Fundamental Ethical Questions Research Articles

Chaucer by George Kane

REVIEWS 136.32: For "heuen" read "heuene." 135, 137, 139: Running heads missing from these pages. 210.18: Read "pat is nought wipseide." DAVID C. FOWLER University of Washington GEORGE KANE. Chaucer. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984. Pp. vi, 122. $12.95. George Kane's Chaucer, one of the Past Masters Series, is a short book with no notes and a brief index. The first chapter is about Chaucer's life, the rest about his works in chronological order with glances at his life and times. It is hard to know for whom the series is intended; sometimes the reader is assumed not to know the text of Chaucer, at other times to know it well. But Chaucer scholars will enjoy it as a sage personal essay by a delightful and intelligent man. The decreed lack of notes leaves unsupported some surprising assertions. For instance, Kane gives the date of Chaucer's birth as "late 1345 or early 1346" (p. 4). This must be based on the records of the Scrope-Grosvenor trial, 1386, which state that he was then "forty years of age etplus." Kane's reckoning (which ignores et plus) would make Chaucer about fourteen when he was made an esquire and about eleven when he went into the Countess of Ulster's service (p. 11). But merchant-class boys were rarely sent away from home before fourteen (when adolescentia began) or sent into battle before sixteen. Again, can one say that "the country was full of those love-songs of [Chaucer's] youth" (p. 36), none of which have sur­ vived? Did Chaucer really make a "decision to write in English" (p. 4)? If so, can we ignore James Wimsatt's argument that his first poems were in French? Would "everyone in the small world of court and London offi­ cialdom" have known Chaucer "since he was a boy" (pp. 36-37)? This spirit of genteel amateurism is an English phenomenon that Ameri­ cans do not always take to. Kane draws no line between his own notions and others', names no scholars or critics, argues with no one; he breezily identifies quotations by page numbers in the Robinson edition-let the reader comb through two long columns if he mustlook something up. The premise is that readers are lost in their private worlds anyway, that distinc209 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER tion in such a book depends on panache and prestige, that being "responsi­ ble" is boring-as, alas, it often is. Such writing is not criticism or schol­ arship; it is a form ofautobiography with the 'Ts" left out, but when done well it is interesting. Kane writes with great elegance, and his small book is full ofexpansive thoughts. "Dante's geography, erudite enough," he observes on page 45, "was bookish andtheoretical. Chaucer's had been physically experienced as seasickness, saddle-stiffness, surly natives, fleas in bad inns." He is very perspicacious about Chaucer and Boccaccio, Chaucer's relations with women (including Cecily Champain), his depression in his last years, and much more. Few have written more concretely ofChaucer's development. His earlier work shows "a sense of the bankruptcy of a poetic mode at best declined into frivolity, at worst spurious, and it suggests a contempt for Machaut" (p. 45). The House ofFame was about Chaucer's identity as a poet and about "truth in report and poetry," written in an experimental spirit that produced an ironic relation with his audience. "The self-mockery," Kane says, "began as aprotectivescreen, to hide the excitement ofthe poet about a new kind ofpoetry, and himselfas a new kind ofperson, which he feared might not be understood.... We shall never see Chaucer reveal himself like this again" (pp. 39-40). The Parliament ofFowls, which is about the negotiationsfor Richard II's marriage to AnneofBohemia,was intended as a mirror for princes: in it Chaucer reached a point where poetry and philosophical reflection became one. Kane characterizes Trozlus and Criseyde as Chaucer's magnum opus, a genuinely philosophical work. Of The Canterbury Tales, which he charac­ terizes as a "human tragicomedy," he points up fundamental ethical questions: "Chaucer's speculative intellect penetrated to the deepest philo...

The Theory of Categories by Franz Brentano

nooK REVIEWS 493 ideal is easily enough asserte.d, but it is more difficult to deal with the limitations and imperfections which reality consistently presents. The social strategist deals in imperfect (sinful) reality, and his strategy will reflect an awareness of that imperfection and sin; Roman Catholics optimistic about human nature frequently back away from the relative evil which realistic efficient strategy so often involves. Posner is a good reminder that strategy is inevitably realistic or it is doomed to fail. Finally, what is to be said about Posner's picture of human nature' He accurately describes contemporary Americans, but perhaps we are not typically human. We are maybe homo economicus, but is that a true description of all humans T Are all humans over the ages "rational maximizers of our satisfactions "' Because Americans do meet this description , an economic ethic for social justice is attractive and presumably consistent. But the real ethical question is not whether we are rational maximizers of our satisfactions, but whether we ought to be such. Again, Posner does not address such fundamental ethical questions. If he proposes to continue speaking of his work as an ethic, he must speak more directly to a set of issues which underlie his present theory and which perennially invite the insights of all thoughtful persons, including economists. St. Thomas House University of Virginia Charlottesville, Virginia WILLIAM J. FINAN, O.P. The Theory of Categories. By FRANZ BRENTANO. Translated by Roderick Chisholm and Norbert Guterman. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1981. Melbourne International Philosophy Series, volume 18, Pp. 275. $49.50. Although the title of Brentano's study of the categories might call Kant to mind, the book in fact develops from Aristotle's ideas and seldom refers to Kant at all. The Kantian revival at the end of the nineteenth century left Brentano cold. Instead, he drew his inspiration from his Dominican training and from his teacher, the great Aristotelian scholar, Adolph Trendelenburg. Brentano was too original a thinker simply to repeat Aristotle, but he claimed just to be carrying on where that master left off. Writers since Aristotle have just confused the issue, Brentano says; and a true understanding of the categories will not be achieved until one starts from Aristotle, at the same time feeling free to correct his ideas when necessary. 494 BOOK REVIEWS The Theory of the Categories thus takes its place along with Brentano's four Aristotelian studies, three of which have recently been translated by Rolf George. The relationship is especially close with Brentano's first book, his dissertation On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle, published in 1862. Two-thirds of this early book is taken up with the senses of being that Aristotle distinguishes according to the figures of the categories . The Theory of the Categories consists of essays written at the other end of his life, between 1907 and 1917, the year of his death. Yet it is almost as if Brentano here, in one of his last books, is determined to complete and modify his dissertation, and the editor has therefore appropriately entitled the first third of the book on categories "The Strict and Extended Senses of Being" to indicate the continuity with the earlier work. Unlike the four Aristotle studies, however, The Theory of Categories is intended primarily as a contribution to systematic rather than to historical philosophy. The Aristotle volumes discuss one passage from the classic works after another, and they are copiously footnoted to Aristotle and bis commentators, so that their main interest for contemporary readers lies in the way they elucidate Aristotelian texts. The book on categories, on the other hand, dispenses by and large with citations from Aristotle and other thinkers and deals with issues as they arise for Brentano's own system. The difference between the early and the late work is also partly the result of a change in Brentano. In the years since On the Several Senses, Brentano's thinking on epistemology and metaphysics had gone through several stages and had become increasingly independent and creative. By writing this late book on an Aristotelian theme, Brentano thereby provided us a measure of the distance he had come since his first...

In loco parentis: the child model of psychiatry, a critique.

I have attempted to show that much of psychiatric treatment now and in the last two centuries has been conceptualized and practiced along the lines of a child model. In my discussion of what I consider the inappropriate use of this model I have suggested that it obscures certain fundamental legal, moral and ethical questions involved in the practice of psychiatry. Because psychiatry is still a relatively young science, and still very much involved in the process of determining its relation to the people it seeks to serve, we must be ever alert to the consequences, intended or unintended, of using a particular model. An we must do this in the contex of our professional and cultural history.