Book Reviews Ethics and Practical Reason Edited by Garrett Cullity and Berys Gaut Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. viii + 421. ISBN 0–19–8233669–7 £35.00 One of the most pressing problems in contemporary moral theory is that of providing a correct account of the relationship between an agent's having a normative reason to act (what she ought to do) and an agent's being motivated to act (what she actually does). Broadly speaking, there are three rival accounts of this relationship on offer. Neo-Humeans (e.g. Michael Smith, Stephen Darwall, Bernard Williams) argue that an agent has a normative reason to act if and only if so doing would satisfy some desire of the agent; consequently, their task is to show that there is an internal relation between an agent's having a normative reason to act and an agent's having a desire to act. Kantians (e.g. Christine Korsgaard, Thomas Nagel) argue that any agent who has a normative reason to act, and who is practically rational (i.e. not suffering from some debilitating form of practical irrationality, such as weakness of will or depression), will act; consequently, their task is to show that normative reasons always have overriding authority and that it is always irrational not to act upon them. Neo-A ristotelians (e.g. John McDowell, Philippa Foot, David Brink) argue that normative reasons for action are derived from facts about human well-being, and that an agent will be motivated to act provided that she has been habituated into having desires, guided by reason, to act for her own well-being; consequently, their task is to show how normative reasons can be derived from facts about human well-being and whether it is always in an agent's best interest to act morally. A ll of the thirteen original essays in this collection, the majority of which were presented at the E thics and Practical R eason Conference held by the Department of Moral Philosophy at the University of St A ndrews in March 1995, are devoted to some aspect of the problem of practical reason, and most of them side with one of the three accounts described above. James Dreier defends the neo-Humean position that 'the only ultimate sort of reasons are instrumental reasons' (p. 96), although he does so by arguing that fellow neo-Humeans are wrong to claim that there are no categorical imperatives, since there is one categorical imperative, namely, the means/end principle of instrumental reason: 'If you desire to ¥, and believe that by ø-ing you will ¥, then you ought to ø' (p. 93) . His defence of the categorical nature of this principle is similar both to Peter Railton's argument that there cannot be a purely hypothe tical account of why we must conform to certain forms of practical reason, and to David Velleman's argument (against David Gauthier) that our reasons for favour ing certain principles of practical reasoning over others cannot themselves be practical. Meanwhile Michael Smith argues, with his customary optimism, that the neo-Humean dispositional theory of value can provide a perfectly satisfactory account of human freedom and responsibility. International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol. 7 (1), 119–135 © Routledge 1999 0967–2559 Christine Korsgaard argues against Dreier and other neo-Humeans that they are unable to provide an account of the normativity of the instrumental principle: 'if you hold that the instrumental principle is the only principle of practical rationality, you cannot also hold that desiring something is a reason for pursuing it' (p. 223) . Since the neo-Humean position rules out the possibility of practical reason determining which ends ought to be pursued, it follows that an agent's ends are wholly determined by her desires. However, this means that the instrumental principle must be reduced to something like: If you desire to ¥, and believe that by ø-ing you will ¥, then you are going to ø. The principle cannot advocate that one ought to ø on the basis of having a desire to ¥, since this would be to derive an ought from an is. The only way to avoid this error, and to derive a reason for acting from the principle, is to construe it as follows: If you have reason to ¥, and believe that by ø-ing you will ¥, then you have reason to ø. But this means that neo-H umeanism must be rejected, and that the instrumental principle must be supplemented by another principle of practical reason, one that determines which ends ought to be pursued. Korsgaard ultimately argues that the principle of practical reason required to support the normativity of the instrumental principle is that 'the adopt ion of an end is conceived as the person's own free act' (p. 234). Korsgaard's Kantian constructivism – the thesis that an action is good insofar as it is the object of free rational choice – is in turn attacked by Berys Gaut in an essay which seeks to undermine key elements of Kantian ethics in favour of a neoAristotelian position. Gaut  rst undermines the hoary article of faith that the only thing which is good without quali cation is a good will (something which would have us believe that there is nothing admirable in a clever thief ), advocating in its stead a plurality of unconditional goods. He then argues that Kantian constructivism gets the relationship between value and rationality backwards: 'The proper criterion for being rational here is the ability to recognise what it is good to do' (p. 178), as opposed to its being good to do whatever it is rational to do. Gaut argues that it is a mistake to identify goodness with being the object of free rational choice, since the notion of goodness is teleological and 'for living beings the teleology is biologically categorised, linked to what ful ls the needs or advances the interests of a living being – and not all living beings are rational (p. 178) . Joseph Raz, in an essay entitled 'The Amoralist' which does not quite live up to the promise of its title, also criticizes the Kantian thesis that persons are to be valued in themselves tout court, as opposed to being valued in themselves in virtue of their possessing various natural qualities, while both David Brink and Jay Wallace argue against the Kantian thesis that impartial moral obligations should always have overriding authority. Finally Robert Audi places a plague on both the neo-Humean and Kantian houses by undermining all attempts to  nd an internal relation between an agent's having a normative reason to act and her being motivated to act. A lthough none of the three rival accounts emerges as the victor, each of these essays, along with those by Terence Irwin, John Skorupski and Garrett Cullity, makes a signi cant contribution to the debate over practical reason. Cullity and Gaut are to be congratulated for putting together an extremely valuable collection. Duke University James Edwin Mahon I N T E R N A T I O N A L J O U R N A L O F P H I L O SO P H I CA L ST U D I E S 120 Marx: Justice and Dialectic By James D aly Greenwich Exchange, 1996. Pp. xiii + 144. ISBN l–871551–28–5. £7.95 (pbk). Although appearing in a series called Philosophy Guides, this work is in many respects as far from an introductory treatment of Marx's thought as one could imagine. Not only is it a substantial contribution to recent debates about the role of justice in Marx's thought, but it also broadens the scope of those debates markedly by setting Marx's thought in the context of the history of philosophy. One way of understanding Daly's distinctive approach is to see it as bringing together and advancing two recent trends in Marx interpretation. One is the recent discussion of Marx's idea of justice (or his critique of 'justice') in analytical philosophy; the other is the increasing recognition of Marx's debt to Aristotle. Daly argues for a broader historical approach to thinking about Marx on justice than has been taken to date. Whilst the Aristotelianism of Marx has been demonstrated by people like Scott Meikle and George McCarthy (and Allen Wood for everything