Journal of the History of Philosophy

236 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY text of the chapter on "Pleasure and Necessity" the "pleasure" spoken of seems to be specifically erotic; his application of die Sache selbst to the activity of scholars--an interesting interpretation which is found also in Hyppolite, but for which there seems to be insufficienttextual or contextual justification;his overly facile remark that "a quick perusal of Kant's Metaphysics of Morals would indicate that it comes up with no conclusions which are not already considered morally acceptable" (p. 221n.); and his similarly facile identification (pp. 262-63) of "the absolute" with God (God is an "absolute," but so is the state, and so is the sophisticated Rational Consciousness , and in a certain sense so is Being). Aside from the above exceptions, Lauer's interpretations seems to me plausible on most points, and he certainly manages to avoid the egregious errors and stereotypes that have plauged Hegel scholarship for too long. HOWARDP. KAINZ Marquette University Fernand Turlot. Id~alisme, dialectique, et personalisme: Essai sur la philosophie d'Hamelin. Paris: J. Vrin, 1976. Pp. 457. One can think of a number of fascinating but lesser known figures in the history of recent philosophy who deserve the kind of treatment Octave Hamelin (1856-1907) has been given in this volume by Fernand Turlot of the University of Strasbourg. The study is at once systematic and masterly, and it places Hamelin in historical perspective. It draws on Hamelin's own writings in detail, makes use of later interpretations, and adds richness by citations of Hamelin's letters to such contemporaries as Renouvier. It is a model of thorough and clear exposition with full but unobstrusive documentation and useful bibliographies. One would like to have seen, however, some few pages of biographical information. Though there were a few critical studies on Hamelin in the journals in the first decades of this century, his thought was apparently not dealt with as significantly by his contemporaries as was that of his mentor Charles Renouvier, who had so much influence on William James. In a series of published letters between Emile Meyerson and Harald Hrffding, dating from 1918 to 1931, Hamelin is mentioned but once. And in earlier correspondence between William James and Throdore Flournoy (1890-1910), we do not find his thought discussed at all. Nor does his countryman Jean Wahl cite Hamelin in his study of pluralism (1925), though he might well have shown how Hamelin's thought vigorously preserved pluralistic idealistic personalism while incorporating facets of Hegel's monism. Hamelin's uncompromising idealism, which he characterized "as nothing more than the doctrine of consciousness and of the person" (p. 221n.), emerged more from his diligent study of Kant, Descartes, Renouvier, and Aristotle than from any immersion in the thought of Berkeley or Hegel, though the latter thinker's influence regarding the dialectic is evident (see pp. 175-88). While Hamelin made a place for Fichte too (p. 170), and distinguished his personalism from Leibniz's monadism (pp. 211-15), he thought, observes Turlot, that German idealism was incapable of attaining "le vrai concret, la personnalitC' (p. 11). And that may well have been true, but Hamelin seemed unaware of the work of R. H. Litze and especially the many British and American pluralistic idealists his efforts spawned. Turlot instructively shows Hamelin's affinities with Maine de Biran, Lequir, Lachelier, Boutroux, Ravaisson, Brunschvicg, and Bergson and suggests implications for current French thinkers like Ricoeur, though the more direct ethical personalism of Emmanuel Mounier is not mentioned. While it is true that "la libert6 est au coeur de l'hamelinisme" (p. 311), that central theme is arrived at only after significant wrestling with alternative outlooks. Accordingly, the first five BOOK REVIEWS 237 chapters of Tudot's exposition are given over to Hamelin's views on and criticisms of previous thinkers. Chapter 6 is a survey of Hamelin's views on the sciences with special attention being given to mathematics, physics (causality and induction), and biology. Commencing with a criticism of Kant's idea of unknowable noumena, Hamelin offers a system of categories dialectically conceived. It incorporates but goes beyond Renouvier's scheme, for it encompasses not only relation, number, and causality, but...