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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.

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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.

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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.

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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)

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Freedom and unity are the values James most wanted to protect and to extend. Roth agrees with this choice, and recommends James to his readers as the moral philosopher who can best show us how. James is presented as combining a principled morality with the responsiveness to particular cases characteristic of existentialism and situational ethics, and his ethics is found to yield what John Wild would call a "primary existential norm": Act so as to maximize freedom and unity. While the (...) philosophical foundations of James' theory are generally secondary to Roth's advocacy of it, the author shows how the norm is based on the following Jamesian concepts: human consciousness is selective and efficacious; the universe is unfinished; value is rooted in consciousness and choice; and the goal of ethics is to achieve unity or harmony among personal and communal choices. Roth mentions problems for James--for example, pointing out that the principle of satisfying as many value demands as possible while frustrating a few as necessary does not handle qualitative differences in demands, and showing how James' later work emends this principle. He also touches on the tough problem, developed by others following James, of "unity" as an ideal in a system in which both meaning and value are rooted in feeling, and feelings are "owned" by individual selves. The book is simply written and should present no difficulty for the reader with little background in philosophy.--M. B. M. (shrink)

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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)

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Sr. Garcia wants to bring readers the image of Marx they might draw from his 1844 economic-philosophical manuscripts which were not published until 1932, on the initiative of the Marx-Engels Institute of Moscow, under the title Zur Kritik der Nationaloeconomie mit einem Schlusskapitel über die Hegelsche Philosophie. He feels the tardy discovery of this work is as significant for the understanding of Marx as the belated discovery of the epistles of Saint John would have been to an understanding of Jesus. (...) Garcia sees his task to be that of "cleaning the coin" of Marxism in order for both of its true faces to be seen. Marx used the word "transubstantiation" to refer to the transformation of the substance of the history of philosophy by the socialist revolution. This is much more than reinterpretation. He likens the socialist transubstantiation of philosophy and Catholicism to the absorption of primitive explanations in science into modern theoretical physics. As the transformation of the son of man into the Son of God was the task of Christianity, the transformation of natural man into the creator and creature of society is the task of socialism. The author is thus trying to show that the atheism attributed to Marx is not inimical to the true values of the Christian myth, but absorbs and transforms them into Humanism, which is the "very theme of our time."—M.B.M. (shrink)

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Erikson is Professor of Human Development at Harvard, a psychoanalyst, and the author of the widely influential books, Young Man Luther, and Childhood and Society. What is the relevance of his latest book to philosophy? One answer is that Erikson deals with several concepts of personal identity which philosophers will recognize as corresponding to historical philosophic positions. He does not choose between these disparate views, but correlates them, treating each as partial, and learning about his complex subject from the habits (...) of syntax appropriate to each. Erikson divides personal identity into the "I," the "selves," and the "ego," on the grounds that these terms provide a way to distinguish roles and "counterplayers" of various functionings of human personality. We need these various terms to designate identity as viewed from without and from within. Erikson's "selves" are what the "I" reflects on when it views the body, the personality, or the social roles to which it is attached. The counterplayers of the "selves" are the "others" of Existentialism. Erikson's reflective "I," like the subject of Descartes' cogito, is "the center of awareness in a universe of experience in which I have a coherent identity... am in possession of my wits and able to say what I see and think." With Descartes, Erikson finds the unique counterplayer to the "I" in the Deity; the repository of the vitality which is being affirmed of itself in each awareness of the "I." Erikson's "ego" corresponds to the Self of Hume's Treatise, undiscoverable beneath its particular perceptions. The "ego" is necessarily unconscious; we are aware of its work but never of it. As of Hume's self, we can say of it that it has the task of turning passive into active, screening and organizing the impositions of the internal and external environment in such a way that they bring about volitions. Like Hume, Erikson feels philosophers and psychologists have "created nouns such as the 'I' or the 'self', making imaginary entities out of a manner of speaking" and that we would be mistaken to give ontological status to these particles. Perhaps Erikson would accept a statement of the contemporary philosophical form: "The several designations of 'selves', etc., are instrumental in explaining complex personal identity feelings or events." In other parts of the book Erikson uses William James as an example of creative identity, discusses the concept of "negative identity", and in the last three chapters discusses aspects of personal identity in the disequilibrium of the young, the races, and women. The book contains Erikson's writings on identity over a twenty-year period. However, in areas of common interest to psychoanalytic theory and philosophy, the requirements of Erikson's clinical work have suggested relationships between concepts different from the relationships often assumed by philosophers. Thus, on personal identity, criteria of ideological soundness of a society, and the determinants of empirical perception, the addition of Erikson's insights may give the philosopher a multidimensional glimpse of the field wherein he labors.--M. B. M. (shrink)

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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)

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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.