but ethics/politics), until now no attempt has been made to look beyond Aristotle himself. This work rightly stresses the fact that Marx's debt to Aristotle places his thought in relation not just to that of Aristotle, but to the A ristotelian tradition in general. Whilst its comparisons of Marx's thought to that of the natural law tradition might initially appear strange, it has good grounds and is well argued with a mastery of both that verges on being intimidating in its succinctness. As well as relating Marx's thought to Aristotle's followers, Daly also compares Marx to Aristotle's teacher Plato, again bringing connections to light which have to date been generally missed or neglected. In adopting an historical, rather than purely analytical, approach to Marx's thought, Daly stresses Marx's rejection of forms of thinking characteristic of modernity; in particular, Marx's rejection of both sides of the false opposition of Kantianism and utilitarianism, and their attempted conjunction by R awls. In arguing for the strong af nities of Marx's approach to issues of justice with that of the natural law tradition (broadly conceived to include Plato, A ristotle, the Stoics and Aquinas), and its strong contrast with that of the modern natural right tradition, Daly brings out the historical background to Marx's concept of dialectic. Unlike Kolakowski's treatment of this background, which suffers from a lack of completeness and absence of a sympathetic understanding, Daly's rich knowledge demonstrates that Marx's rejection of Hegel's idealism brings him back to older traditions of dialectical thought which were critical in nature rather than mysti catory and justi catory as in H egel's thought . Instead of presenting Marx as somehow combining German Idealism and English/French materialism, as most commentators do, D aly argues that Marx rejected both by developing a materialist conception of history which overcame the idealism/materialism split characteristic of modern philosophy. Marx's materialism, thus understood, is not materialist in the sense of reducing things to atoms colliding in the void, but rather anti-reductionist in seeing things, including human beings, in basically Aristotelian terms as possessing a nature or essence whose potential can be realized or thwarted in speci c societies to varying degrees. It is this emphasis on human nature as providing the critical standard by which all societies may be judged which is the means to avoiding the aporia of relativism. Whilst 'moralities' emerge from societies and are laden with the power relationships of their origin, such an Aristotelian conception of the good based in an understanding of human nature as transcending any particular society enables Marx both to reject modern (bourgeois) accounts B O O K R E V I E W S 121 of the content of justice and to articulate a different conception without himself falling into the trap of relativizing his own conception to a particular society. Such a view of justice goes against any view of Marx as holding to a vulgar progressivist, or Plekhanovite, view of history. There is no unilinear ascent from the past to the present, but rather an ever open potential within human beings for shaping social relations into forms which are more adequate to human nature. This transhistorical idea of justice is thus not something which  oats free of the world of nature, alone in a realm of it own; rather it is grounded in our most basic needs and concerns as human beings, albeit distorted by class. One topic which perhaps needs explication at greater length is the connection between Marx's use of the concept of human nature and his critique of H egel. It is unclear to me to what extent Marx can both validly reject class-distorted conceptions of human nature and claim a special status for his (i.e. the proletariat's) conception. Rousseau seems to have been aware that in criticizing Hobbes and Locke for referring to 'natural man' yet describing '(un)social man', objections of the same form could be cast back at him. It seems to me that a similar problem reproduces itself in any attempt to assimilate Marx's materialist conception of history to an Aristotelian position in ethics. If Marx, following Feuerbach, is going to reject Hegel on the grounds that his philosophy makes use of abstractions invalidly generalized from empirical reality, then his position, as interpreted by Daly, is surely open to a similar objection: that Marx's concept of human nature is itself an abstraction of the kind he sought to avoid. The seemingly paradoxical nature of the proletariat as being both a particular class within capitalism and the universal class is the key to Daly's answer to such objections. However, this idea requires to be spelled out in greater detail. The realism of Daly's position with respect to essences needs a more substantial defence in this context; but this is really a minor caveat, given that Marx himself never explained his epistemological commitments in the depth that is necessary. University of Ulster Colin M. Harper L e monolinguism e de l'autre ou la prothèse d'origine By Jacques D errida Galilée, 1996. Pp. 137. ISBN 2–7 186–0474–3. 140 f. Derrida  rst read a shorter and somewhat different version of Monolinguism e at the conference organized by Edouard Glissant and David Wills (23–5 April 1992) at the Louisiana State University, under the title: 'Echoes from Elsewhere/Renvoi d'ailleurs'. To de ne the status and the purpose of the text, we could use classical and apparently evident criteria, and assign the text a place between the autobiographical genre and a kind of phenomenological description of the general conditions of constitution of the ego. Taking his own case as an illustration of a general re ection on the transcendental conditions of autobiography, Jacques Derrida seems to use this theoretical consideration as a pretext for an autobiographical narration. But the reverse is also true. This autobiographical report, in so far as it is exemplary, offers itself as an allegory of the relation of man to language in general. This reversibility is the effect of a complicated structure which Derrida names 'exemplarité de remarque', and which renders those distinctions inappropriate. As Derrida reminds us in the epilogue: 'Ce que j'ébauche ici, ce n'est surtout pas le commencement d'une esquisse d'autobiographie ou I N T E R N A T I O N A L J O U R N A L O F P H I L O SO P H I CA L ST U D I E S 122 d'anamnèse, pas même un timide essai de Bildungsrom an intellectuel. Plutôt que de l'exposition de moi, ce serait l'exposé de ce qui aura fait obstacle, pour moi, à cette auto-exposition. De ce qui m'aura exposé, donc, à cet obstacle, et jeté contre lui' (p. 131). A ll things considered, the main purpose of this text is a rigorous exposition, a scrupulous report of a complication which hinders any plain and peaceful self-reference and self-exhibition – whether in the empirical mode of an autobiographical account of an individual and contingent curriculum or in that of a transcendental or ontological description of a universal structure and genesis of the ego (Husserl) or of the ipse (Heidegger). And this complication has something to do with that relation to language which Derrida calls 'monolinguism'. Yet, even if it renders inadequate the distinction between reference to an empirical 'I' situated and determined historically, geographically, sociologically, etc., and reference to a universal structure of subjectivity, this distinction remains nonetheless a necessary – but not suf cient – condition to understand the uncanny (unheimlich) logic of this exhibition (D arstellung), of this demonstration (taken both in its logical and its political sense). A s it is the case for everything Derrida has written so far, this demonstration is carried out and forth by the movement of a strange 'retro-hetero-reference' (sic) to something which is neither transcendent nor immanent – but elsewhere. This movement is, as such, an