An anthology of philosophical essays and abstracts ranging from Plato to C. D. Broad. The work includes specific discussions of the philosophy of science, religion, politics, and value, as well as discussions concerned with the more general issues of epistemology and metaphysics.--T. M. G.

This powerful, original, and tendentious book was written in 1940, published in Russia in 1965, and is now available in English. It suffers from many shortcomings--repetitiousness, oversimplification, the exclusion of material which fails to fit the author's thesis. It also inevitably reflects ignorance of scholarship since the thirties, which has tended to deny Rabelais' alleged agnosticism and nudged him closer to orthodoxy. But it represents nonetheless an important advance in the understanding of Rabelais' book, and defends provocatively an unfashionable theory (...) of the Renaissance. Bakhtin lays heaviest stress on his author's freedom to play with authorized symbols and solemn institutions in the spirit of the carnival, a spirit deriving from folk humor. The common folk of town and country delighted in improprieties, turned all serious values and structures upside down, dwelt subversively and coarsely on the "bodily lower stratum." Just as food enters the body and is eliminated, so all authorized solemnity enters Pantagruel and is turned into fun. This peasant laughter remains unafraid before age and death because it recognizes the simultaneous destruction and creation in all experience. The medieval hierarchical conception of the universe is replaced in Rabelais and in the entire Renaissance by a new horizontal perspective upon the individual in history. This new perspective fastens particularly upon the body and renders it good-humoredly grotesque. Bakhtin seriously underestimates the breadth of both Renaissance religious feeling and neo-Platonic speculation as well as the strength of medieval survivals. But specific readings of Rabelais' text are genuinely enlightening even when they distort or simplify his meaning.--T. M. G. (shrink)

This short study attempts to demonstrate the importance for Rabelais's thought and art of the "Platonic-Hermetic" current in antique and Renaissance intellectual history. The demonstration is weakened by the author's failure to sketch a history of this tradition, and one is left to gather from intermittent allusions and from footnotes whom he considers its principle spokesmen and what he considers its main tenets and spokesmen to be. According to Masters, Rabelais's writing is grounded in a Platonic dialectic which plays with (...) the tensions between reality and appearance, intellect and matter, soul and body, God and man. The presence of the divine in human affairs is manifested by such images as the androgyne and the pantagruelion. The recurrent Rabelaisian image of drinking can be understood on several levels. In its most literal sense, it points to the pleasure of festive conviviality. At a higher level, it involves the enlightened exchange of ideas, and at the highest, evoked in the episode of the Dive Bouteille, drinking suggests the acquisition of self-knowledge and, with self-knowledge, all other knowledge proper to the human mind. The Hermetic sciences can lead man in three directions: downward to the black arts; outward toward a salutary investigation of the world; or finally upward to an "intuitive dialectic" and a mystical union with the godhead. Although Masters' interpretations of specific images and episodes sometimes lack tact, his erudition should enhance the book's interest both for intellectual historians and Rabelaisian specialists.--T. M. G. (shrink)

A brief summary of ancient thinkers who contribute to a theory of the physical universe, ranging from Anaximander to Proclus, with a major emphasis on pre-Aristotelian thought. Included in the work are many well-chosen abstracts of primary sources, such as Hippocrates' "On the Sacred Disease" and Parmenides' "On Nature." De Santillana presents a lively account of his materials, together with helpful illustrations. There is a rather insensitive portrayal of Aristotle as a mere synopticist of earlier theories and as primarily concerned (...) with "a tidiness of words."--T. M. G. (shrink)