This deeply researched, carefully constructed and very thoughtful book is fascinating in its own right as well as being indispensable background material for anyone interested in current philosophical thought about space, time, and geometry.

Neoplatonism is, as Wallis notes, a movement which helped shape Western culture and thought but it remains little known because of "the difficulty of the Neoplatonic writings and the absence of a satisfactory popular account." This last he intends to remedy by his book, in which he concentrates "on producing as accurate a picture of the movement as I could" by providing "readers some fundamental principles to assist them in penetrating the labyrinth of the Neoplatonists’ works" in Chapter One, by (...) noting their sources in Chapter Two, and by then studying each of the major Neoplatonists, viz., Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, Proclus, and Damascius, as well as commenting on a host of minor figures. The book terminates with a survey of the influence of Neoplatonism, which "threatens to become little less than a cultural history of Europe and the Near East down to the Renaissance, and on some points far beyond". There is a selective bibliography and an index. (shrink)

Kasm does not offer any concept of proof which is regulative for all metaphysics, for he is convinced that each metaphysical approach requires its own proper logic and methodology. Within this pluralistic framework he seeks to discern the structure of formal truth as expressed in the concept of proof inherent in various metaphysical approaches.--L. S. F.

A selection of brief, half-page reflections and observations culled from Schweitzer's major works. --L. S. F.

In an attempt to render the philosophical enterprise scientific by making it fully systematic, Lazowick elaborates seven exhaustive dimensions or categories which are applicable in every instance to each of the three dominant wholes: the personal self, cultural institutions, and God. The attempt is not enhanced by Lazowick's singularly barbarous style.--L. S. F.

This book is short on pages but long on valuable content. Oates intends to refute the rather widespread contention that Plato "denied the worth of all the so-called fine arts" by an objective and historical study of the Ion, Republic, Greater Hippias, Phaedrus and Symposium. Since the author himself clearly summarizes his own thought frequently, we here need only present his final conclusion. Every human activity is valuable in direct proportion to its closeness to the domain of the ideas and, (...) specifically, the Idea of Beauty and Goodness. But artistic creation is a human activity. Therefore, it too must be oriented towards the Idea of Beauty. Thus, "the creative artist must be ‘philosophical'" and, since he comes close to Beauty through intuition, also "quasi-mystical", as were Aeschylus, Sophocles, Dante, Milton, Shakespeare, Michelangelo. So too was Plato himself, whose dialogues are philosophical dramas containing "a more explicit expression of a vision of reality and value than is to be found in epics or tragedies or lyrics". In Oates’ book the only flaws are minor: an occasional awkwardness of style, referral only to scholars prior to the mid-twentieth century, notes are placed at the end of chapters rather than at the bottom of the pages. Even so, the book is well worth having.—L.S. (shrink)

Aleksandr Bogdanov is probably the most original philosopher to have arisen thus far among Marxists. Most scholars know of him only as the man who provoked Lenin into writing the book of polemical epistemology, Materialism and Empiriocriticism. Jensen’s work, the first full-length study to deal with Bogdanov’s thought in its own right, is a careful analytical account; it sets forth the novel theses, chapter by chapter, in Bogdanov’s later book Philosophy of Living Experience.

Eleven essays devoted to contemporary perspectives on mysticism, mostly written in the tradition of religious liberalism. Several contributors stress the existentialist contribution to our understanding of mysticism, while N. A. Nikam examines "Some Aspects of Ontological and Ethical Mysticism in Indian Thought." Emerson is considered, along with two less conventional candidates, Whitehead and Wittgenstein, for their relevance to mystical thought. These studies are suggestive rather than definitive.--L. S. F.

This is the third and final volume of Dr. Wuest's expanded translation of the New Testament, a literal rendering of the Greek text with numerous bracketed insertions intended to clarify the meaning. Designed primarily as an auxiliary study aid for those who have not studied Greek, it lacks the gracefulness of the Revised Standard Version and the readability of J. B. Phillips' translation. Dr. Wuest is conservative and premillenialist in theological belief.--L. S. F.

In Treatises 1-3 of Enneads, VI, on the genera of being Plotinus first critically discusses the categories of Aristotle and the Stoics. In the next treatise he discloses that intelligible reality entails being, movement, rest, sameness, and otherness—the five gene of which Plato spoke in the Sophist. In the third he elaborates the categories of the sensible universe: ousia, quantity, quality, relation, and movement.

Despite Schelling’s recognized influence upon a wide spectrum of sciences and arts, only a small amount of his work has been translated into English. Earlier, Robert Brown’s The Later Schelling opened up a significant dimension to our understanding of Schelling. Now, with this first translation of The Deities of Somothrace, Brown has added substantially to the thin shelf of Schelling’s works now available to the English-language reader.