exaggeration and a complication of the Rückbez iehung characteristic of Husserl's transcendental phenomenology (see Ideen . . . I, § 65) . If, on the one hand, 'tout [ce qui a interessé J. Derrida] n'a pas pu ne pas procéder de cette étrange référence à un "ailleurs" dont le lieu et la langue [lui] étaient à [lui-même] inconnus ou interdits' (p. 131) , on the other hand, nothing could be explained without a 'judéofranco-maghrébine' genealogy (p. 133). This twisted reference folds up and again marks and remarks a universal structure on the singular body of a witness. Such is the reality itself of this hyperphenomenology. Such is the thing of this phenomenologist struck by an 'hyperbolite incurable' (p. 81), who carries phenomenological uprightness (honesty) with respect to this thing and body up to the point of exaggeration, of presumptuousness of seeing itself as it is and telling himself as it sees himself – i.e. as exemplary. This self-exposition takes the form of a 'demonstration' and one must understand this word as denoting not only a logical inference, but also the kind of political event in which one shows one's force and one's grievance. The demonstrandum is a liminary statement: I speak only one language, and it is not mine ('Je n'ai qu'une langue, ce n'est pas la mienne' (p. 13)). This statement is put forward not exactly as an assum ption, not even as a supposition, but rather as a  ction. And it is, on the spot, generalized and increased into the form of a conjunction of two universal propositions: 'On ne parle jamais qu'une seule langue – ou plutôt un seul idiome' and 'O n ne parle jamais une seule langue – ou plutôt il n'y a pas d'idiome pur' (p. 23) . This statement seems obviously contradictory, from a logical and from a pragmatic point of view (p. 15) , yet its generalization introduces us into the edge of the argument ('le nerf de l'argumentation'): the exemplariness of a testimony. This structure of exemplariness represents the heart of Derrida's argument. As we know (at least since Hume's Enquiry Concerning Hum an Understanding, Section X, On Miracles), the credibility of a testimony testifying to such a case of monolinguism presupposes the possibility of what is testi ed; and, vice versa, the veri cation of such a possibility implies the eventual exhibition of an example. It implies the event of a case of 'monoliguisme de l'autre'. For Derrida these are two different ways of circumscribing the same circle. One is the Socratic-Platonic way, in which the intuition or the de nition of the essence must precede the mention of any example. A nd the other is the 'A ristotelian' way, B O O K R E V I E W S 123 on the authority of which Derrida seems to act, and following which the intuition of a case precedes, conditions (as p r o ¢ t e r o n p r o z h ' m a V ) and guides the clearing out and the deciphering of any universal structure (p. 27). Yet an example (a 'case') imposes itself on Derrida's attention, that of a little (French) Algerian Jew arrived in France at the age of 19, who has been forced into the position of testifying (as under coercion) to an uncanny monolinguism. It is the double bind of a double ban , so to speak: the  rst is a tacit interdiction concerning the use and the learning of the neighbour's and autochton's languages (Arabic and Berber), and second is the impossibility of appropriation of and self-identi cation with the dominant and colonial language. Derrida gives two reasons of this impossibility: for French-A lgerians in general, France was the 'métropole', and the French language was the language spoken outre-mer; but more accurately, French Jews were new, vulnerable and exposed citizens ('assimilated' in October 1870 and deprived of French citizenship in October 1940, they were re-assimilated (!) in 1943). From a psycho-pathological point of view, one could consider Derrida's as an exceptional 'case' of identity trouble. But it is also – and rather – a cultural, sociological and political one. Derrida endeavours to show that this exception is exemplary of all singular situations – except for the suffering which falls to each singular case. Exemplariness means that it reveals, indicates, and gives to read 'plus à vif et mieux que d'autres' (p. 41) the main features of a universal structure of 'linguistical solipsism'. Derrida's case will have been sui generis and more exemplary than any other. This is the incredible thing, and thus the thing one can only believe. Thus are displayed the threads – or the plot – of this strange demonstration, which give it its irrepressible course and its necessity. By enforcing and simplifying its didactic scheme, we could obtain the following logical sequence: (1) assumption of an hypothesis determining what must be the choice of a good example (Chapter 3), (2) mention of the example, assimilated to a subpoena of witness (Chapter 4), (3) explication of the status and the full – i.e. political – significance of this example (Chapters 5–6), (5) exposition and report of this example structured as a story and its inscription into the context of 'generality circles' (p. 71) (French-Algerian in the broad sense of the term, and French-Algerian Jews), (Chapters 6–7), (6) corroboration of the possibility of a monolinguism without any own language, without any mother tongue and corroboration of the fact that this testi ed possibility is revealing of a universal structure concerning every linguistical situation (Chapters 7–8). But such enforcement and simpli cation would put aside what is essential in this essay, i.e. its writing that must be distinguished more than ever from any literary or rhetorical concept of 'style' – if we want to read Derrida. Such assimilation would only follow in the footsteps of – or forestall – the words of the Attorney General of sound philosophy, who threatens on p. 18: "Si vous continuez, on vous mettra dans un département de rhétorique ou de littérature'. Writing corresponds by no means to what a purist would understand by bon goo t, i.e. grammatical and stylistic correctness. This term denotes the same thing as that of 'uncanny reference'. A nd as the uncanny reference to one's language, it gives this demonstration its purpose and shape. This writing gives way (and voice) to a rigorous and almost ascetic exercise of responsibility. A ccording to D errida, responsibility is the scrupulous obedience to a more imperative and 'secret rule' (p. 79) than what one usually understands by grammatical correctness, than what one understands as understanding and speaking good French and following sound logic. Writing as 'mode d'appropriation aimante et désespérée de la langue' (p. 59), as 'inscription de soi dans la langue défendue' (p. 60), refers consequently I N T E R N A T I O N A L J O U R N A L O F P H I L O SO P H I CA L ST U D I E S 124 to a political strategy and to a certain political culture concerning language. As any politics, it is against something. In this case, against a certain complicity between philosophical and political attitudes with regard to language. Language is supposed to be governed by certain rules according to which one can determine the conditions of communicability. Derrida detects behind those apparently descriptive statements a series of performative speech acts. Any attempt to objectivize language – to dominate it theoretically and practically – is the symptom of a compulsion and a phantasm. In his own way, Derrida is to a certain extent motivated by this compulsion. For writing in the Derridian sense intends that 'quelque chose arrive à cette langue', that something happens to it, affects it so intimately that it be no more 'en position de protester sans devoir protester du même coup contre sa propre émanation . . . qu'elle en vienne à jouir comme d'elle-même, comme l'Un qui se retourne, qui s'en retourne chez lui, au moment où un hôte incompréhensible, un arrivant sans origine assignable la ferait arriver à lui, ladite langue, l'obligeant alors à parler, elle-même, la langue, dans