Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 405 "seeming" and "being" (cf. Plato's Sophist). And therein lies Prauss' main difficulty, since, for Kant, even these immediate contents are "judgments," albeit of a special kind. Kant may have shown the Rationalists the necessity for a doctrine of a sensible Anschauung, but, on the other side of his critique, with these immediate "seemings" intelligible only mediately, with a certain Gebrauch of the categories and a problematic use of Er]ahrungsurteile , he also refuses to accept the Empiricist beginning with" simple, given "impressions ," upon which all knowledge is "built." (Indeed, one of the best sections of Prauss' book is his devastating "Kantian" critique of sense-data phenomenalism, pp. 292 ft.) But Kant so strongly resists this empiricist tendency, so immediately makes the question of Wahrnehmung a question of a Wahrnehmungsurteile, and Prauss follows Kant so closdy in his usurpation of the given by this complicated Verscheinungs/unktion, that it is difficult then to describe the non-formal (for Kant always : non-subjective) aspects of these judgments, their contents as informed by the "object" (even if the object itself = X). Prauss shows the possibility for a correctly Kantian transcendental analysis of a merely subjective , determined-as-undetermined consciousness in these "es scheint... Urteile" (not at all a small task), but neither he nor Kant can explain those aspects of Erscheinung's "seemings" (other than the transcendentally conditioned aspects) that make even a "subjective " recognition of a this-seems (as opposed to a that-seems) in a problematically invoked Er/ahrungsurteil possible. (Especially in contrast to the overwhelming importance of this transcendental-objective aspect of the seeming problem in the Platonic enterprise Prauss is always eager to contrast with Kant's; see especially pp. 58-102.) Thus, Prauss can claim, as a conclusion to his analysis of the intertwined relation of Wahrnehmungsand Er]ahrungsurteile, "daran kommt nicht anders zum Ausdruck, als die immer schon a priori geleistete Einheit von Anschauung und Begriff, Sinnlichkeit und Verstand, als die Einheit der Subjektivit~it" (p. 321). But it is still too easy to add that it is only the unity of subjectivity that is affected, a well-known Kantian problem that not only left philosophy open to the Hegelian critique, but one which has also engendered no end of "analytic" epistemologies heavily indebted to Kant's work, but continually foundering on its difficulties . Prauss' book is a more than welcome initial attempt to clear the air on Kant's position and, by so doing, itself represents a noteworthy discussion of the problem of "appearance," well worth much attention and study. ROBERTB. PIPPIN Pennsylvania State University Kant as Philosophical Anthropologist. By Frederick P. Van De Pitte. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971) Kant's Principle o/Personality. By Hardy E. Jones. (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1971) Kant et le Probl~me du Mal. By Olivier Reboul. (Montreal: Les Presses de L'Universit6 de Montr6al) The Notion o/Form in Kant's Critique o] Aesthetic Judgment. By Theodore E. Uehling, Jr. (The Hague: Mouton, 1971) Immanuel Kant: Brie/wechsel. Edited by Otto SchSndSrfer. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1972) I turn first to Van De Pitte's monograph, Kant as Philosophical Anthropologist, because its author views the whole of Kant's philosophy from a novel point of view that contributes notably to our understanding of that philosophy. The core of the argument is that Kant's critical philosophy is his "fully developed conception of man and [of] man's place in reality" (5 f.); that "the three Critiques constitute the a priori framework which serves as basis and guaranty of adequacy" of a philosophical anthropology (6). 406 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Kant's acceptance of Newtonian mechanics and the impact this had upon his thinking are, of course, well known. Kant himself said in the Preface to B that in the first Critique he was attempting to apply the Newtonian method to problems of metaphysics. But it is not so well known that, even as early as I757, Kant was interested in anthropological problems . And after he had read Rousseau (1762), he wrote: "Rousseau set me right.... I am learning to honor men." From then on, so Van De Pitte argues, "science and speculative knowledge could...