The Great Chain of Being has been recognized for fifty years as the masterpiece of the History of Ideas movement in America. Lovejoy's work stimulated deeper research into our heritage, which has demonstrated that the idea of the chain of being has not lost its vitality. However, Lovejoy would probably be surprised that hierarchy is now defended in philosophy of science, in ontology and metaphysics, in ethics and aesthetics, and in philosophical anthropology. This volume presents concepts of hierarchy and the (...) great chain of being from Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, medieval and Renaissance thinkers, Hindu philosophy, and authors of the twentieth century. This volume represents the ideas of twenty scholars, among whom are Dominic O'Meara, Ronald Hathaway, Ewert Cousins, John Sommerfeldt, Lewis Ford, David Blumenthal, and Marion and Paul Kuntz. The editors have compiled a bibliography of four hundred and fifty items and an index of names, places, and concepts which allow the reader immediate access to the variety as well as the unity of ideas. (shrink)

The concept of order has been subjected to clarification both by Linguistic Analysts and by Phenomenologists. Since the question of the parallelism of the work of these schools, or their overlap and possible collaboration, is now seriously raised, it seems appropriate to examine the methods and results with reference to this common, or similar, problem.

The Labyrinth is man's symbol for his human condition; it is life itself, and not a prison to be escaped but to be lived in.

The reputation of Rudolf Hermann Lotze was high in the philosophic world, especially the English-speaking philosophic world, during the period 1880–1920. One encyclopedia of the period says that “in the U. S. his influence is stronger in academic philosophy, perhaps, than that of any other author.” In typical histories of philosophy Lotze is counted among the great successors in the tradition of Kant and Hegel. I have elsewhere sought to explain the reasons for his great influence. Writers contemporary to Lotze (...) wanted first to classify him as an Herbartian, and in spite of his protests, he seemed some sort of Kantian or Hegelian. The character of his philosophy remained enigmatic, and he was sometimes called an “eclectic” since his philosophy contained aspects that reminded readers of some predecessor or other. But clearly he resisted the tendency to make all questions problems of knowledge: “The constant whetting of the knife is tedious, if it is not proposed to cut anything with it.” And clearly he is no Hegelian. He considered the rationalistic search for a single principle and a single method to have failed. German philosophy had failed to respect what is given in experience. Even in aesthetics, where surely one might be expected to attend to what the arts present for sensuous enjoyment, German intellectualism, to Lotze’s disgust, tended to use a deductive method. Santayana accused a priori German philosophers of “egotism”; he might have learned this from Lotze who found this same tradition marked by pretension. Only God could satisfy the program of Fichte. The demand of an all-embracing system is that it “make all particular parts of it pass before [us] in the majestic succession of an unbroken development!” Wrote Lotze, “It seemed to me that only a Spirit who stood in the centre of the universe which he himself had made could, with knowledge of the final aim which he had given his creation…” see the whole. Lotze’s kind of philosophy is professedly modest, nondogmatic, fallibilist. (shrink)

Among controversies about philosophy that are also philosophical problems the most complex and difficult to solve is that about philosophy and the history of philosophy. On one hand there is Wittgenstein claiming that history is irrelevant to philosophy. On the other hand, there is Gilson claiming that history is not only relevant but necessary to philosophy.

Literary people have had less difficulty in understanding George Santayana than have philosophers, and it is particularly we Anglo-American philosophers who complain that he is enigmatic. We have read his books as arguments of a professor of philosophy, and failed to recognize that he was a sage, one who sought wisdom and found redemption. Anthony Woodward's Living in the Eternal succeeds as no other book on Santayana in showing how to understand this philosophy as the confessions of the freedom and (...) joy of spiritual ascent. Santayana is like no modern philosopher, save Spinoza, and passing over the medieval and Renaissance wise men who were well known to Santayana, but to whom Woodward has no reference, he is most like "some Gnostic Christian of Alexandria, in the early centuries of the faith, for whom love has been swallowed up in knowledge and the believer consummated in the sage". We are apt, at first reading of the "attempt to be godlike," to explode: "but Santayana was a materialist and an atheist! How can he, more than any other modern philosopher, have more to say about spirit?". (shrink)