sa langue, autrement. Parler toute seule. Mais pour lui et selon lui, gardant en son corps, elle, l'archive ineffaçable de cet événement' (p. 85). Deconstructionist writing appears as the hyperphenom enology of this messianism , of this 'structure immanente de promesse ou de désir', of this 'attente sans horizon d'attente [qui] informe toute parole' (p. 42) . It is also described as a structure of alienation without alienation (sic), without any former appropriation and propriety. The idea of an appropriateness concerning the use of language is the upper structure of this substructure. It institutes the 'phénomène du s'entendre-parler pour vouloir-dire', the 'phénomène comme phantasme' (p. 48). It fosters and deters any desire of mastery – it exacerbates it. The feat of strength of any 'master' consists in leading one to believe that he does have a language, that he does know what speaking means and consequently in what kind of discourse thought can be properly expressed, in presenting himself as the beholder and defender of a cultural and linguistic identity. We could  nd this archiperformative speech act at the groundless ground of every institution and authority. Taken in this sense, Derridian writing has a testimonial and exemplary dimension. And Derrida himself appears as the 'héros-martyr-pionnier-législateurhors-la-loi' (sic) of this strange law and even as an ironical prophet carried along by his own prophecy (p. 61). For this structure is the same as that which Derrida names 'exemplarité de re-marque' – as opposed to the instantiation of an example in a series. Derrida notices (p. 49) that even in its classical treatment, this problem is already unfathomable. But it receives here an additional condition ('un pli supplémentaire') so that it becomes inappropriate for any self-identi cation or self-glori cation. This experience of an hospitable and jealous language is the quasitranscendental condition of articulation between universality and singularity ('la singularité exemplaire ou témoignante de existence martyrisée') (p. 50). Language is not a habit or an habitus among others, or something one could peacefully inhabit; it makes of who wants to have it its 'host' and 'hostage'. This entails a certain number of complications and consequences not only with regard to autobiographical writing, but also with respect to metalogical pretensions of philosophical or theological discourse. A pparently, all philosophers of language, especially in the analytical tradition, would accept this thesis. We  nd both arguments in Wittgenstein. It is less evident that they would accept the hypothesis that this archi-determining relation to language should be of a solipsistic kind. Is it not another way of reintroducing the mythology of a 'private language'? In my view, this objection stands only as far as we continue to consider philosophy and logical B O O K R E V I E W S 125 clarity in philosophy with what phenomenology calls a natural attitude. For the phenomenological tradition, this hypothesis is not absurd. Even in Husserl's phenomenology, there is that requirement of a 'transcendental logos' which, according to the 'natural attitude' must appear, inevitably, as pure nonsense. And from the genetic and constitutive point of view, the intersubjective habitus of a language in general is a transcendental condition of the inhabiting of a common world – which in the  rst stage is not the 'universe' of science. But Husserl's phenomenology is carried along by the movement of the Rückbez iehung and forced to take into account the historical determining conditions of this constitution. This is how Husserl is led, in his later works, to the question of historical inscription and accomplishment of the general performances (L eistungen) of transcendental subjectivity, and thus, to that of the singular and historical language in which and with which the ego breaks from its solipsistic sphere to come to the light of communication. Derrida is in a way a turbulent son of this tradition. Like Husserl and Descartes, he assumes and suffers from the same 'hyperbolite'. Like them, he is convinced that there is a philosophical courage which consists in pushing rationality to the 'point de folie et de mort' which represents the highest danger for philosophy and reason (cf. the discussion with Fouccault concerning D escartes's 'argument de la folie', in 1963) . For this reason, Derrida's thought can be described as hyperphenomenological. Université de Caen, France Carlos L obo Equality in Com m unity: Sexual Equality in the Writings of William T hompson and A nna D oyle W heeler By D olores Dooley Cork University Press, 1996. Pp. 448. ISBN 1–85918–004–3 (hbk), 1–85918–005–1 (pbk) . £40.00. This scholarly and impressive book, which brings together biographical, historical and philosophical themes, is an attempt to render the invisible visible. Dolores Dooley begins with a question: why is William Thompson's A ppeal not included in the canon of feminist writings? Published in 1825, between Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Wom an (1792) and John Stuart Mill's Subjection of Wom en (1869), the A ppeal is a radical text which, Dooley notes, presents the 'rudiments of a socialist feminist position' (p. xiii). It covers themes which were important in its day, and which remain central to feminist thinking now. Indeed, its radicalism anticipates many strands of modern feminist thinking and, in this sense, it is more 'advanced' than either Mill's Subjection or Wollstonecraft's Vindication . Yet the book has been largely ignored by feminists, who move seamlessly from Wollstonecraft to Mill, giving no hint of the existence of anything in between. Dooley's  rst task, therefore, is to explain this puzzle and to defend the A ppeal as worthy of a place in the canon. However, this is not the only form of invisibility which requires explanation. Nested within the invisibility of the A ppeal itself are two further exemplars of invisibility: the invisibility of Thompson's intellectual and life partner, Anna Doyle Wheeler, and the invisibility of women generally in nineteenth-century political life and letters. Dooley opens her book with two chapters documenting the lives of William Thompson and A nna Doyle Wheeler. Her aim here is not simply to I N T E R N A T I O N A L J O U R N A L O F P H I L O SO P H I CA L ST U D I E S 126 provide an historical context for the A ppeal, but also to justify the contention that Wheeler was more than simply a muse to Thompson. Rather, she made a distinctive contribution to the A ppeal and to the realization of its political aims via her emphasis on 'emotional negotiation' and her practical attempts to liaise between the Owenites in Britain and the Four ierists and Saint-Simonians in France. Philosophically, she shared Thompson's commitment to the greatest happiness principle, but she also saw the practical necessity of persuading people to focus on that 'unifying' aim in spite of their smaller disagreements. Her emotional negotiation work was therefore both a contribution to the political project and a warning against excessive abstraction in philosophy. Moreover, the need to retrieve the story of Anna Doyle Wheeler is a speci c case of the more general need to render nineteenth-century women visible. Thus, the A ppeal draws attention to the various ways in which women are 'written out' of political life, and it challenges those who do this to justify their stance and show how it can be consistent with their wider philosophical theories. Chief amongst the targets of the A ppeal is James Mill, whose Essay on Government insisted: 'One thing is pretty clear, that all those individuals whose interests are indisputably included in those of other individuals may be struck off without inconvenience' (as quoted, p. 127). This is what Dooley refers to as a case of 'pseudo-inclusion'. Mill supposes that women are included in his political theory because he supposes that women share an identity of