Abstract

Every genuine history of philosophy is a guide-book which directs intellectual travel without substituting for it, even when it maps the shifting sands and storms of contemporary thinking which often seem too close to exhibit any permanent pattern of behaviour to the casual visitor. Useful current introductions are rare and invaluable to the beginner. Father Bochenski offers his work both as a general survey—and this will demand a high degree of intelligent concentration from his general reader—and as a bridgehead for further systematic study, providing it with a fifty-five page bibliography. One feels at once that it is the specialist and the student already familiar to some extent with these philosophers and philosophies who will benefit most from this guide. It is a remarkable achievement to accurately summarise and summarily judge in some 264 pages the varied cross-currents of about forty years of intensely lived experience and reflection, particularly when there is no single dominant school of thought. Indeed the author notes: “To-day, as always, a violent struggle is raging between antagonistic views of the world, and it is possibly more violent in our own time than it was during the past century. Rarely has it been of such intensity, with such a wealth of opposing viewpoints or expressed in such elaborate and refined conceptual frameworks”.