Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVXEWS 273 congratulated on packing so much good material into a small space. Gouinlock, it should be added, faced an extremely difficult task in finding a theme by which he could intelligibly discuss the potpourri contents of volume 2. That he succeeded is no small accomplishment. EDWARD H. MADDEN State University of New York at Buffalo and University of Kentucky Anders Wedberg. A History of Philosophy. Volume 2: The Modern Age to Romanticism. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1983. Pp. 227. $24.5o, cloth; $9.95, paper. Charles Hartshorne. Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers: An Evaluation of Western Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983. Pp. xviii + 393. It is helpful to consider these books together in a single review. They open up some possibilities for the study of historical sources in philosophy and for presenting these sources in fresh perspective to students. Both authors take an approach based on themes and problems, not one organized primarily around the individual philosophers in chronological order. Both authors also place a premium on clarifying the philosophical issues themselves rather than upon the conventional outlines and terminology . However, there are also some definite differences between these two works which must be noted. Anders Wedberg, late professor of philosophy at Stockholm University, published his three volume History of Philosophy in Swedish in 1958-66. The present book is the first volume in this series, first published in 1959 in Swedish and translated basically by Wedberg himself, with some revisions by Dag Prawitz and others. The eight main parts deal with: the modern mechanistic world view, the Platonic-Aristotelian ideal of science, the continental systems (of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz), British epistemology, empiricist critique of causation and necessity, empiricist theories of the external world, Kant on synthetic a priori judgments, and the transition from Kant to the later Germans. There is also an Appendix on Marx and Engels. Within each of the divisions there are chapters devoted to the main problems. For instance, the mechanistic world view provides a framework for treating the corpuscular theory, the dualism of matter and consciousness, and questions about space and time. Under the heading "The Revival of the Platonic-Aristotelian Ideal of Science" Wedberg seeks to reformulate his treatment of Greek philosophy (in Volume 1 of his History) in a way that is related to the so-called hypotheticodeductive method in modern science and especially to Leibniz's vision of a universal characteristic. The chief philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are given unequal attention. Among the continental system-builders the main focus is upon 274 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Spinoza and Leibniz, since Descartes is treated mainly through the problem of matter and consciousness. Wedberg acknowledges the complexity and richness of Leibniz's philosophy and his supple notion of a deductive method. Similarly Locke is presented chiefly as a forerunner, as one who sets up terminology and problems for the empiricists. In Kant's case, the process of selectivity manifests itself in concentration upon the first Critique's handling of synthetic a priori judgments in the Esthetic and the Analytic. Wedberg has separate sections of criticism of the positions he has selected and formalized. The continental systems are regarded as faulted because of their reliance on the deductive methods and their search for certainty. The same search is also attributed to the empiricists, but with a difference. For they temper the all-or-nothing notion of knowledge with a practical appreciation for belief and probability. As Wedberg phrases it, "the reasons for opinions vary in strength, and I ought, in each case, to let the degree of my belief correspond to the strength of the reasons." According to the author, the blending of the absolutely certain and the probable in human knowledge constitutes an "unconscious psychological conflict" reaching down to Bertrand Russell. In assessing Kant, Wedberg distinguishes between the criticist deduction (an analysis of the notion of experience as a stated fact) and the Copernican revolution (an explanation of the mental factors that produce experience). It is asked how Kant can claim to know a correspondence between phenomena and things in themselves; how the latter act upon consciousness; how the ego...