interests with their husbands or fathers. However, the identity of interests thesis is a  ction, and the exclusion of women to which it leads is a betrayal of utilitarianism itself. As Dooley amply demonstrates, the gauntlet which is cast down by the A ppeal is one which calls upon utilitarians to take seriously their own commitment to the pursuit of happiness and to acknowledge that that project requires the inclusion of women in political life. She notes: 'it is a compelling part of the argument of the A ppeal that by continuing to exclude women from liberty, equality, and access to all the means to choose their happiness, men were failing to see clearly their own possibilities for happiness' (p. 136) . The very principle of utility which informed James Mill's writing was also, and at the same time, a principle which should led him to endorse the extension of the rights of man to woman. There is, however, a twist in the tail of this argument. Notoriously, truth and utility do not always combine harmoniously, and there can therefore be cases in which the promotion of the greatest happiness requires a certain economy with the truth. Dooley is alert to this dif culty, and she invokes it both as a partial explanation for the invisibility of the A ppeal and as a partial explanation for the exclusion of women in nineteenth-century utilitarian thinking. Thus she notes that it was 'politically inexpedient for co-operators to adopt wholeheartedly the critiques of the A ppeal' (p. 138), and singles out Jeremy Bentham as someone who should, in consistency, have been far more vociferous than he was in response to Mill's Essay. She speculates that 'Bentham may have decided to maintain some unity among the circle of Political Radicals, to focus on expanding the suffrage for men but to allow the extension to women to wait – for almost another century' (p. 133). Ironically, the principle of utility could be used in more than one way: it certainly exposed the illegitimacy of refusing political and legal rights to women, but it could also be deployed to condone political quiescence in the face of injustice. It was also a signi cant factor in the neglect of the A ppeal itself, which was too radical for the political moment at which it appeared. Throughout the book Dooley shows care in locating the diverse sites of invisibility, and sensitivity in discussing the reasons for it. Her chapter on 'Sites of Oppression' is a strikingly nuanced account of the multiple ways in which B O O K R E V I E W S 127 nineteenth-century women might suffer oppression, and Dooley is at pains to point out that the A ppeal itself does not adopt a simple model of oppression according to which 'men  ourish and women languish' (p. 181). On the contrary, it is a deep and dif cult fact that women are often rendered incapable of recognizing their own oppression, and it is an equally troubling fact that men too fail to realize how much they lose by having, as a wife, a more or less willing slave. It is not only the A ppeal and the political oppression of women which are invisible, but also the psychic damage which is done to both men and women by political structures which perpetuate inequality and deny liberty to one half of the human race. Dooley's book constitutes a very signi cant contribution to feminist history, to intellectual biography, and to moral and political philosophy. William Thompson's A ppeal is set in its historical context, and it is shown how that context in uenced the reception of allegedly 'universal' philosophical arguments. What we must conclude is that philosophical arguments do not persuade merely in virtue of being true, and that what constitutes the canon is dictated as much by fortune and political convenience as by argumentative power. This conclusion is an important one for feminist theory in particular, and also for moral and political philosophy generally. Feminists, historians and philosophers all have reason to be grateful to Dolores Dooley for retrieving an important work which has for too long been consigned to the dustbin of history. University of York Susan Mendus Prem ises: Essays on Philosophy and L iterature from K ant to Celan By Werner Hamacher, translated by Peter Fenves Cambridge, MA: H arvard University Press, 1996. Pp. 393. ISBN 0–674–70073–2. £36.50. It is dif cult to write on philosophy and literature without being thick or simple. This collection of essays by Werner Hamacher does not prove otherwise. Since Hegel vowed to make philosophy speak German and, in spite of that, was translated into many languages – to the universal detriment of philosophy, if not of German – there have been regular recurrences of the thick disease, some (Heidegger) nearly as rampant as Hegel in his high season, others (Hamacher, one might hope) less infectious if no less . . . thick. While the subtitle's reference to Kant and Celan promises well to avoid Teutonic barbarism, Hamacher really begins with Hegel, from which he goes back to Kant, and underwrites the whole with references to Fichte and Heidegger wherever Hegel is sublated. It is extremely dif cult for one who does not share his tailors to come to an understanding of the man. I am not sure, however, that this is a problem, or even a possibility, on Hamacher's account. Consider: 'Authentic interpretation' makes a demand – it is imperative – on every text, whether this text be nature or the world, and the demand is: act in language, or in speech, so that there could be a homogeneous continuum of understanding, comprehension, and agreement – and thus a universal language. It demands that an interpretation should be possible. Since, however, it is merely the imperative of this interpretation, it also contains the following I N T E R N A T I O N A L J O U R N A L O F P H I L O SO P H I CA L ST U D I E S 128 concession: such an interpretation has not yet come into being, and under the conditions of  nitude it never can and never will. (p. 89) This will not, then, have been a review of Premises. I am not sure what we should make of a book which begins (as many in our overly epistemological age might) 'Understanding is in want of understanding', but then goes on to explicate its opening thus: That understanding is in want of understanding – a proposition to be read as the principle of understanding, as an announcement or summation, as a demand or complaint – will not have said anything about understanding unless it itself is understood, and unless it is understood that this proposition speaks also of the impossibility of understanding and thus the impossibility of this very proposition. (p. 1) Perhaps there is something here which I do not understand; but even to phrase this possibility requires the grammatically induced presumptions that there is a subject, an object and a relation (or misrelation), rather than that reading is 'sheer relation without relata' (p. 135) . Perhaps my view of this book is false where it is not blank, but such a complaint should be questioned (if, in fact, it can even be raised), for hermeneutics 'cannot construct a theory of truth as correspondence but must set out the conditions of possibility for, the genesis of, and the imperative demand for such a truth. . . . A n interpretation can be said to correspond to the interpretandum or not to do so only if this interpretandum has a reality independent of every possible interpretation' (p. 137). This condition is known not to hold. The conditions for the possibility of such a demand could not be evaluated should any hermeneutic ever supply them, for to be able to evaluate the truth-value of those conditions would always already have presumed an answer to a question which arises after the question which hermeneutics has only now opened is answered. The question of truth has become a Capuchin; it is permanently begging. Perhaps, on the other hand, this book is meant as the reductio ad absurdum of post-Kantian G erman philosophy; in that case, everything is in order. No doubt I have exposed