Collins examines the main philosophical approaches, whether positive, negative, or skeptical, which have been taken towards God since Cusanus, showing the central and often decisive role which the theme of God's existence, nature, and relation to the world has played in this development. It is an ambitious undertaking, and Collins acquits himself well. His survey includes such diverse thinkers as Montaigne, Descartes, Hume and Rousseau, Pascal, Newman, Marx, Mill, and Whitehead. The concise introductory remarks to each chapter are particularly revealing, (...) and the bibliographical references are extensive and up-to-date.--L. S. F. (shrink)

This book, originally a doctoral dissertation directed by Gottfried Martin and presented to the University of Bonn in 1970, concentrates on the problems which the Parmenides has triggered for more than two thousand years: Is the dialogue a mere dialectical exercise or an introduction to Plato’s own metaphysics or what? Are the hypotheses which constitute its second part logically valid or fallacious? Does Plato seriously intend the apparent contradictions within and between them? How closely related is the second part of (...) the dialogue to the first? Koumakis attempts to solve them in several ways. He substitutes "Wie-Frage" for "Was-Frage". In Ch. 11 he semantically investigates on in Plato and Zeno’s paradoxes. In subsequent chapters he turns to the hypotheses themselves: Plato’s introduction to them in 136A-B, their philological and philosophical underpinnings, the syntactical identity between hypotheses 1 and 2, the possible localization of the one in itself and in the other. In the final section he acknowledges failure in coping with the paradoxical dialogue. Lest anyone be turned away from the book by this acknowledgement, he should realize that it is worth buying for its bibliography alone, as well as for its helpful digests of that literature. Slip-ups in proofreading occur mainly in English quotations.—L.S. (shrink)

Modern Studies in Philosophy, we are informed on the page facing the title-page, "is a series of anthologies presenting contemporary interpretations and evaluations of the works of major philosophers." The volumes are "intended to be contributions to contemporary debates as well as to the history of philosophy; they not only trace the origins of many problems important to modern philosophy, but also introduce major philosophers as interlocutors in current discussions." In the first of the two volumes on Plato three of (...) the articles chosen by Gregory Vlastos have not appeared elsewhere: Julius Moravcsik, Learning as Recollection; G. E. L. Owen, Plato on Not-Being; David Higgins, Sentence Meaning, Negation, and Plato's Problem of Non-Being. The other studies in Volume One are reprints: R. Robinson and J. D. Denniston, Plato; H. F. Cherniss, The Philosophical Economy of the Theory of Ideas; A. Wedberg, The Theory of Ideas; R. C. Cross and A. D. Woozley, Knowledge, Belief and the Forms; R. Robinson, Hypothesis in the Republic; G. Vlastos, Reasons and Causes in the Phaedo; R. E. Allen, Participation and Predication in Plato's Middle Dialogues; Colin Strang, Plato and the Third Man; J. L. Ackrill, Symplokë eidön; J. L. Ackrill, Plato and the Copula: Sophist 251-259. In Volume Two Terry Penner, "Thought and Desire in Plato" has not been published before. The others have: Paul Shorey, Plato's Ethics; David Sachs, A Fallacy in Plato's Republic; Raphael Demos, A Fallacy in Plato's Republic?; J. D. Mabbott, Is Plato's Republic Utilitarian?; G. Vlastos, Justice and Happiness in the Republic; F. M. Cornford, The Doctrine of Eros in Plato's Symposium; R. A. Markus, The Doctrine of Eros in Plato's Symposium; Glenn R. Morrow, Plato and the Rule of Law; Wayne A. R. Leys, Was Plato Non-Political?; F. E. Sparshott, Plato as Anti-Political Thinker; Renford Bambrough, Plato's Political Analogies; E. R. Dodds, Plato and the Irrational Soul; W. K. C. Guthrie, Plato's Views on the Nature of the Soul; Harold Cherniss, The Sources of Evil According to Plato; W. J. Verdenius, Plato's Doctrines of Artistic Imitation. Obviously, the above listed articles will be welcome to those debating issues in Plato and to historians of twentieth-century philosophy. There are two difficulties, however. The print is too small in the body of the text and is nearly microscopic in the footnotes and diagrams. Reading thus becomes almost painful. Margins to the left, right, top and bottom of the pages are practically nonexistent. On occasion footnote material is misplaced--for example, the comment on Strang's article as originally published elsewhere should be on p. 184, not on p. 187, of Volume One. But a greater problem is the fact that almost all the articles on metaphysics and epistemology are by linguistic analysts. Vlastos in his introductory remarks admits as much: "Volume One is heavily weighted on the 'analytical' side." He reports the statement of an un-named advocate of conceptual analysis "that these [analytic] methods now enable us to understand Plato better than he was ever understood by anyone in history--better than by any of his own contemporaries, even better than by himself!" He disclaims such euphoria but insists "there is an element of truth in it after all" insofar as analytic tools can alert a student to ambiguity and its consequences in some of Plato's sentences. Hence, "if we come across such sentences in Plato, it would be plainly true to say that we can understand them better than he did and even to add that we can, therefore, understand him better, since we can see both what he meant to say and the logical liabilities of his incautious sentences." All this is true enough, but a warning still is in order. Linguistic analysts tend to read only some of Plato's dialogues and, even within them, to concentrate on some passages only. This is understandable in view of their interests and the capacity of the analytic technique. But that selectivity might lead them to believe that the Plato thus revealed is the complete and authentic Plato, which it is not. Hence, in reading and teaching Plato one must complement language- and concept-analysis with other approaches. Vlastos himself is aware of this necessity : [[sic]] "Once we have made full allowance for what modern semantics and logic can do to make Plato more intelligible and alive for us today, we should be quick to concede that borrowings from this quarter must be used with economy and discretion, and that continuing reliance on older linguistic and historical disciplines is as essential now as it has ever been in the past if the object of our inquiries is Plato himself, instead of some mock-up more pleasing to current taste." One could only wish that Vlastos had fostered that reliance on other disciplines by including articles of that sort among those he actually chose.--L. S. (shrink)

