not help much to write: "I do not wish to deny that, as a matter of fact, people often think in words. This means that a factual condition of having certain thoughts is the mastery of speech. Linguistic conventions thus may constitute causal conditions of certain intentional states. What I am claiming is that the notion of a convention does not enter into our concept of an intentional state." It is not sufficiently clear what the difference between mere "causal conditions" and "logical conditions" is supposed to be. Some might say that the notion of thought presupposes the notion of logic and that logic, unless we are to mix it with empirical psychology and talk of "laws of thought," presupposes the notion of language. Unfortunately, Landsman has little to say about the criticisms that have been made of Grice’s theory, mentioning Ziff’s criticisms in a brief aside and not so much as mentioning John Searle’s attempt to improve Grice’s theory of meaning. Also Landsman has nothing to say about recent and closely related work in linguistic theory: e.g., 1) though Landsman maintains that all ordinary speakings are performative actions, he has nothing to say about whether or not there is any relevance, and if so what, in J. R. Ross’ fairly recent claims to the effect that all sentences, in their syntactic deep structure, begin with a general performative verb coupled with the speaker’s pronoun; 2) much of what Landsman says relates to the distinction between the pragmatics and semantics of language, and to the success of Davidsonians and "generative semanticists" in their equation of deep syntax and logical form, but Landsman does not explain what his position comes to in such terms, nor does he explain why he does not have to explain. These last points are more a plea for catholicism in talking about meaning than a criticism of Landsman’s able exposition. The second half of this book consists largely of two papers: on the indeterminancy of translation and on abstract particulars and passages from The Problem of Universals, which Landsman edited.—R. B. (shrink)

A careful, detailed, summary and interpretation of the development of Kant’s views on political philosophy from his early denial that the concept of obligation could be derived from Wolff’s Naturkausalität until all the major elements of his own Rechtsphilosophie could be identified. The major source for the author’s reconstruction of these largely unpublished views is, of necessity, the large volume of disorganized, problematically dated Reflexionen, and student transcripts and summaries of his lectures. He convincingly organizes these materials into four main (...) "phases": 1762-1765, when legal obligation was grounded in the notion of the "analogon rationis"; 1766-68, "The competent judge as necessary condition of law"; 1769-1771, with its initial attempt to connect a universal order of law and the problems of "Verstandes erkenntniss"; and post-1772, wherein, the author asserts, the truly critical foundation for Kant’s philosophy of law is discovered, his transcendentally justified notion of freedom. All of this material represents a judicious and quite useful compilation of pertinent Reflexionen and marginalia, but the author’s main purpose in amassing and presenting this often confusing material is interpretive and polemical. (shrink)

The authors examine the present situation in education, especially its weaknesses. They advocate a creative humanistic approach which will expand the student's horizon and aid him to construct a philosophy of life. --R. B.

The main thesis of this excellent little book is that "contrary to widespread misapprehensions, two formally different kinds of utilitarianism, simple and general, and along with the latter one kind of rule-utilitarianism, are extensionally equivalent; that is, analogous principles of the various kinds necessarily yield equivalent judgments in all cases; or, in other words, it makes no difference in theory whether the simple or generalization test is applied to acts or—within limits—whether an appeal is made to rules grounded in utility." (...) The "misapprehension" is dispelled in the particularly valuable third chapter, "Extensional Equivalence," by means of an a priori causal analysis of action situations and an exacting consideration of action descriptions. Furthermore, Lyons argues that other rule-utilitarian theories not extensionally equivalent to the simple utilitarianism of tradition differ from it in the wrong ways. As a result of these two findings the author holds that "any appeal to generalization or to rules consequently fails to escape the force of traditional arguments against utilitarianism." Utilitarian readers who accept Lyons' argument and particularly his interspersed but incisive criticisms of the works of Broad, Harrison, Singer, Harrod, Brandt, and Rawls, are likely to feel that it is best to go back to Mill! But in his final chapter Lyons' analysis of promising and fairness throws doubt on the adequacy of any purely utilitarian moral theory. However this may be, to read Lyons' book is to follow a precise and rigorous intellect, free of current dogmas about value statements, while it threads its way through a maze of conceptual complexities toward substantive philosophic conclusions.—R. B. C. (shrink)