myself. It is not only poetry which no longer imposes itself, but exposes itself (pp. 43, 379) . But since interpretation just is exposition, Professor Hamacher will not be displeased – or even disagree with my exposition. For truth 'is not "correctness" – for it does not consist in the correspondence between given entities – and hermeneutics is not the "art of correctly understanding another's discourse", as Schleiermacher de nes it. Hermeneutics is the releasing, the setting free, of "another's discourse", and being itself discourse in its alteration, it is anaand allo-hermeneutics' (p. 142, Hamacher's italic). That this undecidable question, this dilemma – this quaking between incapacity and absurdity – should be the body of my review is a mimesis of the deep structure of modern and post-modern philosophy of literature. Where for Kant the noumenal began as a theoretical limit, in the movement of German philosophy through Nietzsche, for whom designation phenomenalizes individual differences into something shown. It generalizes its communication in accordance with an economy of representability that is foreign to the unconditionally individual. The B O O K R E V I E W S 129 'phenomenalism and perspectivism' of 'communicative signs' – of the 'markings of the herd' – rest on the systematic restriction of difference and on a morphologizing of what has neither shape nor self, neither substance nor subject. Consciousness, even the most 'individual' is a mask (p. 175, quot ing Neitzsche) the individual, will, life, death, everything becomes a thing in itself. 'This "phenomenalism" of consciousness and language is irreducible' (p. 175); the Capuchin truth makes its rounds in cities of nominalist preachers exchanging greetings of mutual anathema. Thankfully, they are mutually meaningless as well. Knowledge is not, interpretation is not of, and the question of truth is merely an echo of grammatical form re ecting off the cave-wall of language, beyond which we can not even imagine. It is possible that where Professor Hamacher wants to go in writing, and where he wishes us to go in reading his book, is a good place, the right place, the place where we in fact are though we do not recognize it, for that philosophy – as poetry – exposes and constructs its understanding even as it seeks to understand is undeniable. But the conditioned freedom of our knowledge and willing, writing and interpreting is not 'helpless' (p. 295), and it does not require us to draw the conclusion that since 'it is no longer clear what is absent, what is lost, and what has missed the mark, then all talk of absence, losing and missing the mark is not only hypothe tical, it misses the mark in principle' (p. 296) – or even agree with the premises. But even if all that he exposes in those sentences is so – whatever that could mean – his writing is the wrong writing to take us to the place of mutual understanding between poetry and philosophy, or to show the place to us. It is too philosophical, not poetic enough; it suffers from the form of philosophy – and German philosophy in particular – rather than suffering the shaping of poetry. The fact that it is a collection of disparate essays emphasizes this point , for while the essays are thematically linked (linked in the way of philosophy), they were not meant each part for the other; they are not poetically self-conforming or lyrically formed. I would agree that the place where philosophy and literature meet is a point of genuine uni cation; 'critique [should] itself be the poetry that it [seeks] to analyze; poetry [should] be the prose of thought' (p. 228). That is not accomplished here, nor is it even under way (cf. p. 229) ; it is announced as a desideratum, and spoken of as an abandoned child. University of Nebraska–Kearney Gene Fendt Brute Science: Dilemm as of A nimal Experimentation By H ugh LaFollette and Niall Shanks Routledge, 1996. Pp. 286. ISBN 0–415–13113–8 (hbk) . £45.00. ISBN 0–415–13114–6 (pbk) . £13.99. There are three stages in the testing of new clinical drugs (and vaccines). At  rst research is done in the laboratory using computers, test-tube experiments, and the like. Drugs that pass this stage are tested on animals, and those which are successful here are then taken to clinical trials with human volunteers. It follows that if the animal stage is to be bypassed, then alternatives to animal testing must be found. I N T E R N A T I O N A L J O U R N A L O F P H I L O SO P H I CA L ST U D I E S 130 However, if the present three-stage experimental system is perfectly adequate, then why should we search for an alternative? The short answer to this question is that it would prevent animal suffering and death, both of which occur on a vast scale in the interests of medical research. The moral issue of animal testing has long seemed an intractable one. Those who defend the practice use the following range of arguments: (a) the argument from human welfare; (b) the argument from the experimental necessity of using animals; (c) the argument from the superior status of humans; (d) the argument from the strictness of regulatory procedures; (e) the argument from legal obligations; (f) the argument from the exclusivity of rights; and (g) the argument from human participation. Those who oppose animal testing use the following range of arguments: (a) the argument from intolerable cruelty; (b) the argument against the experimental necessity claim; (c) the argument from triviality; (d) the argument against the success claims of the researchers; (e) the argument from grievous experimental error; (f) the argument from dissimilarities between humans and animals; (g) the argument from alternative techniques; (h) the argument from pharmaceutical excess; (i) the argument from animals' equal capacity for suffering; (j) the argument from animal rights. In Brute Science, LaFollette and Shanks devote some two hundred pages to one segment of this debate, that concerning the scienti c legitimacy of animal experimentation. This is because 'there are scienti c questions about the validity of animal experimentation that both sides of this debate should consider seriously' (pp. vii, viii). In particular, they maintain, 'Doubts about the grand claims made for animal experimentation emerge from a careful examination of evolutionary biology' (p. viii). The central scienti c question is whether 'the  ndings in animals are causally relevant to biomedical conditions in humans' (p. 22) . It is reasonable to doubt that the  ndings in animals are causally relevant, they contend, because of differences in anatomy and physiology, because of differences in the aetiology of disease ('most diseases and conditions in laboratory animals are arti cially induced'), and because of the different sources and extent of the stress experienced by laboratory animals. That there is good reason to doubt the causal relevance of  ndings in animals is con rmed, according to LaFollette and Shanks, by the testing of drugs in animals: 'Less than one out of four potential drugs that successfully negotiate initial animal tests are ever approved by the Food and Drug A dministration . . . if we give the most generous interpretation of the data, of those drugs that successfully completed animal trials and began clinical trials, 47 percent are discontinued because the drugs are later deemed unsafe or inef cacious in humans (FDA 1988)' (p. 28) . From this evidence LaFollette and Shanks conclude that 'of those drugs that are safe and ef cacious in animals, the animal trials are no better than 50 percent accurate in determining a drug's safety and ef cacy' (p. 28). I'm afraid I do not see the problem here. What LaFollette and Shanks are talking about represents just a section of the screening process for a new drug. To begin with, scientists learn a great deal about a potential new drug from computer graphics and test-tube experiments. Drugs that pass this stage are then tested on animals. Drugs that pass this stage are then tested on