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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)

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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)

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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)

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A good and useful book with over 100 pages of appendices, bibliography and index, its utility perhaps will be due more to its qualities as a reference than as critique. The first of five parts sketches the background of pragmatism, concentrating on the problems of scientific knowledge. Part II gives a chapter each to Peirce, James, Dewey, Lewis, and G. H. Mead, emphasizing their answers to the problems of Part I. Part III treats pragmatism in Europe. Part IV is called (...) "Consequences." Here Thayer includes the attack on the analytic-synthetic distinction, a discussion of instrumentalism in philosophy of science, and he gives an exposition of Dewey's ethics. In Part V, "Speculations," the author lists attitudes and topics of renewed interest in contemporary philosophy which are characteristically pragmatic. This "Pragmatism" is a revolutionary shift in methodology and criticism. It finds that non-philosophical contexts are the initiating and terminating points of philosophical analysis, and it is tolerant of pluralism. The ethics of Dewey and Lewis, which stress the necessity for communication between philosophic valuation theory and the empirical sciences, are one expression of this "Pragmatism." The successes of an empirical philosophy which aims to account for originative thinking and valuing in either science or morals support Thayer's speculation that "the future may well be with Dewey, Lewis, and Mead."--M. B. M. (shrink)

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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)

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Marnell studies the fortunes of the belief that society's moral foundations are man-made. In England and America this belief has "crested four times in the past three hundred years, and receded three." Deism, utilitarianism, social Darwinism, and pragmatism are the crests. About half the book's length consists of sketches of nearly fifty adherents of these philosophies--their birth and training, their views and influence on the movements, and excerpts from their work. The philosophical expositions are reliable. Moreover, the book is thick (...) with detail and very lively, both because its subject is the philosophy of essentially active people, and because of its style. Thus the reader is propelled along by colorful, epigrammatic prose. It should be a popular assignment as background reading in American civilization or philosophy, or the history of ideas. There are notes, bibliographical notes, and an index. In the final chapter Marnell examines the relationship between "progress," "liberalism," and the belief in a man-made order. Each man-centered philosophy has started as a reform movement, but has degenerated into cynicism and an excuse for self-aggrandizement, he tells us. Then, "believers in the divinely created order have found the way around to the fertile plain where progress once more is possible." Pursuing the current good cause, liberals have shifted philosophical positions three times in the past one hundred years. Currently, civil rights arguments rely on a natural law position ultimately based on divine rather than man-made order. The author makes a case for at least alternating emphasis on human and divine order, as the condition for social betterment.--M. B. M. (shrink)

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The editors tell us this book is an outgrowth of their course in philosophical arguments. It contains both readings from traditional sources, and new material especially for this book. It is thus of interest as a potential text, as a source book, and for its original contributions. To consider it first as a text, it would be a challenging and valuable choice for sophisticated students. As a source-book, it is a good anthology of hard-core arguments on seven metaphysical topics. Authors (...) selected include Aristotle, Plato, Church Fathers, Rationalists, Locke and Hume, Bradley and Moore, Kant, Frege, Carnap, C. I. Lewis, Russell, and others. Selections run from a page or two to 16-page Hume excerpts. The last section, on The Nature of Metaphysics, contains essays newly written for this volume by A. J. Ayer, Brand Blanshard, John Passmore, and M. Lazerowitz. Other new material elsewhere in the book includes Alice Ambrose on Wittgenstein, and the introduction by W. E. Kennick. The latter suggests that in metaphysics there are arguments but no proofs, and that metaphysics has four curious characteristics: its disputes are never resolved; in these disputes the array of experts on each side is likely to be equally impressive; antinomies seem unavoidable; and metaphysics frequently conflicts with common sense. Ayer's article is called "Metaphysics and Common Sense." Using Carnap's distinction of "internal" and "external" questions, he finds metaphysical questions to be external. His explanation of what these are and why anyone would wish to raise them yields three legitimate ways in which metaphysics can add to our understanding of the world, and concludes that "it would be a mistake to forego the more imaginative kinds of conceptual exploration." In both tone and content this essay is a surprise for readers who know earlier work by Ayer. Passmore attempts to correct the popular tendency to confuse the philosopher with the sage. He places metaphysics, mathematics, and empirical science within "rational discussion": each is speculation, each has its characteristic control procedure. Blanshard's article attempts to defend metaphysics against criticisms such as those made by Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Freud. Lazerowitz treats the thesis that "metaphysics works by unseen paradoxes."--M. B. M. (shrink)

