Philosophy after Darwin: Chapters for "The Career of Philosophy," volume 3, and Other Essays (review)

Abstract

274 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Milanesi, in an introductory chapter, surveys the long and heated controversies provoked by Dewey's earlier works, especially by his insistence that means and ends cannot be separated, being aspects of a single process of valuation, that values are practical facts not transcendental, and that "the logical conditions of a scienfitic treatment of morality" are those of experimental judgment. Then he analyzes carefully Human Natttre and Conduct as the best statement of Dewey's ethics. This basic work, published in 1922, was not translated into Italian until 1958. It is recommended by Milanesi as still fundamental. The most important part, however, of Milanesi's exposition is his detailed analysis of the close relations between Dewey's theory of scientific ethics and his theory of the logic of inquiry, including Dewey's final development (with Arthur Bentley) of the theory of transaction, as it was published in Knowing and the Known. This work, too, was translated into Italian in 1958 by Visalberghi. In this way Milanesi succeeds in presenting the historical development of Dewey's ideas on valuation and ethics from the early works of 1891 to the very last attempt by Dewey to interpret moral judgment as practical action and inquiry, rather than as a purely logical, theoretical form of knowledge. There is one phase of this development which Milanesi, and other historians, fail to emphasize. The supposed "continuity" in Dewey's theory of ethics was radically broken in 1894, when, apparently aroused by some reading in Darwin and in William James, he suddenly shifted his psychology from "will" to "interest" and began to analyze the human self as a bundle of interests which moral judgment and reflection must "mediate" or harmonize. I cite Dewey's own statement of this crisis in his thought as he records it in the Prefactory Note to the Syllabus (1894): The edition of my Outlines of Ethics having been exhausted, I have prepared the following pages, primarily for the use and guidance of my own students. The demand for the former book seems, however, to justify the belief that, amid the prevalence of pathologicaland moralistic ethics, there is room for a theory which conceives of conduct as the normal and free living of life as it is. The present pages, it may be added, are in no sense a second edition of the previous book. On the contrary, they undertake a thorough psychological examination of the process of active experience, and a derivation from this analysis of the chief ethical types and crises--a task, so far as I know, not previously attempted. HERBERT W. SCHNEIDER Clarernont Graduate School John Herman Randall, Jr. Philosophy aJter Darwin: Chapters Jbr "The Career of Philosophy ," volume 3, and Other Essays. Edited by Beth J. Singer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. Pp. x + 352. $17.50. Since the publication, in 1965, of Volume II of Prof. Randall's The Career of Philosophy , the third volume has been awaited. It was to be entitled "The Hundred years since Darwin," and was to deal with the differing adjustments in the various national philosophic traditions to the new problems posed by Darwin, Clerk-Maxwell and later innovators. It is unfortunate that a sudden and serious break in Dr. Randall's health denied to him full enjoyment of his retirement and denies to us any such third volume. We have instead the volume under review, containing twelve essays: four of them parts of Career ill not BOOK REVIEWS 275 only completed but already separately published, four others completed but published here for the first time; and four other previously published essays not intended to be chapters in that volume but whose concern with significant twentieth-century thinkers (Dewey, Cassirer, TiUich) justifies their inclusion. In addition, we are given, in an appendix , two uncompleted chapters and the most recent (1969) of Randall's proposed outlines for the whole volume. At the behest of Professor and Mrs. Randall, these have been put together and painstakingly edited by Beth J. Singer. Randall's plan is clear from the outline: Book VII was to be on "coming to terms with natural science," Book VIII on "philosophies of science" and the final...