Journal of the History of Philosophy

~OOK REVIEWS 575 linking the two major parts of Kant's ethics and making sense of concerns, in the context of "a whole life," that cannot in the final analysis be kept separate. Steven's work shows connection and development in Kant's statements on character where others have found only idiosyncracies and laughably quaint convictions. This is in part due to the fact that he discusses Kant in the context of the 18th-century debate over the formation of character. But it is also a result of a sensitive and insightful reading of Kant that allows for the first time a recognition of the full importance of honesty in Kant's theory of virtue. Because Stevens carefully places Kant's remarks on character in historical context, he is able to raise issues that point to new directions in Kant scholarship. Thomas Auxter University of Florida Jill V. Buroker. Space and Incongruence: The Origin ofKant's Idealism. Synthese Historical Library, vol. 21. Dordrecht, Boston, and London: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1981. Pp. 143. $31.5~. Through a partly exegetic and historical but mostly logical and theoretical reconstruction of Kant's thoughts, this study argues that Kant's apparently disjoint uses of incongruent counterparts to show that space is absolute 0768), a pure intuition (177o), transcendentally ideal, merely subjective, and not related to things in themselves (1783, 1786) were actually related uses of incongruent counterparts and indeed formed the cornerstone of Kant's transcendental idealism. The study is commendable for drawing attention to several of Kant's early works, for suggesting how certain aspects of his Leibnizian heritage were accepted, modified and/or rejected, and for critically evaluating several recent commentaries on the Kantian theory of space and sensibility. But the study gives an unsympathetic and oversimplified account of Leibniz's theory, ignores primary and secondary literature which is not in English translation, and in general is myopic in its effort to show that Kant's concern with incongruence was the determining factor of his transcendental idealism. The first two chapters compare Newton's absolute theory of space with the relational theory as discussed by Berkeley, Mach, and Leibniz. The introduction of Berkeley and Mach's theory is unnecessary since there is no subsequent use of the non-Leibnizian theory in this study. Buroker's examination of Kant's Regions m Space0768) in chapter 3 anachronously discusses Kant's concept of an incongruent counterpart in terms of n-dimensional, orientable, non-orientable, Euclidean, non-Euclidean, homogeneous , non-homogeneous, local, and global spaces, while simultaneously using the term "space"--the very meaning of which is the issue between the relationists and the absolutists--as if it were unambiguous; for example, the claim is made that it is a "fact that space is only three-dimensional" (p. 56). The author then argues through a comparison of recent commentaries by Lawrence Sklar, Graham Nerlich, and John Earman , but without citing either Kant or Leibniz, that the x768 argument is not decisive against Leibniz's relational theory, even though Kant thought that it was. Finally, 576 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 21" 4 OCT t983 Buroker suggests that the real importance of Kant's Regions in Space was the awakening of Kant's epistemological concerns about space. The key to Kant's transition from metaphysical concerns in 1768 to epistemological concerns in the 177o Inaugural Dissertation and later, Buroker argues in Chapter 4, must have been Kant's reflection on Leibniz's theory of relations. Since the distinguishability of incongruent counterparts entailed that knowledge of space be given with, but not abstracted from, the perception of objects, and since we experience only one given space whose parts are extensively related within it, the representation of space must be through sensible intuition and not through the understanding. Consequently , in 177o Kant rejected Leibniz's view that sensations are merely confused concepts. Lewis W. Beck, in a work not cited by Buroker, has already shown that this same progression of Kant's thoughts was actually aimed at Wolff and Baumgarten's single-faculty theory of knowledge? Two interpretations by Adolf Griinbaum and Jonathan Bennett of Kant's use of incongruent counterparts are then criticized by Buroker...