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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)

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Volume Three of the selected works of Unamuno, this is the first of nine projected volumes to appear. It contains the long personal exegesis of Cervantes' Don Quixote, and a group of sixteen essays, several of which also take the Knight as their point of departure. There are essays which are explicitly on the subject of philosophy; a memoir of Ángel Ganivet as philosopher, and musings on why Spain never has had a philosopher. The conclusion reached is that the Spaniard (...) is antimetaphysical; the Spanish soul strives not for a concept of the universe, but for a sense of life. Unamuno finds it suitable, appropriate, and inevitable that the philosophy of Spain must be searched out in the only places in which it can be found, in fictional deeds and carved religious images. Idealism will not be metaphysical idealism, but ethical and practical idealism. Unamuno celebrates the pattern of the antirational, individualistic, anarchistic, action-centered Spanish philosophy of life, in which the seeds of existentialism seem so clearly visible. The book is physically and stylistically appealing, with a very full index, and bibliographical, explanatory, and poetic-linguistic notes, all very scholarly and full.--M. B. M. (shrink)

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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)

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Richard Popkin gives the frame into which the topics of the colloquium fit: Cartesian skepticism about our knowledge of the existence of the self and the external world. Robert Fogelin sketches a prescriptive model for human action, using classical and contemporary ideas on the grammar of act descriptions. Following these individual papers, there are three symposia, consisting of a paper, comments, and author's reply. In the first, with Philip Hugly as commentator, Fred Dretske attempts to undercut skeptical attack on the (...) validity of ordinary perceptual claims. He holds that an epistemic perceptual report conveys two items: a description, and a justification of the increment in knowledge which is the crux of each particular claim. The second symposiast is Roderick Chisholm, writing with historical fluency and analytic skill on the loose and strict senses of identity. In his comments, S. Shoemaker offers a "special concern" criterion for personal identity. In the third symposium, Jaakko Hintikka argues that the logic of perceptual terms is modal, in the extended sense that most of the words used to express propositional attitudes, words like 'knows', 'believes', 'strives', serve as modal operators. Romane Clark is Hintikka's commentator. Again, the comments seem genuinely helpful in clarifying or emphasizing the issues for the reader. Hintikka tells us that he finds that traditional problems in perception are closely related to difficulties logicians have met as they try to understand the interplay between modal notions and the basic logical concepts of identity and existence. His comment expresses the sense of discovery and promise which pervades these papers. It strikes one that this Colloquium achieved a felicitous combination of high-level technique and creative scholarship.--M. B. M. (shrink)

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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)

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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)

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This book can be useful in a number of ways to teachers and students in social philosophy and allied fields despite the frustrating brevity of the selections, most of which average five pages. Purchased with this severe economy is the advantage of a wide span of selections, starting with Plato and Aristotle, and including those as recent as the 1960s. The selections are comprehensive in viewpoints presented. In addition to professional philosophers we are given the work of theologians, jurists, political (...) theorists, even excerpts from Dante and Camus. Beck follows six problems: man and society, values, authority, law, obligation, and justice, through nine major philosophical "perspectives," an attempt to show the interconnection of philosophic concepts both with each other, and with the methods and presuppositions whereby they were reached. Each section begins with a page or two of introduction in which the editor gives historical background, and perspicuous definitions and analysis of the central ideas. The sections are: Classical Realism, Positivism, Liberalism, Utilitarianism, Idealism, Communism, Pragmatism, Existentialism, and Analytic Philosophy. There is a bibliographical essay which covers secondary material, primary sources not excerpted in the text, and references on special topics. Taken together with fuller use of the sources represented in the editor's selections, this book could be a text for a course in social philosophy, taken alone it is an attractively presented introduction or good browsing for the professional.—M. B. M. (shrink)

