Journal of the History of Philosophy

118 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY while feeling personally the charge of inferiority. Gerbi carries the discussion down to the close of the nineteenth century and ends with a chapter of "Supplements and Digressions," each topic of which would make another book. Gerbi's book is fascinating. His scholarship is vast. He brings together Spanish and Italian sources with the more standard fare of the French, English, and German writers. The book raises a problem that still persists, that of the cultural relations of America and Europe, and the relative place and merit of each culture. Gerbi refers often to the European debate over whether the discovery of America was a bad mistake in the first place. But he does not deal with the actual debate, announced in the preface tO the French edition of Raynal's R~volution de l'Am~rique (1781). The Academy of Lyon in 1783 proposed an essay contest on the topics "La decouverte de l'Am6rique a-t-elle ~t~ utile ou nuisible au genre-humain? S'il en est r6sult~ des biens, quels sont les moyens de les conserver & de les accro~tre? Si elle a produit des maux, quel sont les moyens d'y remedier." Basically, Gerbi covers the dispute concerning the negative answers to those questions. The dispute lingers on into the twentieth century. Post-Second-World-War America is hardly capable of a Buffonian or de Pauwian analysis, so another kind has developed. Twenty-five years ago in Paris I was told that America was the only culture that had moved from barbarism to decadence without ever having been civilized. Gerbi's book is a superb and significant study dealing with an aspect of the Enlightenment that is usually ignored. The extension of his theme into the literary world is most suggestive. The work will be of interest to a wide range of scholars in the history of ideas. RICHARD H. POPKIN Washington University Reflections on Kant's Philosophy. Edited by W. H. Werkmeister. (Gainesville, Florida: University Presses of Florida, 1975. Pp. 181. $8.00) Kant's 250th birthday (April 22, 1974) was celebrated by the Department of Philosophy of the Florida State University by holding an international philosophy forum on the great German thinker. The highly instructive papers on different aspects of Kant's philosophy are gathered now in the form of the present volume, edited by the organizer of the symposium. Under the powerful impact of logical positivism and analytic philosophy it has become fashionable in the United States to consider Kant's philosophy as lacking any significance for modern science. Philipp Frank and Hans Reichenbach, especially, have tried to show that all philosophical problems of modern science have been solved by logical positivism, which totally refuted Kant. It has been emphasized that Einstein's theories have sapped the ground on which Kant's philosophy was built because it was nothing but the epistemological expression of Newton's mechanics. It has been furthermore argued that mathematical knowledge is not synthetic a priori but analytic or "tautologic," a merely verbal knowledge (B. Russell, H. Hahn). Werkmeister's essay "Kant's Philosophy and Modern Physics" re-evaluates the philosophy of Kant in the light of contemporary science by a thorough analysis of Kant's Metaphysische Anfangsgrande der Naturwissenschaft, his AIIgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himreels , and his Opus Postumum. Werkmeister comes to the most interesting conclusion that not only has Kant not been refuted by Einstein, but he can be considered to have been a forerunner of the great physicist, recognizing relative motion, whereas Newton believed in absolute motion. "With this line of argument," writes Werkmeister, "Kant had clearly abandoned Newton's position and had moved toward a conception of universal relativity which found its culmination in Einstein's general theory." This is a sensational conclusion. Werkmeister also insists on the synthetic a priori character BOOK REVIEWS 119 of Einstein's theory of relativity, in conformity with Kant's epistemology. (From a conversation with Einstein I gained the definite impression that the creator of the theory of photons was in many respects a Kantian.) Werkmeister also shows an interesting analogy between Kant's theory of ether, with its vibrations and undulations, and SchrOdinger...