One of the three volumes dedicated to Professor H. Wagner on the occasion of his sixtieth birthday. The first is Lehrstücke der praktischen Philosophie und der Ästhetik. As the title indicates, this publication concentrates on ethics, legal philosophy and aesthetics. It approaches these disciplines from a Kantian perspective. The second volume dedicated to Wagner is the fourth number of the 1978 publication of the journal: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie. This volume quite appropriately contains historical studies related to Kant or (...) Kantian concepts. It also contains a bibliography of Hans Wagner’s writings. (shrink)

L'ordre du discours is the inaugural lecture read by Foucault when he became the successor of J. Hyppolite at the Collège de France. The booklet is a good introduction to the work of the author. It gives a summary of his key ideas, with here and there a couple of suggestive examples. At the end we find an outline of the work the author hopes to fulfill in the future. Foucault sees human history and human civilization as a big effort (...) of discourse-creation. To engage in a discourse though, is a dangerous activity. This danger might be avoided by diminishing the quality of the discourse. It is, however, tricky to escape discourse itself. Foucault now, analyzes the mechanisms by which civilization tries to maintain the quality of the discourse while at the same time protecting the individual against the dangers of it. The author mentions three series of mechanisms: 1) Exclusion: Not every thing can be said. Things are prohibited of entering the discourse. Societies also exclude persons such as the fools from human discourse. Finally, human talk is divided between true and false talk, of which only true talk is to be taken seriously. 2) Appropriation of the unknown: Certain forms of discourse have been given priority, such as commentaries, pieces written by known authors and pieces fulfilling the formal characteristics of a discipline. 3) Limitation of speakers: Not everybody is allowed to use all forms of discourse. Rituals make sure that only appropriate persons talk. The existence of societies protecting a monopoly on certain forms of discourse or the attempt of doctrinal groups to impose orthodoxy are two further examples of the attempt to limit the possible speakers. This being the case, Foucault claims that his philosophical method will not try to find the truth of a discourse, but rather he will in the future show that there is a discontinuous variety of discourses; that a discourse is essentially a violation of the world of things and that we cannot hope to understand the inner meaning of a discourse. The two most provocative ideas put forward in this booklet are that truth is not in the first place an act of intelligence but an act of the will. Foucault talks of a will to truth. The second provocative idea is that all discourse is a violation of the world of the things. To sacrifice the search of truth for the search of the structure of discourse is the essence of structuralism, of which Foucault is the philosophical standard-bearer.—W. V. E. (shrink)

This book is dedicated to Hans Wagner, at the occasion of his 60th birthday. It is written by academics influenced or familiar with Wagner’s thought as expressed in Philosophie und Reflexion. The book edited by Barthlein and Wolandt intends to present a series of essays that could be used as introduction to the philosophy of action and of aesthetics. The different essays are well coordinated and of competent scholarship in that they present a thesis which contradicts established opinion, or a (...) thesis explicitly denied by Kant but argued for with Kantian arguments or a thesis which brings the field of economics under the principles of transcendental philosophy with a technique similar to the one by which other Kantians established the validity of transcendental principles for the philosophy of law. (shrink)

In his previous book, La philosophie et les experiences naturelles, A. De Waelhens claims that great philosophers in the past have not only been in dialogue with their predecessors but also that each great philosopher benefited from a confrontation with a non-philosophical experience. This previous book forms the theoretical justification for the present one. Here the author studies the problem of psychosis, with the hope and the intention of contributing to the further development of philosophy. Insofar as philosophy is fascinated (...) with the obligation "Learn to know yourself" or the search for an answer for the question "Who am I," insofar so claims the author, contemporary philosophy cannot afford to bypass psychoanalysis. The book has six chapters and a conclusion, but could easily be divided in three parts. The first part is a survey of the general approach to psychosis and schizophrenia by a selected group of European psychiatrists. The author indicates the crucial shortcomings of each approach and shows how there is among them a gradual turning away from a physiological interpretation of schizophrenia and psychosis towards a psychological one. In Part II, the author uses mainly the theory of Lacan and his disciples to present a coherent theory of psychosis. The crucial concepts are 1) the Oedipus-complex, 2) the mirror stage, 3) the foreclosure of a reference to the father. The Oedipus-complex is well known from Freud’s works although it receives here a more structural interpretation. The mirror stage refers to the events around 6-8 months when the child has to appropriate himself as a unified body, not just a collection of partial elements. This task can be noticed easily when one observes the attitude of the child towards the mirror. Hence the name. In order to perform this task successfully the child needs the support of the mother. The function of the mother is still more important for the third problem: a reference to the father. A healthy development of the child requires that the mother is capable of recognizing and of acknowledging the part played by the father in the creation of the child. This is done in our culture by giving the child the name of the father. Mothers of psychotics often are emotionally unable to tolerate that. They want to situate their child exclusively in relation to themselves: they foreclose any reference to the father. Psychosis is therefore related to the foreclosure of the name-of-the-father. These three crucial concepts allow the author to explain the crucial symptoms of schizophrenia, and to compare it with paranoia and paraphrenia. The third part of the book is a philosophical discussion of the problem of psychosis. The author offers the continental philosophical tradition as a better intellectual framework to study psychosis than the physical framework that Freud used in his Project for a Scientific Psychology and that he never completely abandoned. In the conclusion A. De Waelhens summarizes the direct philosophical consequences of the study of psychosis, the most fascinating being that one has to recognize the priority of language in the constitution of the subject, and that there is a meaningful relation between the way I relate to myself, the things and other people. Two improvements could be made in the book. The first is pedagogical: i.e., a critical bibliography of the crucial works of Lacan and his school and of the phenomenological tradition would have been very helpful for any reader not familiar with one of the two streams of thought. A second improvement would be the inclusion in Chapter One of a discussion of the development which has taken place in the U.S.A. in the explanation of schizophrenia. It is parallel with the development in Europe. A useful reference is E. G. Mishler and N. E. Walker: "Family Interaction Processes and Schizophrenia: A Review of Current Theories," in International Journal of Psychiatry, July 1966, Vol. 2, Number 4. Although the book is difficult, it is very insightful and provocative and it certainly merits translation.—W. V. E. (shrink)

