This book is less about disjunction than about the English word ‘or’, and it is less for than against formal logicians—more exactly, against those who maintain that formal logic can be applied in certain ways to the evaluation of reasoning formulated in ordinary English. Nevertheless, there are many things to interest such of those persons who are willing to overlook the frequent animadversions directed against their kind in the book, and this review will concentrate on them.

Essentially a collection of letters from Santayana strung together with narrative about the activities of Santayana, C. A. Strong and Cory himself. Other figures come and go: Walter Lippman, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound. Some of the flavor of Santayana's thought comes through and a good deal of his personality. The letters cover the years 1927-1952: a period of great productivity for Santayana, embracing the Realms of Being, The Last Puritan, Persons and Places and Dominions and Powers. As long as (...) Cory keeps Santayana the center of focus, the book is captivating and brilliantly effective—like Santayana at his best. Unfortunately, the latter half of the book covers a period when Cory was generally somewhat independent and at a distance from Santayana: there are not so many letters and the narrative becomes longer, more autobiographical and much less interesting. Only Santayana's death refocuses the book. But by then the work is irremediably flawed.—W. G. E. (shrink)

This closing volume of Tillich's Systematic Theology is devoted to the domain of the Spirit, the domain of social reality, culture, history, and tradition. Tillich's existential, ex-static concept of faith, his qualitative concept of God, and his symbolic concept of the Christ lead him to see the ambiguity, fragmentariness and repeated failures of the church as an empirical reality. But they offer insufficient tools for an analysis of the positive nature and functions of the community of the Faithful. The Protestant (...) Principle becomes a principle of the ultimate inadequacy of all finite systems of thought and action, and is offered as the universally valid resolution of existential estrangement. As such, one wonders if it can also be a principle of faith for a community of believers. This ambiguity creates a number of difficulties throughout the book. Many of the themes of this volume are central to Tillich's thought and the general approach parallels and completes the earlier volumes. And for such a passionately committed theologian as Tillich, this last volume must be of first importance.—W. G. E. (shrink)

There are many reasons to rejoice at this revision of Owens' masterful work, although one might question the term "revision." There are no substantive revisions in the text. There is a very important addition, the Foreword to the Second Edition, in which Owens defends his views against critics and goes on to point out some conclusions about the nature of the Metaphysics which were not explicitly stated in the previous edition, notably that Aristotle's metaphysics was necessarily not a system and (...) was necessarily incomplete. New bibliographical information has been included in footnotes throughout and the Bibliography has been up-dated. The major improvement in the book is that it has now been printed with regular set type. An almost equal boon to the reader is the inclusion of the footnotes at the bottom of the appropriate pages, rather than as a separate section at the back of the book. That extensive revisions of a substantive nature were not necessary is only one more tribute to the excellence of Owens' original work.--W. G. E. (shrink)

This translation of the Fons Vitae, "specially abridged," is stiflingly verbal. There is no critical apparatus, no index, no attempt to lay bare the philosophic doctrine, no explanation of the "abridgment." The book is useless to a serious student and too clumsy to interest any but the most general reader.--W. G. E.

Weiss offers here what might be called a normative phenomenology of religion. The book clearly presupposes a body of descriptive detail and properly avoids metaphysical considerations of the existence and nature of God. The latter can be found in Modes of Being, the former have been the province of several disciplines. Weiss begins with an exploration of human experience to find those elements which give rise to religion and the common features which we should expect to qualify religious as well (...) as other human experience. The religious experience is described as a distinctive, episodic, qualitative immediacy involving the individual with God and detaching him from the world. Since the individual is public as well as private, the religious experience is both anticipatorily public and needs to be sustained within a religious community. We must be able to achieve a non-religious perspective in order to know what is involved in a religious experience. But the idea of God receives most of its content within a community which is distinctively religious though related in various ways to secular communities, and more or less antagonistic to competing religious communities. The most powerful chapters discuss these conflicts between religious communities and the phenomenon of "becoming religious." Combined with the section on the dedicated community, these provide one of the finest analyses of the religious life available in philosophic literature. The book is written with enviable style and grace, especially in the latter half.—W. G. E. (shrink)

A very useful collection of extensive selections from the Metaphysics, the Categories, On Interpretation, Posterior Analytics, the Physics, On the Soul, Ethics, Politics and Poetics. Entire works, or groups of related books within a work are given. The translations are popular. In the general introduction and the commentaries before each major section, the editor attempts to briefly state the issues in the context of present discussion and relate Aristotle's doctrine to current work in British and American analytic philosophy. The collection (...) is of some merit for introducing students to Aristotle, though it provides many causes for doubt in one at all familiar with Aristotle already.—W. G. E. (shrink)

