La filosofia del novecento (review)

Abstract

280 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY to continue to teach at Angers, might have had to "repent" and might have been condemned by his superior, but, nonetheless, he was able to publish and spread his up-to-date version of the Cartesian-Malebranchist-humanist message. And his version was both scientifically sound and Christian in spirit, tone, and content. Dr. Girbal's book is a valuable addition to our information about late seventeenth-century thought. One can only wish it was a larger and deeper study of this subject. He promises us an edition of Lamy's Entretiens sur les sciences and Art de parler, which should contribute greatly to enlarging our picture of "le mouvement des idSes au XVII" si~cle." RICHARD H. POPKIN University o] California, San Diego La filosofia del novecento. [Parte Seconda]. Eredit~ del criticismo e del positivismo. Neoidealismo e neo-realismo anglo-americano. La fenomenologoa. L'esistenzialismo. By E. Paolo Lamanna. (Firenze, Felice Le Monnier [1964]. Pp. 539. : Author's Storia della filosofia. Vol. VI. L. 3800.) This second volume of Lamanna's great three-volume survey of philosophy in the twentieth century continues the history which should become a classic immediately. Superficially, the work has the form of successive expositions of the systems of almost all the major phiIosophers up to mid-century, but it is much more: for there is a substantial continuity of analysis of problems underlying the presentations of individual systems. Though the author is as objective and dispassionate as seems humanly possible and desirable, he is evidently himself a philosopher, for otherwise he could not expound so well, so critically, and so sympathetically the variety of systems which constitute our recent past and complicate our present. I cannot refrain from referring to a disconcerting fact at the outset, which surely any reader will discover for himself, that this twentieth century is not a period of history intelligible as a whole per Be. For no matter what happens during its second half, the century is already broken in two. The revolutions of our time become conspicuous as we look back a generation or two. Our "heritage" already seems too foreign to be useful. This volume, even more than the first, leaves the impression that the story told by the author must begin well back in the last third of the nineteenth century, and that it seems to come to some kind of an end at present. There comes over the reader an irresistible impression that Lamanna is doing well as a historian when he dates the contents of his "twentieth century" history from 1870 to 1960. The story begins well before the twentieth century and seems to have reached an end. The opening scene of this volume, devoted to "the heritage of criticism and positivism of the nineteenth century," takes us back rightly to our immediate intellectual sources, though they already appear remote. On the book's jacket, besides and above the relatively familiar face of Heidegger, there stare at us, almost like ghosts, the unfamiliar faces of F. H. Bradley and of Husserl. Bradley's face was unfamiliar even in his own day, for he was an Oxford recluse. It is an eloquent face, inquisitive but quizzical, good-natured but sceptical. It makes a striking contrast to the stern, professorial face of Husserl. The story which is built up on the foundation of Bradley and Husserl brings back to life many too readily forgotten names which were still very much alive during the early years of our century: Shadworth Hodgson, Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Lotze, Hamelin, and Brunschvicg. Then follow Bosanquet, McTaggart, Royce, Cassirer, and a dozen lesser lights whose careers straddled the centuries. Throughout the early part of the story a "gnoseological problematicity" holds the center of attention. The Absolute, which emerges from the attempt to bring perfect order out of appearances , gradually loses its cosmic, eternal consciousness and becomes transfigured into a "~cial objectivity" on a more human level. Then comes the story of the realists in England and America who, wearied with appearances, faced the external world boldly and explored external relations. Reality now makes its appearance as a temporal, social process, stripped of its Hegelian logic. In vivid...