Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 111 rhetoric, and the connection between him and Isocrates, who claims to be doing "philosophy," is interesting if less well known. Despite the facts that Cicero is a watershed figure in Hellenistic and Roman thought and that he claims to conjoin rhetoric and philosophy, he is today generally considered an imitator and second-rate thinker if he is considered at all. Nevertheless, there is still no history of the relationship between the two disciplines either in the Greek world or in Western culture generally. There are, of course, the comments of Jaeger, the similarly oriented study by Arnim,2 and a few others, but no integrated history. Thus Professor IJsseling's historical survey is to be welcomed into English. Originally published in Dutch under the title Retoriek en Filosofie, it tells, with remarkable sensibility to historical nuance, the story of philosophy's ambivalent or contradictory relation to rhetoric. The conflict begins with Plato and the Sophists (chap. 2), and IJsseling follows its course through Isocrates (3), Greek and Roman rhetoric (4, 5), early Christianity (6), the medieval liberal arts (7), Renaissance humanism (8), Bacon, Descartes (9), Pascal (10), Kant and the Enlightenment (12), Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud (13). But the book is at the same time a philosophical study of this conflict; not only has it in general "determined the content and form of philosophy as such" (p. 5), its first occurrence in ancient Greece "determined the whole of European thought and Western culture" (p. 7). And IJsseling uses each figure and period to suggest problems that the present "rehabilitation of rhetoric" (chap. 1) as well as the whole history of the conflict illuminates: for example, the varieties of forms of argumentation and of types of philosophical texts (books, articles, lectures, diaries, novels, plays, and poems), the role of metaphor in philosophy (chap. 15), and what happens when someone (person or text) speaks (chap. 16). As a philosophical study, Professor IJsseling's book will be criticized by those who do not share its Heideggerian assumptions, program, or language, and by those who do not share its perception of the reality or importance of the renascence of rhetoric in the twentieth century. The book may be faulted for a few infelicities in translation, for sometimes taking Heidegger's philosophical views as historical facts, and most importantly for its failure to provide a reasonably thorough and organized bibliography of the subject for the interested reader. But as a historical survey it is certainly worthy of attention by philosophers of all persuasions, and especially by those interested in the history of philosophy, for its broad and synthetic vision and for the clarity and suggestiveness of the expository chapters. GERALDA. PRESS University of California, Riverside Peter K. Machamer and Robert G. Turnbull, eds. Motion and Time, Space and Matter: Interrelations in the History of Philosophy and Science. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1976. Pp. vi + 559. $22.50. The interrelations between the history of philosophy and the history of science can be exhibited in various ways. Historiographically, a judicious mutual exchange of methods can lead to an improved historical understanding. For example, the exportation of textual analysis from the history of philosophy to the history of science by Koyr~ produced something of a revolution in the latter discipline. On the other hand, the importation into the history of philosophy of the science-historian's concern with the context of discovery, as distinct from the context of justification , could lead to a veritable revolution insofar as it would lead to the testing, if not refutation, of a fundamental presupposition of almost all history of philosophy books, namely, that philosophi2Leben und Werkedes Dion von Prusa, chap. 1. 112 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY cal ideas originate from previous philosophical ideas. From an evolutionary-developmentalpoint of view, the study of the interrelations between philosophical and scientific history could lead to an appreciation of the time(s) when it was philosophical to be scientific (e.g., in the seventeenth century) and when it was not (e.g., in the Middle Ages), the time(s) when philosophy and science coincided and when they did not, the time(s) when one was a philosopher because he was a scientist and...