An interpretative introduction to the major themes of classic American philosophy and five of its major figures: Peirce, James, Royce, Dewey and Whitehead. Smith shows sympathy and insight into these men and their ideas, making an excellent choice of basic themes for discussion. Running throughout the book is a sustained argument for a renewal of the breadth of philosophic interest and the sound empirical basis displayed by Pragmatism at its best. Smith is concerned that this "Spirit of American Philosophy" be (...) rescued from the neglect it has suffered over the past decades and be recalled to the attention of the philosophic community. His book is an admirable step in that direction.--W. G. E. (shrink)

An excellent translation of the seminal and highly influential section of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft entitled "Religionssoziologie." This section, really an extended monograph, is Weber's most profound systematic analysis and theoretical account of religious communities. His basic concepts and distinctions—priest and prophet, rationalization and breakthrough, ethical and exemplary prophecy—have long provided the basic framework for the best work in the Sociology of Religion in this country. His study of the relationship between religious breakthrough and social status is masterful. His discussion of (...) "salvation" and the various kinds of asceticism and mysticism is invaluable. Talcott Parsons' introduction is helpfully expository and judiciously critical. In short, a truly classic text is now available in a worthy English version.—W. G. E. (shrink)

Ferrater Mora's paper is devoted to the thesis that man makes his own life--a person constituting himself historically. Harris's lecture is a two-pronged attack on contemporary analytic philosophy. One part of the argument attempts to show that the enterprise is self-refuting, based on an epistemology of naive positivistic empiricism which most of its present proponents have themselves rejected. The other part of the argument is ad hominem, showing the urgent necessity for a synthetic and constructive philosophy which will be able (...) to develop a way of life and system of values capable of stemming the drift toward nuclear self-annihilation. Prior, starting with the MacTaggart-Broad time puzzle and digressing backward through St. Augustine, offers an adverbial analysis of time and tenses, based on the theory that there are only things, not events, and that things are present tense, when they are.--W. G. E. (shrink)

The author of this study in intellectual history, an economist, tries to analyze the arguments presented in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in favor of a commercially oriented society. But he makes it clear at the end of this book, that his study has uncovered a new reason for the emergence of capitalism. This reason is different from the Weberian argument, which it complements. Weber had presented a psychological thesis, i.e., the search for a criterion for individual salvation led to (...) the "Protestant" work-ethic. Hirschman studies a sociological problem. He shows that men in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were desperately looking for a new model to organize society in order to end the ruinous wars of that time. Thus when the Weberian man appeared on the scene, society was ready to see in him the carrier of the new order. Society was ready to be dominated by commerce and not the chivalric passions and the wars it had led to. (shrink)

Our sense of self includes awareness of our thoughts and movements, and our control over them. This feeling can be altered or lost in neuropsychiatric disorders as well as in phenomena such as “automatic writing” whereby writing is attributed to an external source. Here, we employed suggestion in highly hypnotically suggestible participants to model various experiences of automatic writing during a sentence completion task. Results showed that the induction of hypnosis, without additional suggestion, was associated with a small but significant (...) reduction of control, ownership, and awareness for writing. Targeted suggestions produced a double dissociation between thought and movement components of writing, for both feelings of control and ownership, and additionally, reduced awareness of writing. Overall, suggestion produced selective alterations in the control, ownership, and awareness of thought and motor components of writing, thus enabling key aspects of automatic writing, observed across different clinical and cultural settings, to be modelled. (shrink)

A reference work for the basic concepts of psychoanalysis, this book consists of two hundred fifty entries. On the average, two and a half pages are devoted to each entry, but certain crucial concepts, such as "ego," "death," "instinct," and "projection" are given greater attention.

Our results concern the existence of a countable extension U of the countable atomless Boolean algebra B such that U is a "nonconstructive" extension of B. It is known that for any fixed admissible indexing φ of B there is a countable nonconstructive extension U of B (relative to φ). The main theorem here shows that there exists an extension U of B such that for any admissible indexing φ of B, U is nonconstructive (relative to φ). Thus, in this (...) sense U is a countable totally nonconstructive extension of B. (shrink)

Whittaker, following Siebeck, pointed out the important role Plotinus assigns to the functions of imagination in psychic life. Imagination is the terminus ad quern of all properly human conscious experience; it is that faculty of man without which there can be no conscious experience. The sensitive soul is an imaginative soul below which there is Nature, or vegetative soul, which acts without being conscious. When the functions of reason are added to sensation to produce a rational human being, there is (...) conscious discursive thought as well as conscious sensation; and since the sensitive soul cannot be responsible for the imaging of rational concepts, Plotinus asserts the existence of a conceptual imagination. (shrink)