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A versatile text for graduate or undergraduate courses following a "problem" format, this is a technical manual, which if mastered would impart one of the indispensable skills of philosophers to its students. The responsibility for three of the six chapters lies with each author. Lehrer leads off with "The Contents and Methods of Philosophy," in which he presents the logical and semantic skills which are prerequisite to the following chapters. He considers valid argument forms, the method of counter-example, definition, induction, (...) and so on, with exercises given for each topic. The chapters "Knowledge and Skepticism" and "Freedom and Determinism" are also his. Cornman contributes chapters on the "Mind-Body Problem," "Justifying the Belief in God," and "Justifying an Ethical Standard." Each chapter has an exhaustive bibliography running several pages, giving classical sources, anthologies, textbooks, recent books, other bibliographies where available, and paying special attention to contemporary articles of both immediate and related pertinence. Each chapter, after the first, begins with a statement of the topic in straightforward terms. The alternative positions on the issue are enumerated; each is given a clear elaboration, and the problems faced by each are brought out for consideration. There is considerable dialectical play between positions, as one arises in response to problems unsolvable by another. Each chapter ends by showing which of the alternatives seems most reasonable, and providing exercises for the student.--M. B. M. (shrink)

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Not a text, but a thoughtful and provocative essay for those who have already done their groundwork in ethical theory, this book is especially interesting because it introduces broadly relevant views of otherwise unfamiliar contemporary European philosophers as taken from their publications in the 1950's and 60's. van Melsen deals with the often opposing concepts of "man as nature," the object of science, and "man as freedom," the subject who carries out the research. An especially interesting thesis is that of (...) the correspondence of views of man, stages in the development of science and natural law theory, and ethical theories and aspirations. As an example, van Melsen shows that the relative weight of intention and of results in determining the ethical value of an act, varies in static versus dynamic social orders. In discussing the changes in meaning of "natural law" he relates this to the problem of human sin and freedom, in the form given it by Thomas Aquinas: evil sways man only by its ability to pass as goodness. In modern scientific terms, we are not able to recognize evil except as we can cope with the statistical probabilities of its horrible consequences. The author takes up the relation of "is" and "should," quite independently of the tradition of Hume in which the issue is frequently presented to American students. In both science and morals, "should" is always richer than "is." Although norms can never be entirely divorced from what exists in nature, nature can offer a norm only insofar as it produces something that man recognizes as valuable. van Melsen would opt for the reality of ideals, limit concepts, which constitute the "nature" of ethical good or "human nature." On this view science is doubly relevant to ethics: the scientist should appreciate his work as carrying out the ethical command to distinguish evil from good by enlarging our knowledge of consequences, and further as embodying his love for fellowmen.--M. B. M. (shrink)

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The 21 selections are divided into three conceptual approaches to the study of perception: the neurophysiology, the psychology, and the phenomenology of perception, with a final section, some problematic studies. In effect, however, the editor is challenging the metaphysical position hidden in the attitude that behavioral physiology should be an "exact science" without philosophical commitments. Parts II and IV, no less than the explicit statements of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Gurwitsch and Erwin Strauss in Part III, stand over against a point of (...) view which, beginning with Cartesian dualism, attempts to resolve it in a materialist reduction, a point of view in which behavior is always reaction, of nervous systems to physical stimulation from an "external," "real," world. Tibbetts is pressing two points--first, that all science must be based on some presuppositions or other and second, that any metapsychology ignores physiological and behavioral research only at its peril. In Part I, Bain, Lashley and Sperry are among the authors. In Parts II and IV Tibbetts brings together selections by Hochberg, Gregory, Gibson, Penfield, Donald Campbell, a bit of Piaget, team research reports, and more to provide in one place material not easily at hand. Some authors provide bibliographical references, and the editor gives nine more pages of bibliography.--M. B. M. (shrink)

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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)

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In many Catholic colleges the first exposure to philosophy is a course in the philosophy of man. The text-anthology is specifically designed for use in such courses and forms one third of a series with further volumes on metaphysics and ethics. Views on man's knowledge, freedom, unity, and immortality, are presented in short selections from five philosophical traditions. Each section has an introductory essay, a glossary, topics for student discussion and term papers, and a short bibliography. A contributing editor is (...) responsible for each section. The general editors coordinated the study aids, including a list of films related to the teaching of philosophy. Elizabeth Salmon edited Classical and Scholastic Thought: Plato, Aristotle and Aquinas. Robert Kreyche edited American Pragmatic-Naturalist Thought: Peirce, James, Dewey, and Santayana. The section on Dialectical Thought, edited by R. T. DeGeorge contains, in addition to Hegel, Marx, and Engels, a selection from a book by Adam Schaff. Margaret Gorman edited Analytic-Positivist Thought. This section includes Hume, Russell, Ayer, Carnap, Ryle, Strawson, Hampshire, and Wittgenstein. Although pointing out to students that the interests of this tradition preclude discussion of the reality behind the four core problems, the introductory section is appreciative of the analytic method. The final part, Existentialist-Phenomenological Thought, is edited by R. Sokolowski. A passage from a forthcoming translation of Husserl's Die Krisis der europäischen Wissenschaften, sets the problem; readings from Sartre, Marcel, Merleau-Ponty, and August Brunner treat the themes of temporality, corporeal space, intersubjectivity, decisions, the emotions, and speech. Finally, short passages from Heidegger tell the reader that the above factors "open man to being." In this way the Phenomenological-Existentialist school is shown to provide a philosophy of man which can serve as a first step in metaphysics, and thus as a bridge to the next book in the series.--M. B. M. (shrink)

