The Church of England By Law Established, in incidental payment for secular privilege, has submitted to the bonds of established clichá, in particular to the reproach that its rulers seem more concerned with the external or practical working of Anglican faith and ritual than with their intellectual definition and justification. This intellectual looseness remained unimportant in practice as long as a forceful anti–Roman spirit blew all waves of opinion in one practical direction. In time, however, that wind gradually lost force (...) and positive cross–currents of Anglican belief came to the public surface. The legislators of the sixteenth century had formulated the positive rules of the Thirty–Nine Articles and the Prayer Book in tolerantly broad language. They left no decisive teaching authority to explain their texts and to meet the challenge of shifting ritual and speculative doubt. Time has subjected both instruments to an everwidening range of individual interpretation especially since the early nineteenth century, when the Anglican monopoly of political, social and educational institutions was disputed by fresh tides of Protestant dissenters, renascent Catholics and nascent agnostics. To–day, as Mr. Cockshut wryly comments: “to throw doubt on the Anglican formularies is itself part of the Anglican tradition”. (shrink)

From A. N. Whitehead, his senior collaborator in the classic work on mathematical logic which established his philosophical reputation, Bertrand Russell once provoked the exasperated remark: “Bertie, you’re an aristocrat, not a gentleman”. To-day having matured in the lived experience of eighty-five years and having spanned this century with widely-publicised books, articles and lectures, Russell remains a living paradox in whom the cool logician, the social prophet and the tantalising polemist have yet to achieve integration. Issuing from an established intellectual (...) family with a precociously questioning mind and a moral courage equal to the assertion of any truth, educating himself to a razor-keen mind and a mastery of lucid prose, he has adopted the public role of a witty sophist as well as an iconoclast angry with conservative convention in moral, social and religious conduct. Theoretically practical conduct is a realm of private feeling and not of objective truth in his philosophy, which he implements with literal freedom. Nevertheless he must be conscious that his polemic often falls short of the standard of a disciplined respect for truth, though he might explain away this defect by referring to the accepted rules of the game which he plays…hard. Yet his biographer notes that he resents criticism of his moral and social writings more than of his purely academic work. And his aim, as expressed in a letter from Brixton prison in 1918 where an embarrassed government confined his biting pacifism, is constructive: “There is a little wisdom in the world; Heraclitus, Spinoza, and a saying here and there. I want to add to it, even if only ever so little”. (shrink)

Modern cultivation has multiplied the classic sciences into families of fissionable specialities, whose individual methods and objects tend to be communicated less and less to the man of general culture and even to the specialist fellow traveller. One established means of restoring basic communication lies in the periodic exposition by a team of sympathetic experts of the problems, historic personalities and principles of solution of each family, so that concise, accurate reference is readily available both to the serious student and (...) to the enquiring colleague who may wish to grasp a point of research, theory or jargon without having to search for it precariously in the deceptive haystack of selective text-books, monographs and learned papers. This solution, however, is prodigal of resources, material and intellectual—only anguished editors know what toil underlies the serenity of the expert encyclopedia, with its alphabetical reference, succinct scholarship and up-to-date analysis of every minute point at issue. Convinced lovers of wisdom should quail less than others, perhaps, from this herculean task. In fact, while this century has seen some new philosophic dictionaries and a fair representation of philosophic topics in general encyclopedias, no specialised philosophic encyclopedia has appeared to continue the early enterprise of Baldwin’s Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology and of Hasting’s Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. Now within two years has come the prodigious completion of a meticulous set of four Italian volumes, which survey the whole history and scope of philosophic and cognate science, and present the reviewer with a veritable embarras des richesses. (shrink)

In this elegant volume M. Berger, General Director of Higher Education in France, presents a composite balance-sheet of the professional culture of philosophy and religion in France to-day. The distinguished list of collaborators represents every shade of influential opinion, while their communications are precise and carefully subordinated to a single logical plan, which implies that the classic tradition of spiritual or personalist reflection still commonly inspires French thinking. The result is a stimulating survey of the actual intellectual scene, analysing the (...) reigning problems and tendencies in those basic subjects in which men are personally committed and in which differences achieve a distinctively French warmth and clarity of expression. (shrink)

In 1912 the Home University Library courageously offered to the amateur philosopher G. E. Moore’s Ethics and Bertrand Russell’s Problems of Philosophy. Now under the aegis of the Oxford University Press it offers a brief, selectively partisan retrospect over the half-century’s philosophy, which confines itself to these Cambridge reformers and their colleague, Wittgenstein and to their successors, the dominant Oxford school of analysis. Its donnish author issues a stern warning to the enthusiastic amateur, whether or not he be a professional (...) in another science anxious to plumb his own philosophical presuppositions, to allow English philosophers “to go their own way” without “public complaint or criticism”. English philosophers have just succeeded in achieving distinct professional status as “philosophers’ philosophers”, though they are still affected by nostalgia for “the old, kind days of amateurism”. He grants that “it seems to be true that the contemporary philosopher’s eye is characteristically cold and his pen, perhaps, apt to be employed as an instrument of deflation”. Nevertheless, without apprehension for the consequences of such narrow technique, he ironically underlines the ineffective state that “certain philosophers deplore the present aspect of their own subject, and that, more commonly, certain non-philosophers discuss philosophy with a plaintive and patronizing impertinence which they would not dream of displaying towards any other subject in which they were admittedly ill qualified”. This seems to deny the classic philosopher’s role of thinking for, and presenting his thoughts to the critical consideration of his fellow mortals. (shrink)

The meticulous printing at a moderate price of this remarkable work is a credit to the publisher. During the past thirty years M. Gilson has been the greatest single influence upon lay readers in reviving serious interest in the clerical speculation, which for twelve hundred years conscientiously spanned the gap between the collapse of Greek science and Roman law and the late sweep of modern sciences and their secular philosophies. Preoccupation with short-term apologetics after the Reformation increased clerical aloofness from (...) professional science and philosophy and probably increased the non-scholastic’s assumption that the Christian Era was merely a dark or middle age between ancient and modern intellectual life. In fact, early and medieval thinkers gradually confronted their Christian faith and pagan science and against the basso ostinato of secular warfare developed the varied themes of scientific theology and human philosophy, which crystallized into the mature Scholasticism of the thirteenth century. Hence the seventeenth century founders of modern philosophy, as M. Gilson first found à propos of Descartes, started to philosophize from a metaphysical inheritance much richer than the original Greek patrimony, especially in the light it cast upon the reality of God, the origin of the universe in which man lives, the nature and destiny of man himself. To overlook this linking inheritance, is to make modern philosophy less intelligible; while to personally judge its value, we must return to its historical sources. This is the task to which M. Gilson has devoted his pioneering judgment; this work is probably the final synthesis of his scholarship. (shrink)