In this useful edition, Popkin selects, translates, and annotates thirty-nine articles from the Dictionnaire, with the aim of preserving in miniature the overall character of Bayle's magnum opus. Included are the historically important articles, "David," "Manicheans," "Paulicians," "Pyrrho," "Rorarius," "Spinoza," "Zeno of Elea," and Bayle's "Clarifications." Some inevitable omissions are regrettable, but Popkin has caught Bayle in a variety of his moods, sarcastic, skeptical, and scholarly.—R. B. C.

A welcome republication of Guignebert's impressive scholarly study of the life, teaching, and death of Jesus. Guignebert's conclusion, on the basis of a careful examination of sources, is that nothing or very little of Jesus' work remained and that, from an historical point of view, he cannot be considered the founder of Christianity. -- R. B.

An unorganized but interesting collection of ten papers describing and evaluating the use of computers in legal research and the use of modern behavioral science in analyzing and predicting judicial decisions. The authors are professors of law, lawyers, and social scientists, and include a Soviet scholar writing on cybernetics and Soviet law. Technical descriptions of data recovery systems and technical methods of analyzing judicial decisions alternate with arguments for and against the actual use of such methods and systems by practicing (...) lawyers. All of the technical discussion is within the grasp of the interested lay reader; but the evaluation of these techniques becomes unspecific and polemical at times. The footnotes of many of the papers provide an excellent bibliography.—R. B. P. (shrink)

There is a central issue which runs through most of the details of Walker’s interpretation—the relationship between what he calls, taking his cue from Strawson, "transcendental idealism" and "transcendental arguments." He argues often and, I think, correctly, that the contemporary attempt to reconstruct Kant "austerely" in terms of transcendental arguments alone is misguided, that transcendental arguments about "what must be the case in order for there to be experience at all" cannot accomplish their task, and that we should rest content (...) with the more modest goal of discussing those aspects of our nonempirical "thoughts" or "beliefs" about the world which seem indispensably involved in our experience. Of course, we would still need something like a "transcendental argument" to establish these subjective conditions, but Walker uses that term to refer exclusively to Strawson’s austere reconstruction, and to argue that only Kant’s idealistic use of such arguments comes close to philosophic success. (shrink)

Sympathetic interpretations of Kant’s frequently stressed characterizations of his "architectonic" approach to philosophy are rare. As much as such an approach seemed to gratify Kant, it has embarrassed commentators, who have complained for generations about the "Procrustean bed" or ad hoc quality of Kant’s meta-philosophical principles. The author of this book proposes to take quite seriously the idea of a "unity in Kant’s thinking," but his approach to such an issue is historical and, for the most part, unsystematic. That is, (...) rather than discuss the philosophical importance of a claim for architectonic unity, he instead announces that he will demonstrate that the "unity" of Kant’s entire corpus is the "unity of a problem-determined development in his thinking, not that of a pre-conceived or static system." The result of this approach is a well-informed, but only incidentally thematic summary of Kant’s occasionally continuous, occasionally radically altered views of various Hauptprobleme. (shrink)

