A pedantic and tedious discussion of Socrates’ arguments in Plato’s Crito for obeying the law. Its author, A. D. Woozley, who was a contributor to The Philosophy of Socrates, edited by Gregory Vlastos, focuses on the logical adequacy of Socrates’ arguments. Predictably, he finds them wanting.

If the title of this book is surprising from a professor of sociology, its contents are even stranger. Yet this is a very good book. Blum follows neither the historical approach of classical philology—which usually presents a report on Socrates’ philosophical teachings and a judgment on his contribution to later developments—nor the example of careful exegesis of Platonic and Xenophontic texts engaged in by Leo Strauss and others. Instead, he conducts what he calls a "conversation" with Socrates, who exemplifies the (...) belonging-together of "Theory and Life". Theory needs life because life and its end, the good, enable theory to distinguish the essential and necessary from the inessential and contingent; life needs theory because it cannot achieve its end without "discoursing, questing, and inquiring." What matters in taking Socrates seriously is not a correct "biography or obituary" of the man but "friendliness" toward him, demonstrated in the work of discourse with him. Chapters 2 and 3 examine two opinions hostile to Socrates. "Hedonism" denies life’s need for theory by claiming that freedom, not the good, is what life is; consequently, speech is not an uncovering of truth but is only a convention establishing general agreement. "Exegesis," on the other hand, denies theory’s need of life, for it tries to reproduce the point of view of others as would a merely neutral observer who has nothing to learn and nothing to talk seriously about. Blum’s central theme, to which he returns again and again, and on which he plays many variations, is this: speech points toward a wholeness other than itself and other than life; this wholeness can at most be imaged or alluded to in speech; man’s place in the kosmos is in speech, in between that wholeness and the mere contingency of brutishness. Socrates’ concern with "Justice" and "Work" embody that theme. A chapter on "Philosophy" warns against the danger of merely seeking that which is common in the multiplicity of things: commonness is not essence. Finally, in the closest thing to textual exegesis in the book, Blum treats "The Oracle" as a metaphor for the Good to which speech aspires and co-responds. (shrink)

Mill's feminism has been attacked as being logically incoherent. The general verdict has been that Mill can easily be defended from the charge. However, both sides in the debate have ignored the fact that his feminism is part of a broader theory of liberal empiricism. Placing The Subjection of Women in this context re–opens the question of its logical credentials and reveals a basic weakness in Millian feminism.

Using covariant derivatives and the operator definitions of quantum mechanics, gauge invariant Proca and Lehnert equations are derived and the Lorenz condition is eliminated in U(1) invariant electrodynamics. It is shown that the structure of the gauge invariant Lehnert equation is the same in an O(3) invariant theory of electrodynamics.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:274 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY poisoning, spying, etc., which would render postwar mutual confidence impossible, shall not be countenanced. It is mainly with an eye to these preliminary articles that Professor Wilhelm Miiller argues for Kant's relevance to contemporary political problems. Miiller begins by drawing an analogy between the Peace of Basle (1795) and the Treaty of Versailles: in both instances, it is claimed, secret reservations at the treaty table, (...) the identification of defeated nation with "guilty" nation, and the deprivation of an entire "guiltless" people of "the most primitive right to live" helped lay the foundations for future wars. Miiller sees in the willful dispersion, through motives of revenge and greed, of the possessions of conquered nations after both World Wars a "reversion to the wildest barbarism." He defends Kant's stricture against standing armies as being "simply and logically irrefutable" in spite of Kant's toleration--understandable in 1795--of limited and voluntary militias adequate for national defense. He infers from Kant's warning against national economic dependency the urgent need to exclude international capitalism from world politics. He suggests that Kant's principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of nations has been violated in the splitting of East from West Germany. And he insinuates that the present form of government in the U.S. is democratic and republican only in name, being in actuality a capitalist oligarchy whose two-party system tends to degenerate into a one-party system. Professor Miiller is entitled to his views. The reader, however, is entitled to a more objective exposition of Kant's essay and perhaps even to hope for a more critical and searching appraisal of Kant's doctrines. One opportunity for the latter surely offers itself in regard to Kant's analogy between personal and international morality. The analogy might conceivably break down over the difficulty of assigning collective moral and legal responsibility. If, as Kant maintains, a state is a moral person, it should follow that it and not merely its constituent members taken singly has moral responsibility for what it undertakes. Leaving aside the question of whether or not Kant thought through the implications of his premise, it is clear that Professor Miiller has not done so. Whereas he considers atrocious the branding of the German people as guilty of international crime in either World War, he allows himself the judgment that the "Christian" people of Europe and America were guilty of mass-murder on both occasions. The inconsistency is evident. Left unexamined and even unmentioned are the following: Kant's well-known ethical principles--the concept of practical reason, the phenomenal-noumenal duality, the notion of design in nature, the doctrine of the Categorical Imperative binding on any rational will--upon which he explicitly grounds Perpetual Peace; his efforts to refute the notion of theoretical conflict between morality and politics; his misleading use of the language of the social contract theorists throughout the essay; his proposal, anticipatory of later British philosophers, that the principle of publicity is a necessary if not sufficient condition of morally proper legislation. Perpetual Peace deserves more than Professor Mfiller has given it. PETER FUSS University of California, Riverside The Earlier Letters of John Stuart Mill 1812-1848. Edited by Francis E. Mineka, with an Introduction by F. A. Hayek. Two vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Routledge g: Kegan Paul. Pp. xxvii + 784. $20.00.) These two volumes of early correspondence are the first volumes to appear of a projected new edition of Mill's collected works. If the subsequent volumes maintain the high level of competence achieved here, the new edition will prove a valuable assistance to nineteenth- BOOK REVIEWS 275 century scholars. Of the 537 letters published, 238 have never before been in print, and 72 others have hitherto appeared only in part. Most of the work of assembling the letters was done by F. A. Hayek, but the extremely useful annotation was prepared by Francis E. Mineka. We are told that he and Dwight N. Lindley are planning an edition of the later letters (1849-1873). The earliest letter extant (printed in facsimile and hitherto unpublished) was written, at the age of 6, to Bentham. It... (shrink)

v. 1. Nicomachean ethics. Politics. The Athenian Constitution. Rhetoric. On Poetics.--v. 2. Logic.--v. 3. Physics. Metaphysics. On the soul. Short physical treaties.--v. 4. On the heavens. On generation and corruption. Meteorology. Biological treatises.