It has been forty-four years since an important American philosopher, Ralph Barton Perry, gave two cheers for Puritans in Puritanism and Democracy. Obviously, since we have neglected the deepest heritage of American history and use "Puritan" only in the disparaging sense of "puritanical," Neville must reassure us that he is far from a stereotype. He has written a charmingly personal book. On the cover is the smiling Leonora, a daughter, in white neck piece, as in our pictures of the first (...) Thanksgiving, photographed by her sister Naomi. Bob's gifted artist wife Beth designed the cover of the book, and on the back we see the author enjoying the art of fencing. (shrink)

Philosophers have for centuries kept diaries, and these “commonplace books” are, as in the case of Berkeley, G. E. Moore, and Wittgenstein, among their most valuable legacies. The philosopher poised on the edge of discovery hesitates between different answers to an old question. More excitedly, the philosopher may reject old questions and search for words to state a new question to which the answer is unknown.

As I put down my copy of The Making of Men and take up Volumes III and IV of Philosophy in Process, the period of the diary when Weiss was writing the book, I wondered whether the longer work showed more awareness of human weakness and disability. The philosophic program calls for the overcoming of bias and achievement of neutrality. Has Weiss ever admitted that men are sometimes born tired, suffer weaknesses, yield to the temptation of aiming low rather than (...) high, fail to put out much effort in capturing "the free energy" that Weiss ascribes to us all? If Weiss doesn't correct his account of human life that is too much based on his own great strengths, then the philosophy must be criticized as one-sided. Even if he has swept aside laziness as subhuman, much as a good teacher encourages students by expecting the superhuman and ignoring the subhuman, this practical encouragement cannot fully excuse theoretical failure in adequacy. For surely we who know Weiss know that he is not merely a performing artist who sometimes takes the classroom as a stage, but rather is a coach who knows how to bring the best performance out of his team of intellectual athletes. Most coaches expect to win every game and have a philosophy that never anticipates or prepares for failure. Is that why Weiss found himself so much at home in the world of Sport? (shrink)

Although Santayana insisted that his book on Hermann Lotze was merely a journeyman's task imposed upon him by his master Josiah Royce, the evidence of the text is otherwise. Santayana is warmly engaged not only in refuting Royce's absolutism, he is also giving the first expression to his own aesthetic naturalism. Santayana uses Lotze's pluralistic system to rebuke his teacher's monism, particularly when the unity of the world is interpreted as the adventures of a single mind and everything that happens (...) is said to be for its satisfaction. Santayana might have wished to write on Schopenhauer, but in Lotze also he found an ally in the cause against the idolatry of power and human purpose which so oppressed him in the doctrines of divine providence and the secularized version of inevitable progress. (shrink)

It is a commonplace that Marxist theories of order deal with the transition from one order to another, whereas most non-Marxist theories of order, whether of ideas or of societies, stress the stability of some established order, showing how, by gradual modification, it avoids the violence of revolutionary change. Wild's theory is one of the few non-Marxist theories of revolutionary transition. It stresses the breakdown of the mythical order and emergence of cosmic order which repairs the defects of its predecessor (...) and what we are now enduring, the breakdown of the cosmic order. Out of the ruins is growing a new order, the personal order. That philosophers should attend to the transition from order to order is the precept and practice of Whitehead in Adventures of Ideas, and in Modes of Thought. Wild's theory resembles both the Hegelian-Marxian dialectic of orders and the Whiteheadian doctrine of orders. Wild's theory, although it does not mention Whitehead's, is in certain respects more like the latter than the former. Any order is from a perspective with limitations that become evident when we compare it with alternative perspectives; and although this implies that there is no absolute or final order, no framework within which all phenomena fit, it does not imply that there is no order or no knowledge at all. Most Hegelians will find Wild's theory lacking synthesis, and most Marxists would feel Wild had failed to grasp necessity, specifically material necessity, in the process. The transitions spring rather from the inadequacies of personal perspective: any interpretation is bound to the man in his situation and therefore must be superseded. The resemblance of Wild's theory to Whitehead's goes deeper than form because they are moved by esteem for the human individual and distrust of powerful groups that tend to overpower free men. Both refuse to bend the knee to collective order. Wild could well accept as this own this statement from Adventures of Ideas. There are. (shrink)

The main theme is kinds of order considered in relation to one another. Is there a unitary order that underlies experience, existence, and the good? Or is one of those fundamental, and the other two derivative? Or are there such contrasts and differences between certain orders that the furthest we can honestly go is to contrast them, setting one against the other?