As the interesting title of this work indicates, its author is concerned less with Kant’s theory of morality, with its account of freedom, the possibility of pure reason being practical, and the deduction of the moral law, than he is with Kant’s Sittenlehre, or the account of the moral law as applied, moral judgment, and the substantive, derived duties of justice and virtue. Accordingly, he concentrates almost exclusively on two texts. The first four chapters are a commentary on and assessment (...) of the three chapters of the Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, and his last two chapters deal with the two main sections of the Metaphysics of Morals. Other important texts of Kant’s moral theory are dealt with, as he says, en passant, and some are not dealt with at all. This approach has the virtue of focusing attention on perhaps the central Kantian moral problem: the nature of the transition from pure moral principles to "morals." It has the defect of being bound in too restrictive a way to the Groundwork as an expression of Kant’s general moral theory. There is no discussion of the synthetic or "regressive" methodology of that work, an approach which Kant realized aided its popular appeal, but greatly limited its theoretical adequacy, nor of the well known revisions Kant made in his moral theory, especially his account of freedom, by 1788. However, the author admits that he did not intend to write a book "directed specifically to Kant scholars." Instead, he tries to keep his discussion of textual interpretation minimal, always tries to present Kant’s arguments in a "contemporary idiom," refers only to English translations, infrequently to the Kant literature, and then only to English language literature. (shrink)

The author of this polemical book directs his attack more against what he sees as the overwhelmingly dominant "Kantianism" of "contemporary scientific thinking" than against the "Kant" of his title. This is, his book is much more a very general indictment of the "spirit" of this modern mode of knowing, than anything approaching an examination of Kant’s views.

In an attempt to determine Ward's place in American thought, the author concludes that his subject is a minor intellectual figure, and that his contribution to sociology is insignificant.--R. B.

Six essays on such topics as the phenomena of mystical experience, the history of the word "mysticism," an analysis of St. Paul's mysticism, and, most prominently, the meaning of mysticism in the early Church. The essays follow no general plan; consequently the various subjects are treated unequally, and there are repetitions and occasional inconsistencies. --R. B.

Kolakowski describes his massive and comprehensive study of Marxism as a "handbook." Following a classic pattern, he divides his study into three volumes, "The Founders," "The Golden Age," and "The Breakdown." Kolakowski does not claim to present a non-controversial account of the history of Marxism, however, his aim is "to include the principal facts that are likely to be of use to anyone seeking an introduction to the subject". The main organizing principle is chronological, although Kolakowski frequently departs from strict (...) chronology in order to deal with thinkers who share affinities in their approach to Marxism or to present background information about the historical context and alternatives to Marxism. The first volume begins with a discussion of the origins of dialectic that reaches back to the pre-Socratics carrying us through the neo-Platonic tradition to Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. This is followed by an analysis of the views of the left Hegelians and a detailed exposition of Marx, from his early to his mature writings. The volume concludes with a discussion of Engels’s understanding of the dialectics of nature. Volume 2 begins with an analysis of Marxism and the Second International. There are separate chapters on Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Eduard Bernstein, Jean Jaurès, Paul Lafargue, Georges Sorel, Antonio Labriola, Ludwik Krzywicki, Kasimierz Kelles-Krauz, Stanislaw Brzozowski, and the Austro-Marxists. Kolakowski then treats in detail the origins of Russian Marxism culminating in a discussion of Leninism and its fortunes. The final volume follows the bleak story of Soviet Marxism, but also treats the alternatives to Soviet ideology with chapters on Antonio Gramsci, György Lukács, Karl Korsch, Lucien Goldmann, the Frankfurt School, Herbert Marcuse, and Ernst Bloch. There is a final chapter that surveys developments in Marxism since Stalin’s death. The main emphasis is on European Marxism although there is a brief discussion of the peasant Marxism of Mao-Tse-tung. The erudition, the mastery of detail, and the scope exhibited is remarkable. There is nothing comparable to this work in English. The style is so lucid and the translation so good that it is difficult to believe that the study was not originally written in English. Both the novice and the advanced scholar can learn from these volumes. But the study is not really an introduction. Kolakowski’s expositions, interpretations, and criticisms are at once highly sophisticated and highly controversial. It is a handbook that needs to be used with caution despite Kolakowski’s claim that he had done his best "not to merge comment with exposition, but to present my own views in separate, clearly defined sections". (shrink)

The author uses the Scriptures as the basis for constructing a moral philosophy. Besides describing the Biblical morality, he examines the nature of moral principle and of moral judgment in general. There is a suggestive supplementary essay, "The Logic of an Empirical Moral Philosophy and its Parallel in the Logic of Empirical Science."--R. B.

