The New American Philosophers by Andrew J. Reck

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 739 believe that the Messiah has come while Jews still await His coming-is neither exact nor complete. While the traditional Jew hopes that the Messiah will come, so does the Christian who expects Christ's return in splendor and majesty, when the full glory of God will be disclosed and the rich first fruits of our redemption made manifest, when a new heaven and a new earth will be a reality and the petition, " Thy kingdom come," lastingly fulfilled. Thus Christians and Jews are bound together, not only by their faith in the one living God and their love for him but also by their hope in the ultimate realization of God's reign. They are an ecumene, a brotherhood, sharing in this eschatological hope. A greater or mere appealing theme cannot be imagined for our despairridden age, and this volume admirably and beautifully continues the conciliatory work of its predecessors. Saint John's University Jamaica, New York THOMAS P. MALLAGHAN, c. M. The New American Philosophers. By ANDREW J. REcK. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968. Pp. 349. $8.95. A sequel to his Recent American Philosophy (New York, 1964) which treated of American philosophy between the two world wars, Reck's The New American Philosophy concentrated on American philosophy since World War II. While the latter book stands on its own, it is nonetheless similar to its predecessor in purpose and format. In each case Reck's aim is to " demonstrate the richness, diversity and originality of American philosophy during the Twentieth century." And in each book he accomplishes his end by expounding in general terms the thought of well-known American philosophers who have expressed their views on a variety of philosophical fields and in a number of book-length works. Moreover, his general purpose is served by keeping criticism to a minimum. For Reck feels that to pause to criticize is to interrupt the process of revealing the total development of the thought of the philosopher under consideration. In The New American Philosophy Reck presents essays on no less than twelve philosophers. These are: C. I. Lewis, Stephen Pepper, Brand Blanchard, Ernest Nagel, John Herman Randall, Justus Buchler, Sidney Hook, F. S. C. Northrop, James K. Feibleman, John Wild, Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. We shall here comment on just three of Reck's essays, namely, his expositions of the philosophies of C. I. Lewis, Brand Blanchard and John Wild respectively. The author's account of C. I. Lewis's "conceptualistic pragmatism" has 740 BOOK REVIEWS much to recommend it. While correctly classifying Lewis as a logical empiricist, Reck takes pains to show not only how Lewis's account of analytic truth differs from that of the Vienna Circle version of logical empiricism but also how this difference is rooted in Lewis's rather sophisticated neo-Kantian epistemology. As Reck fully recognizes, analytic statements for Lewis are true not by reference to linguistic meaning but by reference to what Lewis calls sense meaning. And this sense meaning of an analytic statement is something akin to Kant's concept of a schema. Further, Reck ably unfolds the pragmatic feature in Lewis's analysis of meaning as well as the paradox which attends that feature. For on the one hand, the relation between the sense meanings of an analytic statement. are necessary and unalterable according to Lewis; but on the other hand, it is, for Lewis, we human beings who for our own purposes decide what characteristics are to be packed into these meanings. But this paradox is not an inconsistency. In Reck's essay on Blanchard two items especially stand out for the insight they provide into Blanchard's thought. First is the account given of Blanchard's concept of the teleological relation between idea and object and the relationship that that account has both to the Platonic paradox of knowledge and to Blanchard's overall rationalism. This important aspect of Blanchard's philosophy is not often stressed. To the extent that an idea is its object in posse, the two are both identical and different. But this identity in difference is exactly what is called for to explain the fact of knowledge...