On the History of Modern Philosophy (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 621 can be already found in his lectures: dialectic in formal logic leads to the illusions of sophistry. Logic cannot be used as an organon. It is only a canon, a negative criterion of truth. Conrad's book deals only with the architectonic of the first Cr/t/que and its roots in Kant's conception of formal logic on the highest level of generality. Questions about the substructures of the architectonic are never mentioned. Why is it, for instance, that the copulative judgment, and with it conjunction, present in the logical textbooks of the time, in Meier, and in Kant's reflections, vanishes somewhere in the development leading to the first Cr/t/que and the Jaesche Logic? Was it dropped only because there was no place for it in the construction of a balanced architectonic of the table of judgments? Is this another of the surprising movements in Kant's logic, like the move from the disjunctive judgment to the category of reciprocal causation? A student of logic knows that the biconditional is the natural logical counterpart of reciprocal causality, but also that the biconditional is precisely the negation of strict disjunction. Even logical problems belonging to the highest level of the architectonic analyzed in the book are not mentioned. Definition and division of concepts had their place in the textbooks of the time, in Meier, and in Kant's lectures in the chapter on concept in the doctrine of elements. Its place in the Jaesche Logic is taken by the doctrine of method. Virtually nothing else can be found in the doctrine of method, i.e., this doctrine has no function at all in formal logic except as a replacement for definition and division. The author is an excellent philologist and her skill in the techniques of the historical reconstruction of terminological and conceptual developments is outstanding . But she has, it seems, no interest in genuine logical questions. The book is a serious disappointment for readers interested in formal logic in the narrower sense and, therefore, also in transcendental logic. THOMAS M. Sv.EBOH~t Johannes Gutenberg-Universitiit, Mainz F. W. J. von Schelling. On the History of Modern Philosophy. Translation, Introduction, and Notes by Andrew Bowie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xi + 195. Cloth, $54.95. Paper, $17.95. As long as Schelling's philosophical achievement was framed within the familiar dialectical structure of German idealism as defined by Hegel, it was perhaps inevitable that his later philosophy, much of which explicitly challenged and went beyond that tradition , could be dismissed as a lengthy and bizarre false path. Walter Schulz's and, more recently, Manfred Frank's efforts to reconsider the significance of the later Schelling have elicited considerable critical reaction in Germany and France but as yet have found few echoes among English-language scholars. Therefore the appearance of the present translation is an especially welcome event, even if one does not share Bowie's view that the lectures On theHistory ofModern Philosophy is "the best text through which [to] approach the work of the later Schelling" (x). Bowie bases this claim on the fact that the Lectures, as he calls them, contain the most extended version of Schelling's insight- 622 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:4 OCTOBER 1996 ful and influential critique of Hegel, and that parts of the Lectures, for which he gives a probable date of 1833-34 or 1836-37, were adopted almost verbatim in Schelling's 1841-42 Berlin lectures, showing that Schelling thought well enough of these criticisms to repeat them even while occupying what had formerly been Hegel's chair in philosophy. Bowie's introduction situates Schelling in his historical moment, and retells the history of German idealism not as the story of the triumphant Hegelian synthesis, but as a developing demonstration of why Hegel's attempt to reach a final resolution in philosophy did not and could not succeed. This effort is carried on in greater detail in Bowie's Schelling and Modern European Philosophy (London, 1993), which also presents an audacious yet elegant argument for Schelling's relevance to our present postmetaphysical plight. The signal achievement of the introduction to...