An imaginative and provocative attempt to provide a fresh analysis of man as knower, doer, and maker., At the heart of Buchler's analysis is a theory of judgment which encompasses not only assertive judgment, but also "active" and "exhibitive" judgment: The theory is explicated and elaborated by an examination of query, experience and meaning.--R. B.

The main thesis of this book is that ethics ought properly to be an applied social science employing the method and findings of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic method enables us to distinguish authentic values from inauthentic values, and to criticize the latter; this psychoanalytic criticism of values ought, indeed, to be the primary work of the ethical philosopher. Since the ethical position which Feuer defends is in the liberal tradition of Mill, a large section of the book is dedicated to a critique (...) of Freud's philosophy of civilization. The book's main points, unfortunately, are stated rather dogmatically and often with dubious justification. --R. B. (shrink)

The author's approach to philosophy is strongly influenced by contemporary axiomatics. His central thesis is that each of us should try to clarify the postulates which are implicit in our thinking. In this way philosophic communication can be facilitated, and differences resolved.--R. B.

Rotenstreich has here brought together several themes traditionally considered marginal in Kant's overall moral theory, themes which all bear on what the author calls the problem of the "realization" of moral practice. We are thereby offered not a discussion of such well known Kantian issues as the meta-ethical foundations for moral theory or the moral theory itself, but the Kantian account of a fully human moral agent, struggling to realize a moral ideal. The author suggests that this account is the (...) equivalent of a limited Kantian "phenomenology" of practical reason within a larger "phenomenology of practice" ; or more simply he claims that "our study is concerned with the place of empirical human behavior in Kant's practical philosophy". As well as offering such a summary and exposition, Professor Rotenstreich also suggests frequently that Kant's moral theory does not provide him with the theoretical resources to construct such a "phenomenology" adequately. Kant, it is claimed, needs a "link between the extra-moral position of empirical human nature and the moral status of the vocation of human nature", but, given his moral position, cannot offer such a link. (shrink)

A mammoth survey of contemporary psychological research. The subjects treated range from psychotherapy to psychometrics, and from neurology to military psychology. Most of the chapters include both a scholarly background and an introductory statement of the developments and the problems of the subject, and each is followed by a bibliography. The variation which is inevitable in such an undertaking is itself informative of differences in contemporary psychology.--R. B.

The author, a practicing psychologist, argues that empathy among persons is at once a creative act and the ground of ethics and psychological therapy. An analysis of group therapy with alcoholics is given as an example of personal psychology at work, but it is recognized that further effort is needed to strengthen or modify the central thesis.--R. B.

The eight essays assembled under this title were originally presented at the 1965 Great Thinkers Forum sponsored by the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Georgia. These essays are now being published in the conviction that they all make "valuable contributions toward the understanding and resolution of the contemporary challenge to theology and religion." The challenge in question is the one that comes from neopositivism and linguistic analysis. By the time the reader comes to the end of (...) his own effort he finds himself wondering in what sense the 1965 papers are to count as valuable contributions. No doubt they are valuable in the sense that it is worthwhile watching a single-minded philosopher pouring his soul out in an attempt at showing how the "disguised nonsense" of religious language is "patent nonsense," or how the "putatively factual assertions" of religious language are "bogus, pseudo-factual statements, devoid of the kind of intelligibility that believers rightly demand of them." Along the way one may collect pearls of rare beauty, such as the statement that "There is no convention in English or logical rule which makes ‘there is no God’ a contradiction," or questions such as "Who has observed him under controlled conditions?" Another contribution of the same general usefulness may well be that the thoughtful reader is being initiated to the exertions of that transformational hermeneutics by which pseudo-assertive religious statements are being rescued from wholesale meaninglessness, and accorded the innocuous meaningfulness of emotive or convictional language, or of disguised moral discourse. Professor Frank H. Harrison III makes an interesting attempt at injecting into the landscape, linguistically and epistemologically so bleak, what he calls "knowledge by acquaintance," which is in his vocabulary the equivalent of what mysticism calls amor Dei, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry describes as a seeing with the heart. The discussion of myth by Professor Robert H. Ayers ignores what happens to be the heart of the matter in mythic thinking, namely the absence of the distinction between object and subject, but does provide a good introduction to the "profusion of confusion" that flourishes around myth, "one of the most traveled hobos in our times.". (shrink)

