Philosophical Virtue Research Articles

A Death-Blow to Śaṅkara's Non-Dualism? A Dualist Refutation

Many of us, and I am no exception, have been led to assume, almost un-consciously, that Śankara is India's greatest philosopher and that the non-dualist philosophy he consolidated, Advaita Vedānta, is the supreme spiritual philosophy of India, if not of the whole world. Dualist (Dvaita) opponents like Madhva, on the other hand, have usually been appreciated very little, if at all. Several of my colleagues think of Madhva as a reactionary, if brilliant, theist whose philosophy best serves as a foil to Śankara's. Madhva, it almost seems, is studied not for his own philosophical virtues but as a means the better to appreciate Śankara's. I believe that we must weigh more carefully the dualist position, particularly its trenchant critique of non-dualism. We may discover in the process that Śankara, whatever else he was – brilliant stylist, mystic par excellence, deft polemicist – was not the originator or consolidator of anything like an internally consistent metaphysics.

Brief Notices

BRIEF NOTICES Psychology-The Study of Man's Normal Mental Life. By FRs. CHAHLES P. BRUEHL and WILLIAM E. CAMPBELL. Villanova, Pa.: Villanova Press, 1957. Pp. 384 with index. $5.50. The science of psychology seems to be, at the present time, in the difficult but not unenviable position of an enormously rich man who would like to take an accounting of his holdings. Decades of laboratory research, masses of clinical reports, the results of widespread application to practical purposes, the revelations of psychoanalysis and the cogitations of philosophies new and old have produced quantities of pertinent data and varieties of interpretations, almost beyond what any one man can any longer hope to assimilate. The cry is now for synthesis-for the far reaching and deep probing formulae which will organize and coordinate the multitude of facts. The ground needs dearing for more fruitful research and study. The beginning student, and the average man who wants quick and thorough psychological information, stand in need of a basic summary of sound and acceptable psychology. Psychologists are certainly responding to the felt need, according to the annual testimony of the book lists, but, to date, no one book has appeared which threatens to sweep the field before it. It is not easy to synthesize a science as complex as psychology, and especially a science whose frontiers fade almost imperceptibly into ethics, religion, sociology and a host of other disciplines in which value judgments more or less dominate. Neither is it satisfactory to try to delimit psychology from its natural tendency to impinge. For the present, psychologists have to be satisfied with the best that they can do, until the generally satisfactory synthesis can be achieved. The authors of the book under review have taken the general principles of scholastic psychology as their synthesizing principles, and, for their purpose or aim, the integration of contemporary psychological findings with these and by these principles, in a form more descriptive than analytical , and definitely oriented toward practical application. From this account, some of the virtues of the book might be surmised. It is orderly and it has depth. Its order is simplicity itself, beginning with the general introductory notions and then proceeding through the range of psychological activities from the lowest and external to the highest and most internaL Adequate account is taken throughout of the relative positions of the several psychological schools. The concluding section deals with the inferences 300 BRIEF NOTICES 301 which may validly be drawn from the evidences of activities to the nature of the principles of these activities. The integration of philosophical principle and empirical finding is smooth -a smoothness which bears out, in practice at least, the authors' contention that psychology is not a dualistic but an integral science. This is a defini- . tion towards which the reviewer also leans strongly, and he only regrets that its validity is not always sufficiently safeguarded in the text, and never demonstrated. If, however, the definition is ample enough in this respect, it is less than ample, from a traditional point of view, in limiting the subject of psychology to ' mind,' to the exclusion of broader considerations of 'life,'-an exclusiveness which has no particular philosophical virtue, and which must sooner or later be abandoned in any event in order to describe many mental processes adequately. Otherwise, however, the matter is presented very completely, within the limits expected of an elementary text, and is especially good in the coverage of more general psychological states and processes, such as perception, attention, suggestion, etc. The summary technique is used successfully, and the occasional digressions into more or less homespun " appreciations " and practical counsels lighten and enrich the course of the exposition. The real strength, however, of this text is description. The authors have not only taken their stand on principles of realistic doctrine, but also on the principles of realistic exposition. It is one thing to make realistic judgments of facts, and another thing to present them in a style which conveys a sense of their reality, a sense of the data consonant with everyday experience . In no science is this more important than in psychology, whose supject matter is daily present to everyone...