If one were to make, not altogether seriously, such a distinction between types of philosophers, there is no doubt that Professor Feibleman would in many ways fall into the first category. The present volume is impressive in its scope: at one time or another it touches on practically every known field of philosophy, the sciences, the arts, theology, etc. Unfortunately, the development of this vast material is not adequate to the greatness of the themes. Mr. Feibleman has at times interesting, (...) original and provocative ideas; but the reader must, as it were, mine through a mountain of lesser material in order to come upon these occasional nuggets of precious metal. Philosophical doctrines which are palpably inconsistent are eclectically thrown together; arbitrary statements are made; and at times there is an almost incredible over-simplification of problems and lack of subtlety in analysis. To point out the numerous inconsistencies would be a task almost too easy, and one can only regret that Mr. Feibleman did not for his own sake more carefully revise the book before publishing it, so as at least to remove the most glaring of these. (shrink)

Before I can urge this position, however, I must first dispose of alternative views which might be brought against it from the very start. Let us ask if a theory of Newtonian time or a time ontologically complete in itself renders passage comprehensible. The answer must be that it does not. If there is to be passage, something must pass; that at least is certain, but this something cannot be the moments which comprise an absolute time, a time which does (...) not depend on anything outside itself for its reality. For the moments of an absolute time possess no quality which could differentiate one from another, and consequently it must be nonsense to say that one is before, another after, or even that one is earlier, another later. As moments of an everlasting time all must possess exactly the same status. They are limitations of one entity which contains within itself no reason why one part of it should differ from another. (shrink)

Alfred North Whitehead called Isabel Scribner Stearns the most talented female philosopher in America. Drawing on Whitehead and her other teachers, Paul Weiss, C.I. Lewis, H.H. Price, and Grace de Laguna, as well as the traditions of ancient Greek philosophy, Continental Rationalism, German Idealism, and American Pragmatism, Stearns has created an epistemologically and logically sound systematic account of the ontology of individuation and the relational genesis and endurance of individual beings.

The person is in process of becoming, and in this becoming it transforms itself as it reaches after new values. In its becoming, also, it is able to span the distance between the self it was and the self it is to become. Its transformation, then, can never become complete; it arises from a basis to which the person is always able in some measure to return.

To put one of Jordan's central thoughts briefly, forms or relations through the act become "clots" or plexus, i.e., intertwinings, and thus concrete things. Jordan has several descriptions of the act, the perfect act, the creative act, the cosmic act, the integrative act, the subjective act, and the intelligent act. Of these the integrative act is the most important metaphysically, and has many of the characteristics of the other acts.

The book is intended as a critical history of the growth of the ideal of knowledge in science, philosophy and history since Hegel. In order to give some conception of its encyclopædic scope, one need only mention an incomplete list of the topics which are considered in it: the development of non-Euclidean geometries, the logical foundation of the concept of number, the effect of the quantum theory on the concept of physical knowledge, the development of classification and systematization of natural (...) forms in biology, the effects of Darwinism and of the mechanism-vitalism controversy on biological thought, the development of such modes of historiography as the romantic, positivistic and political, as well as of the history of civilization and the history of religion. (shrink)