Journal of the History of Philosophy

466 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:3 JULY 1996 offered in Rameau's Nephew called into question his long-held conviction that "even in a society as poorly ordered as ours.., there is no better path to happiness than to be a good man," Hulliung tends to assume too quickly that the Nephew's attacks on this belief carry the day (99). Diderot did, after all, eventually provide the Nephew's antagonist with some responses and, while these may not always convince us, it is somewhat rash to assume that Diderot himself viewed them as completely empty. Further, while Hulliung carefully shows us what Rousseau found lacking in the philosophes' Enlightenment , it is not entirely clear whether the arguments he offered inJulie, Emile, and the Social Contract really constitute a "positive program for an alternative enlightenment" (2~5). Readers may leave the book still questioning whether Rousseau shared anything with his former colleagues other than their most troubling doubts. The tension between the promise announced in the book's title and the more precise focus delineated in the subtitle captures what is at stake rather nicely: in what sense does the quarrel between "Rousseau and the Philosophes" constitute an "Autocritique of Enlightenment"? Hulliung rightly notes that "it was one of Rousseau's gifts that he always succeeded in bringing out the worst in the philosophes" (208). The book amply demonstrates that the same could be said of their ability to bring out the worst in him. Attacking his person, they prompted Rousseau to produce the autobiographical testimonials to his own sincerity that, while inspiring the coming generation of Romantics , did little to explain what Enlightenment was. To understand Rousseau's role in the autocritique of Enlightenment it may be necessary to turn from the philosophes and consider the impact of his work on Enlighteners more sympathetic to his arguments. It was, after all, a reading of Rousseau that persuaded no less an Aufkliirer than Kant that an understanding of Enlightenment that ignored questions of morality misunderstood what Enlightenment truly involved. JAMES SCHMIDT Boston University Hud Hudson. Kant's Compatibilism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. Pp. xi + a96. Cloth, $32.5~. This is a book that relates the domains of Kant interpretation and contemporary metaphysics, and that forces the reader to consider what it means to engage in the history of philosophy. By characterizing Kant as a "compatibilist" (i.e., as a thinker who affirms both causal determinism and freedom of the will) and by discussing this view within the context of contemporary positions on the issue, Hudson challenges the reader to discuss Kant from a contemporary perspective. He thus criticizes interpreters such as Henry Allison who, according to Hudson, think it does an injustice to Kant to characterize him as a "proto-proponent" of some contemporary theory. Whether or not Hudson definitively resolves this perennial and thorny debate, his work is a good argument for the value of dialogue which transcends the contemporaryhistorical divide. In Chapters l and 2, Hudson presents his distinctive interpretation of Kant as a compatibilist who self-consciously avoids a "Leibnizian" compatibilism which BOOK REVIEWS 467 would reduce freedom to a naturalistic event. Hudson claims that Kant holds a "twodescription " view of events involving human activity, i.e., (a) he assigns two distinct descriptions to this single reality, but (b) he does so in a way that does not reduce one description to the other. The historical reader may hesitate at the use of language like "token-token identity" and "type-type irreducibility" to characterize these two features of Kant's compatibilism, but Hudson's application of the terms is to the point. Chapter 3 provides the most direct confrontation between the historical Kant and contemporary metaphysics. Hudson first compares his compatibilist reading of Kant to Donald Davidson's position, elaborating upon Davidson's brief suggestion that his own view is broadly Kantian in heritage (a claim which Davidson makes in his essay "Mental Events"). Hudson then goes on to defend this Davidsonian reading of Kant against possible contemporary incompatibilist rejoinders. Hudson's defense of the idea that Davidson owes a historical debt to Kant is convincing. Furthermore, in his comparison of Davidson and...