At various times in his "Pre-critical" and "Critical" periods, Kant presented an argument about the nature of space that has come to be called the "Incongruous Counterparts" argument. First presented in his 1768 essay, Concerning the Ultimate Foundation for the Differentiation of Regions in Space, the argument holds that two objects, such as two human hands, might be exact counterparts, that is, identical in "size and proportion and... the situation of the parts relative to each other," and yet might be (...) still "incongruent," that there is no continuous rigid motion which brings them into coincidence in space; or, that they are, though counterparts, incongruently left and right hands. This argument appears in 1768, in the Dissertation of 1770, the Prolegomena of 1783 and the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science in 1786. Unfortunately, while the details of the argument are virtually the same, the conclusions are not. Kant seems to have claimed that the argument shows: that a Leibnizean, relational theory of space was wrong; that a theory of absolute space was correct; that space was a pure form of sensibility and that space was transcendentally ideal, i.e., that space was not and could not be a feature of things in themselves. In the secondary literature, commentators who have dealt with this issue have simply noted the odd history of the argument and lamented it. Buroker's ambitious and interesting thesis in this book is not only that Kant's use of the argument is consistent and interconnected, but that the argument can be seen as the "origin" of Kant's idealism. She argues both of these points by arguing, in the great majority of cases, more for a logical than an actual or historical connection among the conclusions Kant drew from the argument; i.e., that she can illuminate the reasoning that led Kant from a rejection of Leibniz's relational view to his radical separation between sensibility and understanding, and then to his view that things in themselves are both unknowable and non-spatial. (shrink)

Seven articles on American philosophy written by members of the Tulane University philosophy department. Except for James K. Feibleman's "Viennese Positivism in the United States," the papers are concerned with the views of individual thinkers: Dewey, James, B. F. Skinner, Royce, Morris, and Whitehead.--R. B.

The author sketches, briefly and somewhat informally, the foundations of a theory of ethical right which is both "naturalistic" and "rationalistic." The rightness of an act depends upon two things; its conformity to a right rule or principle and the goodness of its consequences--the former is rationally, the latter empirically, determined. Besides this central ethical thesis, the book includes a rather routine discussion of non-ethical modes of rightness and some interesting if inconclusive suggestions about the ultimate ground of the right.--R. (...) B. (shrink)

Chapters on the nature and beginnings of tragedy introduce a survey of Greek, Elizabethan, Neo-Classical, and Modern tragedy. The theoretical portions attempt to remedy Aristotle's "rather strange neglect of the philosophical and religious implications of tragedy," or "the tragic sense of life." Rather than a fresh theory of tragedy, the book presents a critical synthesis of the leading theories of cultural anthropology and psychology; of the work of the modern critics of archetypal forms and ideas ; and the "heroic humanism" (...) of critics like Cedric Whitman. The central sections have the vivid sweep of Muller's The Uses of the Past and give much of its indispensable background material.--R. B. S. (shrink)

Continuing and amplifying his earlier work, Fromm here maintains that modern society is not sane and is heading toward greater insanity. He begins by defining the human situation, and derives a criterion of sanity from this; examines in detail the development of man in modern society, diagnosing some of its major ills; and finally proposes, as a solution, a Humanistic Communitarian Socialism. The book has a welcome positive approach, but it sometimes sacrifices depth of analysis for breadth of scope. --R. (...) B. (shrink)