humans. Each year, between 10,000 and 15,000 people in Britain take part in Phase-One trials (tests on healthy volunteers to check for side-effects of drugs). In Phase-Two trials, the compound is tested on between 100 and 200 patients who have the condition the drug has been developed to treat. Finally, in Phase-Three trials, thousands of B O O K R E V I E W S 131 patients take the medicine, under supervision, to test its ef cacy. Clearly, there is an extensive, and intensive, screening and weeding out process involved. By the time the latest drug for depression or hypertension, gets to me, it is very safe, and very effective. LaFollette and Shanks maintain that 'The presence of causal disanalogies undermines the claim that animal research is of immediate and direct relevance to human biomedical phenomena' (pp. 107, 108). Researchers themselves, they add, 'claim controlled laboratory experiments on animals are the core of scienti c medicine' (p. 109). In particular, researchers assume that inferences from non-human Causal Analog Models (CAMs) to humans 'exhibit normal causal reasoning' (p. 110). But they don't. In deterministic and probabilist methodologies 'experimenters make inferences from what happens to Xs in the lab to what will happen to Xs outside the lab. Not so with animal experiments. Here researchers make predictions from what happens to Xs (some non-human CAM) in the lab to what will happen to Ys (humans) outside the lab. This cannot be straightforward causal reasoning, not even probabilistic causal reasoning' (p. 110) . I hope that these quotations give some picture of the LaFollette and Shanks approach to the issue of animal research. Their thesis that we cannot be con dent about extrapolating from results in animals to results in humans because (ironically) of 'evolved disanalogy in biological systems' (p. 223) , is plausible given the divergence of species. If, on the other hand, you are more impressed by the similarity between species, then the Brute Science thesis appears not only much less plausible, but also profoundly conservative. But much of this is academic anyhow. According to LaFollette and Shanks, 'Animal experimentation is clearly the central element in the current biomedical paradigm' (p. 32) . This thesis is handled in a completely reductionist way by LaFollette and Shanks, and such a reductionism does not serve their argument well. The biomedical paradigm, as I have presented it earlier, is vastly more sophisticated than that. National University of Ireland, Galway Joseph Mahon L udwig Wittgenstein: Cam bridge L etters Edited by Brian McGuinness and Georg Henrik von Wright Blackwell, 1995. Pp. viii + 349. ISBN 0–631–19015–5. £55.00. Ludwig Wittgenstein was perhaps the most important philosopher of this century, in spite of the fact that he wrote only two philosophical works during his entire lifetime. His Tractatus L ogico-Philosophicus (1922) heralded the linguistic turn of twentieth-century analytic philosophy and inspired the logical positivists. H is posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953) was the major force behind the conceptual analysis which dominated anglophone philosophy until the 1970s, and continues to stimulate analytic and continental philosophers alike. But in addition to these classics, Wittgenstein left behind an extensive Nachlass – between 20,000 and 30,000 pages of manuscript and typescript. The material ranges from  rst-draft notebooks and unstructured records of inspirations, to more re ned statements he subsequently abandoned due to dissatisfaction with their content or manner of representation. The Nachlass is essential to an understanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy, because it displays the constant development of his thought, and because it is often more discursive and less compressed than the frequently crypt ic passages of the Tractatus or the Philosophical Investigations. I N T E R N A T I O N A L J O U R N A L O F P H I L O SO P H I CA L ST U D I E S 132 The size of the Nachlass shows that Wittgenstein was a prodigious writer with an almost compulsive urge to record anything from arcane philosophical arguments to personal observations and self-re ections. By comparison, the size of his surviving correspondence is less impressive. A nd it is a fair conjecture that much of the philosophically interesting material survived largely because Russell, Moore and Keynes kept nearly all of Wittgenstein's letters. Nevertheless, the letters to and from Wittgenstein shed invaluable light on both his life and his philosophy. For one thing, in his letters Wittgenstein often clari ed his thought in response to queries. For another, the letters occasionally address intellectual issues that lie beyond Wittgenstein's strict philosophical concerns. Finally, they display his often tumultuous relationships with those around him. For this reason, the publication of L udwig Wittgenstein: Cam bridge L etters is highly welcome. It takes the place of a previous volume, L etters to Russell, Keynes and Moore (Blackwell, 1974) , in that it contains the correspondence between Wittgenstein and those of his Cambridge friends who 'can fairly be regarded as his equals or even mentors rather than his disciples' (p. 1). But it differs considerably from its predecessor. There are important additions, such as the inclusion of Ramsey and of Sraffa, a number of hitherto lost letters from Wittgenstein to Russell, Keynes and Moore, and several letters to Wittgenstein. The latter make for a genuine volume of correspondence, not least because the reactions of his interlocutors are often as revealing as Wittgenstein's own. Furthermore, the letters are now arranged in a single chronological order. Finally, the editorial work has been brought up to scratch. In addition to orthographic corrections, there are now more footnotes explaining points in the letters which would otherwise be unintelligible to anyone unfamiliar with details of Wittgenstein's biography. The translations of the German material are by McGuinness, and they are consistently good. But while I can see no signi cant  aws in the editorial work, the editorial policy invites complaint. As so often in the chequered history of the publication of Wittgenstein's work, the chance of providing an edition that is as comprehensive and de nitive as possible has been missed. Instead, there is more of the dripfeeding which has been a constant feature of the way in which Wittgenstein's Nachlass has been made accessible since the publication of The Blue and Brown Book s in 1958. Whether it would have been pro table to include correspondence with those of Wittgenstein's Cambridge friends who can fairly be regarded as his disciples may be debatable. It is undebatable, however, that other items of correspondence are highly important to an appreciation of Wittgenstein's oeuvre. The letters to Ogden, the of cial translator of the Tractatus, not only illuminate speci c passages, but also contain an important statement on the relationship between Wittgenstein's ideal notation and the ideal languages of Frege and R ussell. The letters from Frege are important, if only because they con rm Wittgenstein's complaint in a letter to Russell (p. 124) that Frege had not understood the Tractatus. The letters to Paul Engelman and Ludwig von Ficker shed badly needed light on the other side of the book, namely its excursions into mysticism; they contain the important (if in my view highly misleading) claim that the essential point of the Tractatus is what it leaves unsaid, namely the ethical. Finally, the exchanges with Malcolm reveal some of the philosophical and personal problems that occupied Wittgenstein's  nal years. A ll of these items have been published. Moreover, the editors of the Cam bridge L etters could plead that they stuck to their brief (non-disciple Cambridge friends). Yet, the brief itself is unduly narrow, with the result that many of the aforementioned B O O K R E V I E W S 133 letters remain beyond easy access. This may not be the editors' fault. It is notoriously dif cult to get so many copyright holders to do the right thing, not to mention publishers. But it remains deplorable, all the more so since a more comprehensive edition of Wittgenstein's correspondence already exists in German, namely Briefe (Suhrkamp, 1980) . Let us hope, therefore, that the volume under review will be followed by a second one which contains the rest of Wittgenstein's important correspondence, and in particular the letters from Frege which had not yet been discovered in 1980. In spite of these strategic limitations, Wittgenstein scholars, other philosophers and laypeople alike will pro t from Cam bridge L etters. As the Introduction explains, it shows that, in spite of the occasional disparaging remark, Wittgenstein was greatly attracted to the Cambridge that these friends represented. It also documents four quarrels and four reconciliations. 