Reid re-argues the necessity of regarding education or teacher training and philosophy as reciprocal enterprises. The argument is conventional: educating presupposes knowledge of desirable ends; such knowledge presupposes a philosophy of the valuable. Reid avoids the problematic character of value and valuations as well as the perennially interesting problem of the "teaching of values." Education contributes to philosophy not only by being its testing ground but by the fact that all ideas are applied to action through the transforming medium of (...) the personality of the teacher. Reid's analysis of the teacher-student relationship is the most interesting part of the book and borrows both terminology and ideas from Buber.—T. C. (shrink)

Three of the eleven essays are about Descartes, two about Moore, and the rest concern, variously, naturalism, the expression theory of art, ordinary language philosophy, and certain attitudes toward time. Bouwsma claims to have "tried to learn" the art of doing philosophy from the later Wittgenstein and it is not surprising that what he says about the work of the latter makes his own essays more understandable. Thus, his essays are investigations of phrases from someone else's work or of phrases (...) which are typical of the language of certain philosophical theories. He is particularly concerned with phrases which, in his eyes, embody some grammatical confusion as the result of some misleading linguistic analogy. In such cases he is concerned with "quickening the sense of the queer," heightening the reader's awareness of the "scarcely perceptible deviation from sense" inherent in the way a certain philosophical question is posed, and with presenting "the meaning of those expressions which are involved in the particular case, and especially those which are relevant to exhibiting not the queerness but the sources, the roots of it". All of these essays are filled with puns, examples, and little stories. Where the latter preponderate the essays read most like traditional philosophy, and are easier to appreciate than the essays in which Bouwsma is content with "teasing the passage [and the reader] with analogies of sense."—T. C. (shrink)

The suggestive vision of Plato’s thought offered us by the author is framed by perfectly identifiable co-ordinates: an anthropological foundation of his philosophical thought, an interpretation of subjectivity and consciousness from a transcendental viewpoint, and, finally, a concept of ontology in which the Leitfaden comes to be the polarity between being and existence, much like Heidegger’s "Ontological Difference." It is, then, not strange that Plato’s philosophy should be analyzed from the standpoint of a double tension, the tension existing between the (...) order of the "transcendental" and the order of the "ground," and that between an ontology of being and an ontology of existence. (shrink)

In this fascinating but mildly repetitious book, Havelock suggests that Homeric Greece was characterized by an oral culture in which the standards, history and techniques of the society were preserved and transmitted through a continuous process of memorization, repetition and recall. The material preserved was necessarily embodied in visualized particular acts and events within the narrative context of the epic. Havelock maintains that Plato's attack on the poets in The Republic was the first totally conscious rejection of this poetic mode (...) of consciousness, in which general conceptual thought is impossible, in favor of abstract language and a new intellectual mode in which the autonomous rational personality apprehends objects of knowledge which are revealed through the integration and abstraction of particulars. This attack is seen as the culmination of a process which reveals itself in Hesiod and the pre-Socratics and terminates in the emergence of conceptual language and philosophical discourse in Platonic Greece.—T. C. (shrink)