Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 377 Hg. Hoppe argues that for Kant mere perception plays no referential role. He holds the position that reference is reference to objects, understood in such a way that all reference is determinable. Hence, categorial principles are required (as conditions of determinate reference). Such argumentation deals with one of two Humean skeptical problems. The second problem deals with the unknowability of particular laws of nature. There Kant is said to agree with Hume that particular laws cannot be known "with certainty." Hoppe also claims that this skeptical attitude refutes interpretations of Kant according to which he analyzes scientific knowledge in explicit contrast to everyday experience. If it was the editor's intention to put forward a few central themes in the Hume and Kant literatures which provide a common background for all or most serious discussions of either philosopher, he succeeds only partially. A number of the pieces included raise issues rather incommensurate with one another, or at least the selections themselves, partly because of their shortness dictated by the format of the volume, do not dispel a feeling of incommensurateness. Many a reader will be left bewildered as to exactly what the crucial points of comparison between Hume and Kant are. The inclusion of the debate involving Beck helps ameliorate this situation. Concerning this debate, Beck's second reply (to Murphy) in his Essays on Kant and Hume would have been a happier choice than the one made by the editor. In the third piece of Beck's included here there occur two unfortunate lapses of translation. On page x8o (of the present volume) "entsprechen" should be "entspringen"--Beck is here talking of a causal principle possibly arising out of experience--and on page 189, a "nicht" is missing in a crucial place. The translation incorrectly has Beck say that objective events are "simply given," the very point Beck is eager to deny. RALF MEERBOTE University of Rochester Kant's Theory of Form: An Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason. By Robert B. Pippin. New Haven, Yale University Press: 1982. Pp. xii, 247. $~3.5o. Pippin promises us a detailed study of the function and the burden of the concept of form in at least Kant's theoretical philosophy--specifically, he promises "(i) to explain what Kant means when he speaks of the 'form' and 'matter' of experience and especially (2) what he means by the relation between form and matter in experience ... ; (3) how Kant justifies his views concerning what the forms of knowledge are, and how they relate to each other; (4) what these arguments reveal about the formal nature of his epistemology in general; and finally (5) to evaluate each of these elements" (pp. 6-7). But he does not really deliver on these promises, especially on the initial promise to provide us with a satisfactory analysis of Kant's concept (or concepts) of form. Instead, he gives us an essay----or series of essays--on a number of issues about the Critique, the agenda for which seems to be determined more by what has seemed important to recent commentators on Kant than by the kind of rigorous focus on the topic of form promised by Pippin's introduction. In many stretches of 378 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 22:3 JULY t984 the book, the notion of form disappears from view altogether, and sometimes it fails to appear even when there is clearly work which it could be doing. Chapter i introduces the themes of the book; the work begins in Chapter 9, which is devoted to the topic of "Sensations." This chapter is illustrative of the nature of the book. The first section describes Kant's thesis that as the mere matter of empirical knowledge, sensation itself is "undifferentiated and indeterminate" (29), and raises a problem for this thesis: how can sensations be thus "and yet somehow decisively direct our empirical knowledge"? (3o). That question is set aside for the next two sections, however, while Pippin considers the question of what justification Kant might have for the thesis that sensation is the mere matter of cognition to which all form must be brought by faculties of mind other than sense...