Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 647 commentary about American philosophy, but rather as a living exhibition of philosophical ideas at work in the actual task of expressing and understanding the cultural fabric of American life.''6 And Sandra B. Rosenthal describes her Speculative Pragmat /sin as "a speculative development of unique doctrines inspired by, and incorporating the spirit of, classical American pragmatism."7 Articulating ideas drawn from Royce as well as from Peirce and Dewey, Smith's essays themselves also exemplify American philosophy in the classic tradition. BETH J. SINGER Brooklyn College,CUNY Robert S. Brumbaugh. Western PhilosophicSystemsand Their CyclicTransformations. Philosophical Explorations. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, x99,. Pp. xvi + 156. Cloth, $~9.95. This book presents the general results of Robert Brumbaugh's fifty-year study of Western philosophic systems and is an important contribution to the current analysis of system types. Brumbaugh begins with a grouping of Western philosophic systems into four great families: Platonic, Aristotelian, Democritean (atomistic), and Anaxagorean (process). Here and elsewhere his method is one of seeking formal similarities. He notes that his four-way grouping is analogous to Klopfer and Kelley's technique for scoring Rorschach responses, to types of literary plots, to Newton Stallknecht's senses of "is," to Stephen Pepper's root metaphors, to Richard McKeon's later semantic schema (the two are "almost indistinguishable" [6]), to Paul Weiss's modes of being, and to Aristotle's four causes. Having identified the four families, Brumbaugh finds that the history of Western philosophy exhibits the dominance of each in turn: Platonism from St. Augustine in the fifth century to the Latin translations of Aristotle in the thirteenth century, Aristotelianism from the thirteenth century to the development of modern science in the seventeenth century, atomism from the seventeenth to the twentieth century, process philosophies in the twentieth century, and, by extrapolation, a new Platonism in the twenty-first century. Seeking formal similarities among the four families, Brumbaugh finds they pretty much agree on a main sequence of entities running from elements to gods. IIe even asserts that the four systems form a closed cyclic transformation group such that every entity in one system corresponds to one and only one entity in each of the other systems. He continues by showing how the systems can be brought together successively in application to the same work, or simultaneously in dialogue. It is a pleasure to read a philosopher who attempts to order and use the immense resources which the history of philosophy puts at our disposal. Many will doubtless (New York: New York University Press, 1976),xvii. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986),5. 648 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3 t "4 OCTOBER 1993 think Brumbaugh's formal similarities rather tenuous, and prefer a method that stays closer to the particulars, but Brumbaugh has ways of accommodating the particulars to his general scheme (see, for example, 71 n.3), and if we are pluralists we will welcome a dialectical voice in the discussion of system types. Nevertheless, I must confess to some dissatisfaction with Brumhaugh's formal scheme and with his assessment of the adequacy of the philosophies it orders. Brumbaugh sets up his scheme by means ofa 2 x 2 matrix: methods may be either holoscopic (Plato and Anaxagoras) or meroscopic (Aristotle and Democritus), and explanatory direction may be either formal (Plato and Aristotle) or material (Democritus and Anaxagoras). If we compare this scheme with those to which it is most akin, McKeon's 4 • 4 semantic schema and the Watson-Dilworth 4 x 4 archic matrix,' the question arises as to what Brumbaugh has gained by reducing the 4 x 4 matrices to a x 2 matrix. The 4 x 4 matrices yield four pure types, which can be used as Brumbaugh uses his four types, so there is no need for the reduction on this score. The 2 x 2 matrix has less explanatory power than its predecessors, and does not exhaust the possibilities of its own variables. By distinguishing methods as holoscopic and meroscopic, Brumbaugh excludes operational or agonistic methods, and by distinguishing explanatory directions as material and formal, he excludes existential interpretations . This results in the omission of Protagoras from...