BOOK REVIEWS 313 viewing his own rational dogmatism as an adequate answer to the quidjuris, he interpreted it as the expression of a demand, as (in Engsder's words) "the formulation of the assertoric-hypothetical imperative of our cognition." One hopes that Engsfler's brief but suggestive discussion of this late phase of Maimon's philosophy will stimulate others to explore this topic more fully. What were Maimon's real philosophical intentions? Did he wish to "complete" the Kantian philosophy? Did he mean to construct an original system of his own? Or was he a fundamentally eclectic thinker, intent upon constructing (in his own phrase) a "Coalitionsystem" which would reconcile the theories of Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant? "None of the above" is Engstler's answer. Instead, he suggests that the key to understanding Maimon is to appreciate that his philosophical interests were always focused Upon specificproblems. In stark contrast to most of his contemporaries he was not a "systematic thinker" at all, but was a Problemd, enker--a "fox," if you will, not a "hedgehog." Engsfler himself attaches extraordinary importance to this feature of Maimon's Den/tart (which he rather boldly attributes to his "Talmudic education") and concludes by calling explicit attention to the fundamental difference between Maimon's aporetic way of thinking and the systematic method characteristic of Fichte, a difference which he finds to be much more important than any similarities between their specific views. In the.end, Engstler seems haunted by a vision of the "road not taken" in German philosophy, described by Dilthey as follows: "If the method of analysis developed by Lambert, Kant, and Maimon had been pursued .... then the path taken by our philosophy would have been entirely different." How successful is Engsfler's "revised" interpretation of Maimon? It is a complete success. No reader of this monograph is ever likely to view Maimon as an acute critic who tried to "improve" Kant's philosophy by eliminating the "thing in itself" and succeeded merely in opening the path toward the Wissenschaftslehre. Beyond this, Engsfler's admirable study makes a significant contribution toward obtaining an accurate understanding of Maimon's own, highly original philosophical standpoint and will, perhaps, lead new readers to discover the works of this fascinating thinker. In an age which clearly prefers foxes to hedgehogs, Maimon may at last have found his public. DANIEL BREAZEALE UniversityofKentt~ky Allen W. Wood. Hegel'sEthical Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 199o. Pp. xxi + 293. Cloth, $49.5o. This book is at once a detailed account of Hegel's social and political thought (Parts 2 to 4 being devoted respectively to Abstract Right, Morality, and Ethical Life) and an account (in Part 1) of the "philosophical foundations" thereof. Such foundations are not to be looked for in Hegel's speculative metaphysics, whose dismissal is so 314 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30:2 APRIL X992 brief as to be little more than a dogmatic assurance that Hegel's speculative logic is dead, but rather in his ethical theory, what we might call his metaethics. In other words, the foundations of Hegel's political theory are a rational ethics, not a rational theodicy (8). This ethical theory turns out to be a "rather Aristotelian variety of ethical naturalism " (19), a theory better conceived as a self-actualization theory than either a deontological or a teleological theory. Its affinity with the classical naturalisms of Plato and Aristotle is found in its willingness, unlike contemporary empirically oriented naturalisms, to be "unashamedly part of a philosophical tradition of grand theorizing about human nature and history" (33). But it differs from its classical predecessors in two ways. First, it is a dialectical or historicized naturalism that does not take human nature to be timelessly given. It is thus a theory about practical reason under the conditions of modernity. Second, it views the highest human good as freedom rather than happiness . Chapter 9 is devoted to explicating Hegel's understanding of freedom and Chapter 3 to his reasons for giving it priority over happiness. Because of the care with which they attend 1) to the relevant texts from Hegel's corpus, e) to the immediate philosophical context, primarily Kant...
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Dec 1, 1997
Alexander Kaufman 
Open Access