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This book is the first volume of a projected three volume work on the philosophy of science. It is devoted to the task of describing the experimental method of discovery as practiced in the physical sciences. In the Introduction, the work is referred to as a handbook and is designed apparently as the first stage in the construction of a theory of scientific investigation. Feibleman breaks down the process of discovery into six more or less distinct stages: observation, induction, hypothesis, (...) experiment, calculation, and prediction and control. Apart from the introduction and a concluding chapter which attempts to classify different kinds of results in the physical sciences, one chapter is devoted to each stage. The contention is that each successive stage, except the last, can be seen to emerge logically from the preceding stage. The book is extremely comprehensive in scope and contains a great deal of information about a wide range of aspects of scientific discovery. This is both a positive and a negative feature. Because of its comprehensiveness, many topics deserving closer examination are passed over quickly, and the various categories and stages which Feibleman employs often seem more or less arbitrary. There are important omissions. Kuhn, Feyerabend and Scheffler receive no mention. One finds oneself asking: what is the point of it all? Feibleman suggests one aim is to synthesize and abstract the method of the physical sciences in order to enhance its deployment in the social sciences. Another aim seems to be to provide some logical or theoretical justification of the procedures of the physical sciences. With respect to this last point, the descriptive classification of this volume is only a beginning. Whether it succeeds or fails must await the subsequent volumes.—M. B. (shrink)

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Today Shaftesbury is studied chiefly because he was a pivotal figure in English ethics; the publication of his Characteristics marked the turn from the primacy of abstract rational principles, in Cambridge Platonism, to the psychologically-based ethics of the "moral sense" school. Grean presents Shaftesbury more broadly, as expressing the basic faith of the Enlightenment, which still underlies the liberal democratic culture of the West. Shaftesbury maintains "that society, right and wrong was founded in Nature, and that Nature had a meaning (...) and was herself, that is to say in her wits, well governed and administered by one simple and perfect intelligence." According to Grean, the motif of "enthusiasm" distinguishes Shaftesbury from his contemporaries; thus the main goal of this study is to understand all the ramifications of the doctrine. In the early chapter entitled "Enthusiasm," we are given Shaftesbury's description of it as a psychological phenomenon, a powerful experience "which occurs when the mind receives or creates ideas or images too big for it to contain." Windelband generalizes the phenomenon into an "enthusiasm" for the true, good, and beautiful which lives out all the peculiar power of man by the elevation of his soul above itself to more universal values. Grean tells us that "enthusiasm" is central to Shaftesbury's account of how we respond to beauty, how we make and are made by the good, how we know the truths of morals which are "patterns of meaningful possibilities... intended not merely to describe but to transform reality." In the early pages of Part I, the historical detail and comments on secondary literature, although very readable, are tangential to the philosophic argument and delay our coming to grips with the author's thesis. Soon, however, in chapters on religion, virtue, and creative form, Grean's mastery of Shaftesbury's holistic philosophy forcefully comes across. We are shown that it is dynamic, unified, and not antirational, and here the reader can derive a characterization of "enthusiasm" sufficiently broad for Grean's purposes. The doctrine means that human nature is capable of ultimate commitment, creative intuition, spontaneity, and disinterested love; further, "enthusiasm" is involved in the method of philosophy and the method of writing. Like Plato, Shaftesbury believed that external beauty can lead us to inner beauty. His philosophy is gracefully written, and Grean points out the relation of style and substance in his subject, while writing readably himself. As a study of Shaftesbury, for whom true philosophy could not be restricted to abstract theory but must form a whole with its practical application, this book is sympathetic in manner as well as in its conclusions. Notes, index, selected bibliography and historical preface provide aids to further study.--M. B. M. (shrink)

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

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