Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 441 ond error is the failure to apreciate that, because human cognition operates in particular ways, its limits are principled. It makes no sense to claim that we can achieve knowledge of an object, whatever that object is like. So the transcendental realist's epistemology does not seriously approach questions of human knowledge; his ontology is tainted by unnoticed epistemological intrusions. Many specific issues are illuminated in Allison's unifying perspective. I will note just three highlights. Contemporary philosophers are fairly contemptuous of the argumentation of the Transcendental Aesthetic. Allison opens up a new and extremely promising line of interpretation, by looking at this text as offering an account of the epistemic conditions provided by sensibility. I think there is more work to be done if the arguments are going to be made to work, but the approach is surely right. Because he understands Kant's project, Allison realizes that the Analytic's doctrine of the transcendental unity of apperception is a conclusion about an epistemic condition, not a premise, as most commentators have assumed. (Again, the details are a bit askew. Allison locates the argument for the unity of apperception in the Second Paralogism; it should be and is, I think, located in the Transcendental Deduction.) Perhaps the most valuable individual discussion is Allison's subtle development of the approach to the problem of the thing-in-itself that he and Gerold Prauss have been pressing over the last decade. Clear and deeply informed, Allison's book should replace Bennett's and Strawson's books as the standard supplementary text in a course on the First Critique. As The Bounds of Sense and Kant's Analytic3 raised the standards of Kant scholarship in the 6o's by revealing exciting themes that could be defended by rigorous, contemporary modes of argumentation, so Allison's more scholarly work should encourage the belief that by following the careful historical and philosophical methods exemplified here, we can find important and plausible epistemological and metaphysical theories in the Critique. PATRICIA KITCHER University of Minnesota Bryan Magee. The Philosophy of Schopenhauer. New York: Oxford University Press, The Clarendon Press, x983. Pp. 4oo. $29.95. Readers trained in the Anglo-American tradition may find their way to Schopenhauer smoothed by this introduction to his thought with its many references to more recent thinkers. Those already familiar with Schopenhauer are more likely to be interested in the book's eight appendices: Magee here addresses such topics as "Schopenhauer on Buddhism" or "Schopenhauer's Addendum on Homosexuality"; more importantly, he exhibits the impact of Schopenhauer's thought, not only on subsequent philosophers, but also on such musicians and writers as Wagner, Tolstoy, 3 p. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., x966); Jonathan Bennett, Kant'sAnalytic(Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1966). 449 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 23:3 JULY ~985 Turgenev, Proust, Hardy, Conrad, and Mann. This leaves the question: What do we today have to learn from Schopenhauer? One can of course point to his lasting influence. As Magee suggests, "he was the first great--and perhaps to the end the greatest intellectual influence on Wittgenstein , so the causal connection with the philosophy of our day is direct" (42). (The appendix on Wittgenstein provides perhaps the best available point of departure for those who would like to explore his debt to Schopenhauer.) Even more profound was Schopenhauer's influence on Nietzsche. His thought provides thus a crucial link in the evolution of transcendental philosophy from Kant to present reflections that have substituted for the Kantian a priori changing categorial frameworks (23~). To be sure, Schopenhauer himself was convinced of the "unimportance of history" (23 x), but by insisting that the knower does not stand before the world as a spectator might stand before a picture, but experiences it from within, where our place is assigned to us by the body and our access to things governed by its makeup and location in space and time, he prepares the way for a more historical approach to the problem of knowledge, as the young Nietzsche's currently so fashionable and quite Schopenhauerian "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense" demonstrates...