v. 1. Philosophie. Rechtsphilosophie -- v. 2-4. Volkenrecht -- v. 5-6. Rechtsgeschiedenis. Burgerlijk recht. Procesrecht. Octrooirecht. Studie.

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)

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)

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)

This book by an economist might seem to claim the attention of philosophers, as its chapters include "The subject and methods of inquiry," and "The problem of induction"; important topics in the philosophy of science. In fact, it is a superficial and pretentious essay on science as a social system. Few facts are offered. The generalizations distort. Probably due to the imprecision of their statement, the premisses often contradict one another. A disproportionate percentage of the book's length consists of various (...) forms of the first person pronoun. The chapter on induction, which Mr. Tullock calls a digression, characterizes induction, also called Hume's problem, twice; once in terms of the popular misconception, as a process of going from the particular to the general, second, as the process whereby "a pattern of the whole problem appears in the mind and is then tested by working out.... The patterns must be directly perceived by the mind, since no 'intellectual' explanation is available." The author seems unaware that Hume's problem, and the justification of induction, are never mentioned.—M. B. M. (shrink)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

In 1967 Paul L'Archevêque published an analytical Index of the works of Teilhard de Chardin which has become an invaluable reference source for the thought of the renowned French scientist. This new Index is to a great extent a continuation and implementation of the former one. While it makes up for some of its deficiencies, it contains many additional references to Teilhard’s works which appeared after 1967, including some unpublished letters and pertinent material from the "Cahiers" of the "Editions du (...) Seuil." A simple look at some of the entries, such as "Christ" with 119 references, "Homme" with 277, "Matière" with 145, and "Vie" with 198, gives an idea of the thoroughness and practical value of this new Index. Thus one can only wholeheartedly agree with Claude Cuénot, the well-known Teilhard scholar and biographer, who, in addition to admitting that both he and the "Fondation Teilhard de Chardin" have greatly profited from the 1967 Index, recommends very highly the Nouvel Index Analytique and expresses the wish that at some future date the two Indexes be combined into one volume with an additional Index of Names. Cuénot’s suggestion has been favorably accepted by the author, who intends to carry out the project as soon as all Teilhard’s works are published.—B. M. B. (shrink)

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)

This latest in attempts to collect statements from living American philosophers presents thoughts and interests of those writing in the "middle decades," the fifty years from 1920 to 1970. The editor has restricted himself to America’s senior philosophers asking each to reflect on "the things that matter most," or "to share the motifs in their work and to present concerns about their world". Although some influential elders are missing from this collection, an interesting variety of viewpoints and styles of American (...) philosophizing are represented. Especially interesting are the reflections of Brand Blanshard, Edwin Burtt, Herbert Feigl, Charles Hartshorne, Stephen Pepper, Roy Wood Sellars, and Herbert Spiegelberg. Blanshard traces his development from the influences upon him of Bradley, and describes his own rationalist ethics and humanist religion. Herbert Feigl in an even more autobiographical vein relates how he came under the important influence of Moritz Schlick and to be a member of the Vienna Circle. Also included in his article is a summary of his views on the issues of induction, scientific explanation, the mind-body problem, determinism, and some matters of practical philosophy. Pepper explains how he originated the idea of world hypotheses, and how he believes these hypotheses themselves originate and function, and Spiegelberg sketches an intriguing "ethics for fellows in the fate of existence." In his essay Hartshorne mixes comments on pragmatism, idealism, and the "linguistic turn," with explanations of his own "neoclassical metaphysics."—B.M. (shrink)