Hennemann finds that the history of the natural sciences has usually been treated in a non-historical way, as a merely chronological sequence of discoveries and developments with little attention paid to the evolution of its historically conditioned presuppositions. Focusing chiefly on the 19th century, he uncovers many interconnections between the special sciences and the philosophy of nature. He is unsuccessful in his attempt to discern a basic structural relationship.--L. S. F.

Today everyone knows that Tübingen is the center of the current tendency to find Plato’s genuine philosophy not in his dialogues but in Aristotle’s reports of his "unwritten doctrines" because of the publications of H. J. Krämer and K. Gaiser, both of whom studied and now teach at the University of Tübingen. That fact was not yet evident in March, 1958, when Hermann Gundert went there to deliver a lecture on "Der Platonische Dialog," in which he stated almost the exact (...) opposite. Aristotle’s reports are to be subordinated to the dialogues themselves, which reveal Plato’s true mind when their content and form are studied together, when the interconnection of dialectical method and dialogic context is detected. That lecture sparked vigorous discussion since both Krämer and Gaiser were in the audience. Ten years after the lecture Gundert published it as part of the "Bibliothek der klassischen Altertumswissenschaften" series. In the same year he got out a long article in the journal Studium Generale, which now appears as the book under review. (shrink)

Selections by Runes from his own writings, arranged alphabetically from "abhorrence" to "zero." It is hard to understand why this should cost as much as $5.00.--L. S. F.

In applying a sophisticated version of "ordinary language" analysis to comparative religion, Smart offers us a highly perceptive account of the inner logic and the principles of justification for religious doctrines. He distinguishes three fundamental doctrinal strands, the mystical, the numinous, and the incarnational, uncovering the demands that each imposes upon the others.--L. S. F.

Nineteen thoughtful essays devoted to the theoretical aspects of sociological investigation: the use of ideal types, the causal concept and the concept of social change, functional analysis, the formalization of theory, and the place of values in sociology. C. Wright Mill's "On Intellectual Craftsmanship" is an engaging and informal account of how one social scientist goes about his business, with a liberal sprinkling of criticisms against the tendency to divorce methodological inquiry from the scientific investigation itself. --L. S. F.

This clearly written and well organized book terminates the long career of Gottfried Martin as historian of philosophy and philosopher who died while the book was in press. His aim is twofold: to study what Plato wrote in the dialogues and, secondly, to understand Plato’s writings by probing and evaluating them. Part one of the book carries out the first purpose. There Martin successively seeks textual information on Socrates’ open-end search for ethical definitions, then on Plato’s gradual disclosure of the (...) Ideas in the last four of six groups of dialogues, on the fundamental notion motivating the theory of Ideas, on their logical basis or proof, on their extent and interrelatedness, on the "two-world" theory, on the mind’s tendency simultaneously to personify and to abstract, on the logical and the mythical as necessary and universal factors in human knowledge and language. (shrink)