In this Festschrift some of Paul Weiss's friends, colleagues, and students have produced a splendid collection of original philosophical essays. Contributions by Charles Hendel, Charles Hartshorne, Robert Brumbaugh, Nathan Rotenstreich, A. Boyce Gibson, John Wild, and fourteen others are included. Outstanding are Father Johann's introduction of a contemporary view of experience into Neo-Thomism, William Earle's phenomenological analysis of love, and Father Clarke's discussion of causality. While the doctrines urged are not uniform, the standard of excellence is. I. C. (...) Lieb, whose editorial skill is evident throughout, has produced a distinguished volume which honors Paul Weiss by its contribution to contemporary philosophical inquiry. --R. C. N. (shrink)

There are two mutually indispensable ways of doing it. The first is to study the development of Plato's literary style. The second is to follow the sequence of his thought from one dialogue to another. Neither test is infallible; that is why Platonic scholarship goes happily on and on. In the course of a brilliant article concerning the place of the Timaeus in the order of the dialogues, Mr. G. E. L. Owen has shown how a merely statistical study of (...) stylistic mannerisms may seriously mislead; and as for thought sequences, they notoriously depend on hypothetical intuitions and vary widely from one critic to another. But along both lines a certain advance is possible. Since Owen, mechanical stylometry is discredited; and no one would now do what Schleiermacher did in his time--place the Phaedrus chronologically first among the dialogues on the ground that it contains in brief the whole of Plato's philosophy. There is progress in these matters, if not finality. (shrink)

There is a belief among the aborigines of Central Australia that the attributes of the divine ancestor are parcelled out among the component members of the tribe: and there are long periods in the history of ideas in which “divine philosophy” is similarly dismembered. The reason is that all great philosophical systems rest on a balanced tension of contemporary cultural elements, and as these change, and especially if they change rapidly or decisively, the unity of thought under which they have (...) been gathered begins to disintegrate. There follows a period of piecemeal experiment, in which the material of philosophy is too rich and too disorganized to be appropriated in a single conspectus: a period in which there will be no great philosophers, and perhaps little conscious philosophizing, not because philosophic genius is lacking, but because there is no scope for it till the various special tendencies of the age have achieved a certain internal development and a definite sense of direction. (shrink)

Readers of the Journal may know little of Melchior Palágyi. Even on the Continent his work has been very inadequately recognized. It is not that he has written little: he published some books and many articles during his lifetime, in German as well as in Magyar, and since his death, Barth of Leipzig has issued an edition of his selected works, including his most important contribution, Naturphilosophische Vorlesungen, also the Wahrnehmungslehre and Zur Weltmechanik. He has many enthusiastic admirers, and those (...) who care to look up the Preussische Jahrbücher, March 1926, will find there a most informative and highly appreciative article on his general philosophy by Werner Deubel, who in the same journal, some two years previously, discussed the work of a kindred spirit, Ludwig Klages. It was Deubel's article that first roused my interest in Palágyi and led me to study his more important writings. (shrink)

Rudolf Eucken on the meaning and value of life: the anthropotheistic standpoint of religious idealism.--The alleged revolutionism of Eucken's philosophy.--Activism and adolescence.--The religion of the spirit.--The principle of fruition.--Religion and morality.--Fruition and action.--The passion of love.--Pragmatism and religious idealism.--Universalism and the problem of evil.

In his introduction, Loriaux cites a passage from Etienne Gilson's L'être et l'essence, p. 30, in which Plato is represented as the typical "essentialist" thinker; i.e., a thinker who, when he talks about "being," is really talking about "essences." It is Loriaux's main contention that when Plato talks about being, or οὐσία, he refers to "the intelligible Form explicitly considered as Being and as existing in itself". It is important to see just what the issue is. It is not whether (...) Plato means, when he says "being," what the rest of us would call "essence;" he clearly thinks of whatever it is he is thinking about, just as "being." The question is whether, from his account of it, it is such that, in the light of later distinctions, we should have to call it "essence." This is the question which after an exhaustive study of the relevant dialogues Loriaux answers in the negative. (shrink)

Mr. Brumbaugh gives several accounts in the course of his work of the main purpose of his study, and the emphasis falls now one way and now another. Readers may easily be misled by the opening sentence of the introduction, which suggests that Plato's mathematical illustrations are pointers to "diagrams which Plato had designed, and were intended to accompany and clarify his text." If that is what Mr. Brumbaugh intended, he has failed to make out his case. There is no (...) direct evidence that Plato designed diagrams; and there is some good inferential evidence to the contrary. It would be surprising, for example, if Plato's diagrams had survived that long, that Aristotle should have described the Divided Line in terms of an arithmetical progression and ignored Plato's express indication of proportion between the upper and lower segments. Mr. Brumbaugh himself faces this passage and admits that "no continuous tradition connects the figures of Hellenistic scholars with Plato's original design." But it really does not matter. If we design diagrams in the light of our knowledge of Plato's mathematical imagination, it is most certainly a help to the interpretation of the passages concerned. This, as a matter of fact, seems to be Mr. Brumbaugh's main reason for ascribing the diagrams to Plato, and while the conclusion does not follow, the premiss is correct; and the premiss, not the conclusion, is the main point at issue. (shrink)

The three books before us are consolingly conservative. They observe the pieties; they display an unusually acute sense of history; they try to find out what Plato said instead of being angry with him for neglecting to read J. S. Mill and Wittgenstein; and they say faithfully and sympathetically what can be said for him even when he tries them hard. This is true criticism: and it stands out sharply against the spleen of the "detractors," as Professor Levinson has happily (...) called them. (shrink)