The many conflicting views that have given rise to the contemporary crisis in religious thought can be traced to certain figures who have played a major role in the shaping of present-day thinking. An exploration of the ideas of these philosopher-theologians, from Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard to Barth, Tillich, Maritain, Berdyaev, Buber, and such lesser figures as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Harvey Cox, Thomas Altizer, and Richard Rubenstein, has been the chief objective of the author of this work. His survey of modern and (...) contemporary religious thinking, which he conducted within a predominantly Protestant framework, has convinced him that a common theme runs through the writings of the men examined by him: the problem of God is inseparable from the problem of modern man. "In the minds of theologians," the author asserts, "the loss of certainty about God is at base a loss of a sense of ultimacy which gives depth and purpose to everyday living.... And so, in responding to the loss of ultimacy, modern theology has reintroduced the question of man himself: his life and death, his experiences of tragedy, joy, guilt, acceptance, loss, and love." While pointing to the radical differences among theologians in their explanations of man's loss of faith, Idinopulos suggests that the theological options offered by such men as Barth, Tillich, Maritain, Berdyaev, and Buber are of paramount importance for the understanding of today's religious thinking. In his final chapter, the author makes a critical appraisal of the chief representatives of "secular theology," such as Bonhoeffer, Cox, and Altizer; and analyzes Rubenstein's peculiar theory of Holy Nothingness, or "Sacred Void out of which we came and to which we return." The author's analysis makes clear the extreme confusion, and even outright absurdity, into which men have been led by the self-styled "Theologians in a World Come of Age," which is the title of the chapter. The volume closes with a selected bibliography for each of the authors discussed and a comprehensive index.--B. M. B. (shrink)

Rosensohn’s interpretation rejects the thesis that Peirce had several systems, perhaps as many as four, each of which is responsive to his new discoveries in logic. Against this view Rosensohn traces the development of Peirce’s system as a coherent phenomenological search, shaped by his "lifelong interest in logic, the sciences, ethics, aesthetics and metaphysics", and culminating in his phaneroscopy, the description of the phaneron. Rosensohn’s text consists of two parts. Part I, "The Elements of Phenomenology," consists of three chapters, two (...) of which are devoted to a close investigation of Peirce’s 1967 "A New List of Categories." Part II consists of two long chapters, "Phenomenology and Nature " and "Phaneroscopy: The Description of the Phaneron." The book concludes with a critique of Peirce’s fundamental categories—Firstness, Secondness, Thirdness—as these bear on his own phenomenological project. From the standpoint of Peirce’s phenomenology, "whatever is present to the mind has Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness", but on the ontological level the cosmos’ evolution is viewed by him as linear. In addition to the usual bibliography and index, Rosensohn provides a helpful appendix of six key quotations in which Peirce explains phenomenology and phaneroscopy. This volume is vastly more substantial than its limited number of pages might suggest. The publisher crowds the pages with smallish print, generally exceeding 500 words per page. Rosensohn’s text itself is lucid, beautifully written, and skillfully argued. It represents at once an important contribution to Peirce scholarship and to the phenomenological literature.—B.M. (shrink)

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)

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)

Inasmuch as a good many of the Australian philosophers one would like to see included are not represented, and some of the contributors are no longer teaching in Australia, the title of this volume is somewhat misleading. It contains an introduction by Alan Donagan and the following original essays: J. Passmore, "Russell and Bradley"; L. Goddard, "The Existence of Universals"; B. Ellis, "An Epistemological Concept of Truth"; P. Herbst, "Fact, Form, and Intentionality"; M. Deutscher, "A Causal Account of Inferring"; D. (...) M. Armstrong, "Colour-Realism and the Argument from Microscopes"; K. Campbell, "Colours"; C. B. Martin, "People"; M. C. Bradley, "Two Arguments Against the Identity Thesis"; D. H. Monro, "Mill's Third Howler"; G. Schlesinger, "The Passage of Time." Though the essays are original and admirable, there does not seem to be anything distinctively Australian, rather than American or British, about their contents. Perhaps the most enlightening fact about them is that neither the Andersonian tradition of Sydney nor the Wittgensteinian tradition of Melbourne which dominated the Australian philosophical scene in the early 1950's is pre-eminent any longer, or even in evidence.--A. B. M. (shrink)