'He appears here in turns shy and affectionate,  erce and censorious, happy to collaborate and sure of his own judgement' (p. 2). One might add that he also appears incredibly rude and self-righteous. The letter he wrote in response to Moore's well-meaning attempt to inform him of the regulations governing the Cambridge BA (pp. 85–6) takes the biscuit in this respect, but there are other examples (e.g. pp. 258–61, 311–13) . Such letters con rm an impression from anecdotes (notably by Fannie Pascal and Malcolm), namely that Wittgenstein was completely oblivious to the effect that his outbursts – including those ostensibly directed against himself, such as his famous confession – might have on those around him. Throughout his life, Wittgenstein struggled against the temptations of philosophical solipsism, a position which Schopenhauer referred to as 'theoretical egoism'. By the same token, it is only mild hyperbole to characterize Wittgenstein's attitude to others as practical solipsism. Why did people of the stature of Russell and Keynes put up with him, at least part of the time? Cam bridge L etters provides some clues to answer this question. They display the effects of his charisma. First and foremost, however, they display the development of his philosophical genius. In particular, they show how many of his most important ideas came to him early and were then subjected to endless revision and reformulation. Thus his second letter to Russell in 1912 already contains the core of his entire philosophy of logic: 'there are NO logical constants' and 'Logic must turn out to be of a TOTALLY different kind than any other science' (pp. 14–15). The symbols of logic (propositional connectives and quanti ers) are not names of logical entities (such as Frege's functions or Russell's logical objects), and hence the propositions of logic, unlike those of other sciences, are not descriptions of some kind of reality, whether physical, mental or abstract. The later and more famous picture theory can be seen as simply providing the background for this idea: by characterizing scienti c propositions as pictures of reality it throws into sharp relief the special, non-depicting status of logical propositions. In recent years, much has been made of Ramsey's in uence on the middle Wittgenstein. Unfortunately, the precise nature of this in uence is dif cult to pin down, except where Wittgenstein himself alludes to it (e.g. Philosophical Investigations §88) . In any event, Cam bridge L etters shows that, at least initially, most of the traf c was in the other direction. Although Ramsey never allowed this to dull his critical intelligence, he greatly admired Wittgenstein (see, e.g., note on pp. 186–7 and pp. 196–8). Indeed, his main ambition was to reformulate the logicism of Principia Mathematica in the light of the strictures of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. One aspect of this project is documented in detail, namely the treatment of identity (pp. 191, 194, 216–21). The Tractatus had repudiated Russell's idea of I N T E R N A T I O N A L J O U R N A L O F P H I L O SO P H I CA L ST U D I E S 134 identity as a relation in which each thing stands to itself: 'to say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing at all'. In an ideal notation, identity and difference of objects is instead indicated by identity and difference of names (5.53ff.), a move which necessitates a thorough modi cation of Russell's theory of descriptions (for details, see my A Wittgenstein Dictionary (Blackwell, 1996, pp. 164–9)). Ramsey accepted Wittgenstein's criticism of Russell's de nition of identity, namely that it implies the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, i.e. that two objects cannot have all their qualities in common. Unfortunately, like Russell and Wittgenstein he ignored the question of whether these qualities are to include spatio-temporal location, which would make the principle plausible. At the same time, R amsey tried to retain identity in a way which accommodates the Tractatus, arguing in effect that true identity statements are tautologies and false ones contradictions. He de ned 'x 5 y' through a two-place function Q (x, y) which is a logical product of material equivalences: f1x ; f1y . f2x ; f2y ., etc. This yields a tautology when x and y have the same value or meaning – f1a ; f1a . f2a ; f2a, etc. – but otherwise a contradiction, because there will be a function fkx and two objects a and b such that fka ; ~fkb. Wittgenstein replied that in the case of x and y having different values, 'a 5 b' is not contradictory but nonsensical , and so is 'a ± b', since the negation of a nonsense is a nonsense. To this Ramsey responded in effect that his Q-function was not meant to be synonymou s with '5 ', but only to perform an equivalent role. The exchange nicely displays their contrasting and yet complementary philosophical talents: Ramsey tries to counter the paralysing effects of Wittgenstein's dialectic acumen through ingenious technical innovations. Wittgenstein's philosophical exchanges with Moore are of an entirely different and less technical nature. Particularly interesting are his comments on Moore's paradox. Moore had observed that while we often do not believe something which is true, it is absurd to say 'It is raining, but I don't believe it.' Wittgenstein rejected Moore's suggestion that this absurdity is of a psychological nature. He claimed that such utterances play a role similar to that of contradictions, and that the paradox shows something about 'the logic of assertion' (pp. 315–17) . This remark anticipates the central bones of contention between contemporary Wittgensteinians and their Gricean adversaries, namely whether the 'semantic', i.e. philosophically relevant, features of language are con ned to those reckoned with by formal logic, or whether they also include the other rules and practices highlighted by Wittgenstein's descriptions of our 'language games'. The single letter from the economist Sraffa (pp. 290–2) is interesting for a different reason. Sraffa repeatedly calls it confused, but it contains an immensely acute analysis of Wittgenstein's options in the light of the Nazi takeover of Austria. One wonders what its author was capable of when he was less confused, and it lends credence to Wittgenstein's acknowledgements of Sraffa's in uence in the Preface of the Philosophical Investigations. Like the whole volume, it shows that the intelligence and talents of Wittgenstein's Cambridge friends made them all the more capable of appreciating and supporting his own genius. This holds in particular of Russell. The correspondence gives us a glimpse of what were perhaps the most fascinating philosophical exchanges of this century. It also shows that in spite of their later estrangement, the two were much closer in intellectual temperament than is commonly supposed. University of Reading Hans-Johann Glock B O O K R E V I E W S 135 Copyright of International Journal of Philosophical Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.