Reason and Argument by P. T. Geach

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 6!l5 mative renderings of some of the concerns of mystics both east and west. Because the book is a good one, I have discussed only King's major themes. Let me conclude this review by recalling that at its outset I remarked that King's effort is notable because it is a judicious mixture of exposition and criticism. I strongly suspect that in some of the places where I have taken issue with the author my doing so stems from the fact that the book is that combination but only that. It does not reflect any lengthy speculative or creative effort in philosophy. I realize that the context in which doctoral dissertations are written is scarely conducive to such effort, so that King cannot be held entirely and perhaps not even primarily responsible for this omission. Nevertheless, there is nothing like wrestling with a problem yourself to help you to understand more fully what another man does when he deals with it. I think that King has another good book in him-a book by King on the issues, not a book by King on somebody else. If he writes that book, I will read it, and if he writes another book on Sartre after he does that one, I will read it too, because it will be even better than this one. Meanwhile I urge the reader to buy Sartre and the Sacred. It is well worth the time and effort. Allegheny College Pittsburgh, Penna. JAMES F. SHERIDAN, JR. Reason and Argument. By P. T. GEACH. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976. Pp. 99. This cultivated, this delightful, this droll little book has but one drawback : what to do with it. One could not use it as an introductory logic text-except for Chapters 10-16 and perhaps 17. But even here the propositional calculus is treated in streamlined and cursory fashion and the presentation is a quick sketch. One could not apply its offerings to the understanding of judgment, belief, certainty, or evidential confirmation; for the book fails to distinguish adequately among explicit, implicit, dispositional , conscious, de dicto, de re, and all the other standard dichotomies of belief which flourish in contemporary philosophy. Nor can it be called a catalogue of epistemological or logical results. And although each of its splendidly terse chapters concludes with interesting discussion questions , it is too charming to be a textbook. It is, as the author says in his introduction, a book for self-improvement d~signed to give the reader enough formal logic to encourage the hope and the desire for rationality but enough informal logic to leave him eased with the thought that good logic is not necessarily the preserve of specialists or a form of abstract art arising out of Principia Mathematica. 626 BOOK REVIEWS The book has nineteen chapters with an average length of three to five pages per chapter. Fundamental epistemological and logical topics are touched on and the orientation is toward acknowledgment of correct forms, themes, and schemes for reasoning and away from formal preciosity. All topics are presented heuristically and the author has used both Venn Diagrams and Lewis Carroll Cells, the latter to particular advantage in representing multi-termed arguments and in analysing valid plurative arguments -those making quantificational use of terms like " most " and " more than half of." The reviewer knows of no book similar in purpose and in length which gives such substantial treatment to plurative arguments. The printing and binding are very good and the typefaces are easy to read. Most typographical errors are negligible except for one on page 86 where Tractatus proposition 6.37~ is incorrectly referred to as 6.73~ and the reviewer feels that the German original should have appeared in a footnote. The book is recommended as a supplement to a standard logic text in an introductory course and as a fine useful primer to any reader interested in logic but wary of technicalities. Dominican House of Studies Washington, D. O. NICHOLAS INGHAM, 0. P. Aristotle on Emotion. By W. W. FoRTENBAUGH. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Pp. 101. The major thesis of this book is that a more rigorous and sophisticated examination of the...