Prohibition on sex selection may well be unnecessary and oppressive as well as posing risks to women’s lives The urge to select children’s sex is not new. The Babylonian Talmud, a Jewish text completed towards the end of the fifth century of the Christian era, advises couples on means to favour the birth of either a male or a female child.1 The development of amniocentesis alerted the public in the mid-1970s to the scientific potential for prenatal determination of fetal sex,2 (...) and progressive decriminalisation of abortion afforded choice about continuation of pregnancy. The more recent emergence of preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) obviates resort to abortion, and improved techniques of sperm sorting and diagnosis permit creation of zygotes that will ensure the sex of a future child. Growth of biomedical means to select the sex of future children has been accompanied by fear that such means will be employed to favour births of sons, and so perpetuate devaluation of girl children and women’s inferior family and social status. A reaction to this fear has been the demand for legal and medical professional prohibition of sex selection techniques. For instance, the Council of Europe’s Convention on Human Rights and Biomedicine3 provides in article 14 that: The use of techniques of medically assisted procreation shall not be allowed for the purpose of choosing a future child’s sex, except where serious hereditary sex-related disease is to be avoided. Legislation has been enacted in a number of countries, and proposed in others, to prohibit sex selection on non-medical grounds, such as the Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act, 1994 in India. In Canada, for instance, government draft legislation introduced in May 2002 proposes to make it a crime for any person, for the purpose of creating a human …. (shrink)

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)

A case study of Chinese grandparents’ transnational caregiving experiences in Canada highlights two issues that have received limited attention in the broader feminist care literature: (1) elderly persons are usually positioned as receivers rather than providers of care; and (2) transnational care studies focus on women migrating as part of “global care chains,” rather than on elderly family members migrating to meet the caring needs of adult kin who work in market economies that do not recognize caring responsibilities. The paper (...) concludes by arguing that the distribution of care responsibilities needs to be one of the pillars in the pursuit of transnational social justice. (shrink)

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)

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)

A collection of essays written over a period of ten years, this volume reflects a continuing concern with the impact of Kant’s critique upon the study of religion. Kant’s challenge to all subsequent speculation about religion is framed by Dupré in the following questions: "How can we restore the theoretical support of religious faith after Kant’s critique of the arguments for the existence of God? How can a method be conceived for the philosophical study of religion on the basis of (...) experience alone? How can that experience itself be legitimated within the context of human autonomy?". The answer to these questions constitutes the threefold division of the book. In terms of legitimation of religious experience, the author discusses the concept of religion as feeling, freedom, and representation in Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, and Hegel, respectively. As for the method to be followed in the study of religion based on experience, he presents the theories of Husserl’s intentions of experience, Blondel’s reflection upon this latter, and Duméry’s reductions of experience. Finally, the question of justification of faith is seen in the context of the cosmological, teleological, moral, and ontological arguments of classic philosophy. (shrink)

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)

The author briskly gives the principles of criticism which he will follow in examining Kant's theory of time, and the distinctions between absolute time, psychological time, and the duration of events and processes which must be made in order to deal with the time theories of Kant and his great predecessors Newton and Leibniz and their defenders. Al-Azm then follows Kant's writings from 1747 through his brief conversion to the Newtonian "receptacle" theory, through the critical period. He considers the Dissertation (...) of 1770, at least in so far as it deals with space and time, to belong to the latter. The principles of criticism are especially relevant to Al-Azm's interpretation of Kant's time doctrine in the critical period. He holds that we must carefully bear in mind Kant's alternation of analytic and synthetic methods, and their dialectic interplay. If we do so, we can explain away the "patchwork" theory of Kemp Smith and others, as the obscurities and apparent inconsistencies and paradoxes which are resolvable in the light of the roles played for Kant by the approaches he employs. Within the first Critique, the teachings on time in the Aesthetic and the Analytic constitute a "genuine dialectic of a highly complex order." Thus, Kant's final position should be sought in the progressive modifications of the preliminary position. Al-Azm regards the Aesthetic as offering merely provisional statements on the subject of time, reached by a process of analysis, at an early dialectical stage, and offering a starting point for a fresh stage in analysis which aims "at the unveiling of the synthetic processes of the understanding." This is accomplished in the Analytic. In a last section, on the first Antinomy, the author considers Strawson's essay, The Bounds of Sense, published in 1966, and cites passages which he feels defend Kant's theory of time, seen in its relation to the critical philosophy, as successfully against Strawson's interpretation as against the claims of its Leibnizian and Newtonian rivals.--M. B. M. (shrink)