Journal of the History of Philosophy

278 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Loeb employs what he calls "a pattern of argument", in which when an historical figure advances on behalf of some position an argument found to be obviously defective, the reason he embraces the position must be seen as other than that argument; in the early modern period the reason is said usually to be some religious motivation which is sniffed out by "psychological speculation". For example, Leibniz rejects interaction between substances in favour of the pre-established harmony, "perhaps the most central and distinctive feature of his metaphysics" (p. 296), partly for aesthetic reasons, but also to support his argument from design, his view that spirits are in the image of (,od, his views on freedom and immortality, and so on. Instead of occupying himself with reconstructing the view as sympathetically as possible , the historian's task seems closer to the sociological one recently recommended by theorizers about the history of science. The putative result is that as opposed to reconstructionist histories, which though philosophically more interesting are too often hopelessly ahistorical, Loeb offers "a book about what actually happened, as best [he] can tell" (p. 17). There are a number of problems with this methodology as employed by Loeb. To begin, what is valid about it with respect to the history of philosophy, seems to be trivially valid. Consider his treatment of Spinoza's position on mind-body interaction. Spinoza tells of his attitude of disgust and laughter toward Descartes's interactionism; according to Loeb, the basis for his attitude is Spinoza's conviction that minds and bodies are too different to interact. "Both infi)rmal and fi)rmal argumentation is then marshalled, unsuccessfully, to support and justify this claim" (p. 189). That is, the conclusion of Spinoza's arguments were determined for him independently of those arguments. But who would have thought otherwise? To think otherwise would be to suggest that somehow the conclusions of arguments come as a surprise to those who frame them, whereas arguments as historical phenomena clearly are but attempts to justify pre-theoretical intuitions. In short, Loeb fails to distinguish between the logic of discovery, a causal domain, and the logic of justification, a normative domain. THOMAS M. LENNON University of Western Ontario. Edward Grant, Much Ado About Nothing. Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. Pp. xiii 456. $59.5 o. While not the first study on this theme, Edward Grant's hook is the most comprehensive to date on the development of theories of space and vacuum from the Middle Ages to the seventeenth century with a serious look back to Antiquity. Earlier writers such as Lasswitz and Gent (neither of whom are here mentioned) covered a more limited range, while in the new book are investigated the writings of many obscure figures whose thoughts on space and vacuum have not hitherto been subjected to scholarly scrutiny. Grant has introduced a profusion of source materials into his study of the theories feeding into the modern doctrine of space formulated by Newton and taken over by several key philosophers including Kant. BOOK REVIEWS 279 The book is divided into two major sections and is organized chronologically, beginning with a brief exposition of Aristotle's views. The two parts are "Introcosmic space" and "Infinite void space beyond the world," which follow the two major themes of the subject's historical development. The first of these was susceptible to both philosophical and empirical analysis, being finally resolved by the barometric and other experiments of the seventeenth century. The second, as (;rant points out, was largely a theological problem, exercising some of the keenest minds of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Though the two problems had parallel developments, many times and in various thinkers they interacted to stimulate the emergence of numerous ingenious theories to preserve the unity of the Aristotelian world-picture, while attempting at the same time to deal with unsatisfactory ad hoc situations. The Aristotelian view was already severely criticized in antiquity, not only by Stoics and Sceptics from whom we might expect it, but perhaps most severely in a commentary on the Physics itself by the...