As the subtitle indicates, this book is a bibliography. The author’s purpose was to present the important works of philosophical ethics and those of the social sciences as they relate to ethical problems, especially in economics, law, politics, and sociology. Each of these fields is given a full chapter of roughly 50 pages, while the chapter on ethics itself covers 70 pages. Each chapter begins with a few preliminary remarks which, in one page, sketch the most important philosophic topics in (...) that field. The listings in each chapter are then arranged under the following headings: introductory bibliographies to the field; references to general studies ; references to studies of particular periods; to particular countries; to special questions; and to periodicals. The bibliographical study should be of value to anybody interested in interdisciplinary research. It gives one an immediate clue where to go in pursuing an interdisciplinary problem in the field of social sciences, but unfortunately not in all of them. Linguistics and anthropology are totally absent, and psychology has unfortunately no separate place in the book, although one can find it under special headings. While the study can therefore not be called a bibliography of all the social sciences, it is nonetheless truly remarkable in its scope. (shrink)

A collection of Head’s previously published papers are reprinted here, often without significant change. Nevertheless, the book has a great unity of purpose. It analyzes different problems related to an important new concept in economic theory: that of public goods. Head’s merit is to review, compare, and analyze the different approaches or definitions of a public good found in the literature. Further, he relates this problem to the whole field of welfare economics and finally, compares and differentiates it from the (...) concept of merit good. Head attempts to clarify the concept of a public good by integrating it into two streams of economic thought that try to construct analytical tools for mastering the problem of market failure. He, therefore, takes up and interrelates such individualistic concepts as Pareto-optimum, consumer sovereignty, jointness of supply, indivisibility of a good, and externality; but he also pointedly refers—through his concept of merit good—to the little discussed authoritarian stream of the liberal economic tradition. To support this claim Head cites a text even from J. S. Mill. The authors that Head refers to the most are Samuelson, Musgrave, Buchanan, and Pareto. But he also incorporates Baumol, Thiebout, Olson, and Downs, among the contemporary authors, and Sidgwick, Pigou, Wicksell, and Lindahl, among the historical figures. (shrink)

A reference work for the basic concepts of psychoanalysis, this book consists of two hundred fifty entries. On the average, two and a half pages are devoted to each entry, but certain crucial concepts, such as "ego," "death," "instinct," and "projection" are given greater attention.

The author of this study in intellectual history, an economist, tries to analyze the arguments presented in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in favor of a commercially oriented society. But he makes it clear at the end of this book, that his study has uncovered a new reason for the emergence of capitalism. This reason is different from the Weberian argument, which it complements. Weber had presented a psychological thesis, i.e., the search for a criterion for individual salvation led to (...) the "Protestant" work-ethic. Hirschman studies a sociological problem. He shows that men in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were desperately looking for a new model to organize society in order to end the ruinous wars of that time. Thus when the Weberian man appeared on the scene, society was ready to see in him the carrier of the new order. Society was ready to be dominated by commerce and not the chivalric passions and the wars it had led to. (shrink)

Gauvin has, for many years, published articles about Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes. What is novel about these articles is that they introduce a new method for the study of Hegel’s Phenomenology. What is exciting about these articles, is that Gauvin’s new method has allowed him to make important clarifications of Hegel’s thought. Thus his article "'Entfremdung’ et ‘Entäusserung’ dans la Phénoménologie de l'Esprit de Hegel" established that Hegel makes a systematic distinction between ‘Entfremdung’ and ‘Entäusserung’, although the first is the (...) result and the limit of the second. (shrink)