Book Notes

Abstract

Book NOTES BOOK REVIEWS 105 Ralph Waldo Emerson. By Josephine Miles. Univ. of Minn. Pamphlets on American Writers, 41. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minn. Press, 1964. Pp. 48. Paper, $.65) This "pamphlet" by Professor Josephine Miles is a substantial essay on Emerson, relating his Essays to his life and his style to his thought. It is supplemented by a useful bibliography. --H. W. Scm,mm~ Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, IV, I (Winter 1968). Ed. Edward C. Moore (Amherst: Univ. of Mass. Press, 1968. Pp. 58) Periodicals are not ordinarily reviewed in this journal. However we call attention to the exceptional unity and importance of the contents in this one. It contains Murray G. Murphey's Presidential address, "Kant's Children: The Cambridge Pragmatists," in which he develops in detail the emergence of Peirce's philosophy of science and conceptions of truth and reality within the framework of phenomenalism and transcendental idealism. This essay is followed by "Existence, Reality and Objects of Knowledge: A Defense of C. S. Peirce as a Realist" by B. Gresham Riley, which shows the relation of Peirce's pragmaticist philosophy of science to his realistic ontology. Then Douglas Greenlee mediates between these rival interpretations by showing the double function of "Peirce's Hypostatic and Factorial Categories." The reader would do well to supplement his study of these excellent papers by reading also Max Fisch'.~ recent work on the steps by which Peirce shifted from his early "nominalism" to a modified Seotist "realism." This analysis brings out the complications involved in Peirce's accepting a general logical realism, but repudiating the Scotist doctrine of real "supposits" because he wished to locate reality not in substance but in the future reference of judgments. This adds a further complication to a very complicated analysis. --H.W.S. Selected Writings. By George Herbert Mead. Ed. with intro. Andrew J. Reck. The Library of Liberal Arts, 177. (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1964. Pp. lxxiiq-416. Paper, $2.45) This is a most welcome and useful collection of Mead's basic writings, arranged chronologically . Thus the volume shows how Mead's social psychology developed gradually into a theory of the social gestalt of self-consciousness and of knowledge until it finally suggested a philosophy of history and a reafistic ontology of objective relativity. It provides, therefore, what Mead in his life-time failed to achieve--a fairly complete system of philosophy. The editor's well-organized introduction supplies an excellent outline of this system in ils development. In view of the scattered sources from which these writings are gathered, it is a great service that this volume renders not only to students of Mead, but to historians who, realizing the growing significance of Mead's work, need to have the source-material for reaching an understanding of how the distinctive traits of recent American philosophy took shape. For Mead had one of the most original and constructive minds among those who shaped this history. He seemed to sense, more than most of his colleagues, the radical implications of behavioral sociology and psychology for the general philosophy of science and of culture. He was pre-occupied much of his time with "movements of thought in the nineteenth century," but out of this historical study he arrived at critical insights that have proved to be basic in the development of twentieth-century thought. One of the most striking achievements was Mead's alertness in generalizing the theory of relativity. --H.W.S. The Philosophy o! No: A Philosophy of the New Scientific Mind. By Gaston Bachelard. Trans. G. C. Waterstou. (New York. Grossmann Publishers, 1968. Pp. xi+123. $6) This is a translation of a volume first published by the Presses Universitaires de France in 1940 under the title La Philosophic du non. The following titles of the six chapters indicate the subject matter: "The Various Metaphysical Explanations of a Scientific Concept,.... The 106 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Notion of an Epistemological Profile," "Non-substantiaIism, the Preliminaries of a NonLavoisian Chemistry," "The Elementary Spatial Connections of Noa-analytics," "Non-Axistotelian Logic," and "The Synthetic Value of the 'philosophy of No."" --H. W. S. Pleasure and Pain: A Study in Philosophical Psychology. By J...