Philosophical Analysis and Human Values. Selected Essays from Six Decades (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 367 "feet"? Should faithfulness to the original be ignored in such cases? But then decisions would have to be made as to just which cases. Or should the whole phrase be listed? And how many such phrases? Similar, and far less trivial, examples abound in the Investigations; and this is not because the translation is insufficientlyliteral. I do not know whether it would have been practicable to provide the present concordance with an appendix of English key words and phrases with their various German equivalents. But I am inclined to think that there is no wholly satisfactory solution to the problem posed by the fact that the Philosophische Untersuchungen has a predominantly English-speaking readership. The work is important enough to deserve a concordance, and this one will be helpful to those who can make use of it. HUBERTSCHWYZER University of California, Santa Barbara Philosophical Analysis and Human Values."Selected Essays from Six Decades. By Dickinson S. Miller. Ed. and Intro. Loyd D. Easton. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1975. Pp. x + 333) At the end of an essay on Matthew Arnold included in this volume, Dickinson Miller declares, "The truth is that because Arnold wrote on the most deep-reaching problems with a sustained simplicity of language and of touch academic scholars have at no time fully perceived his power as a philosopher." I believe that Miller wished to apply in his writing Arnold's purpose and even to an extent his style. And he may well have felt that the "academic scholars" of his time failed to perceive his achievements with respect to these, excepting, perhaps, William James in Miller's early days and Herbert Feigl in later years. In general, however, his reputation has been uncertain and recognition comparatively slight. Undoubtedly this is accounted for by the fact that his publications have been scattered in periodicals and relatively inaccessible symposia. Up to now his only published book was his slim (37 page) doctoral dissertation, Das Wesen der Erkenntnis und des lrrthums, which appeared in 1893. Most of this work, translated by Miller himself, appeared in the same year in the Philosophical Review 2 (1893):408-425, with the title "The Meaning of Truth and Error." Loyd Easton, who was Miller's assistant from 1940 to 1942, has now made possible wider recognition of Miller's power--and other characteristics--as a philosopher. In his preface he writes that early in their association he realized that he "had encountered an unusuallypowerful, acute and original mind." It is a principal merit of the collection of papers assembled in this book that the force of Miller's thought and teaching is brought to clear focus. Miller had projected but never completed two books, one to be called "Inquiry, Analytical or Sceptical," the other "Analysis at Work," on which he worked up to the last year of his long life (1868-1963), and for which he also proposed various alternative titles: "Revolution in Ethics," or "Principles of Practical Intelligence," or "Intelligence, How and Why It Has Not Been Taught." Of the three sections into which Easton has now divided Miller's papers, the middle and longest one is entitled "Analysis: the Method of Philosophy at Work" and presumably contains much of what Miller planned for the book on "Inquiry." The concludingsection of the present volume at least offers applications that would apparently have been used in Miller's other projected book. Thus I think Easton's achievement will make possible for Dickinson Miller's work as a whole what he himself discerned (see p. 145, n. 1) as a particular contributionof Josiah Royce's, namely, that it "should be acknowledged in the history of philosophy." There are two signal contributionsin these" Selected Essays and Chapters from Six Decades," Easton's felicitous subtitle for his volume, to which the attention of students of the history of philosophy should be particularly directed. The first section of the book is headed "Teachers and Teaching" and contains notable essays on George Stuart Fullerton, William James, and George Santayana. Together with two additional papers on James in the later sections and two on David Hume, they are significant chapters in the philosophic history of ideas. Of...