Twentieth-century Philosophy Research Articles

Content and Criticism: the aims of schooling

A number of recent writers have urged that schools not try to foster critical thinking in students, and this attack on what had lately emerged as very widely held to be a central aim of schooling is examined and found wanting. The debate is placed in the context of the evolving discussion in twentieth-century philosophy of education of critical thinking as an educational aim, and it is argued that the distinctions and arguments which are needed to rebut the attack on critical thinking can in large measure be found in the literature from Dewey on.

When Are Technologies Sustainable?

During the latter half of the twentieth century philosophers of science have devoted considerable attention to the incommensurability of competing scientific theories. This paper applies elements of these discussions to the question, "When Are Technologies Sustainable?" It identifies an incommensurability issue accompanying the topic of sustainable technological practices and locates it within contrasting stable-state and growth-oriented economic models. While it is not argued that intra-theoretic incommensurability completely prevents meaningful discussions between these rival models, it is contended that disagreements about the meaning of "sustainability" are not purely technical in nature. The point is defended that coming to understand the issue in the "sustainability" debate involves "framing the issue" or "grasping the point" of each competing approach. "Sustainability," as an idea that functions incommensurably in rival economic theories, can best be analyzed as a Wittgensteinian "form of life." This characterization will lead to the identification of normative factors that typically are missing from attempts to characterize technological practices as sustainable or unsustainable.

The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, and: Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (review)

Reviewed by: The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy, and: Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde Tom Quirk The Crisis in Modernism: Bergson and the Vitalist Controversy. Edited by Frederick Burwick and Paul Douglass. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xv + 405. $74.95. Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde. Mark Antliff. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Pp. xii + 237. In his fine contribution to the collection of essays in The Crisis in Modernism, Richard Lehan observes that Bergson “undid the notions of mechanism and teleology, undercut both Enlightenment and Darwinian assumptions, gave weight to the modernist belief that art is the highest function of our activity, and helped establish the modernist belief that the universe is inseparable from mind and that the self is created out of memory. If the moderns did not have Bergson, they would have had to invent him” (311). Of course the moderns did have Bergson, but the fact did not prevent them from inventing him anyway, and the overly eager appropriations and reformulations of his thought prior to the Great War were so widespread that it was common to speak of an international “Bergson mania.” The point is worth making because, though no one would dispute Bergson’s central importance to modernism, we are, more than a hundred years after the publication of Time and Free Will (1889), far from reaching a consensus on the extent or the consequences of that influence. It seems implausible, not to say outlandish, to claim that Bergson is a neglected figure in twentieth-century intellectual and cultural history. Nevertheless, the editors of The Crisis in Modernism are entirely justified in suggesting that Bergson’s work may well represent “a repressed content of modern thought” (7), and their provocative and various collection of essays serves to substantiate that view. The volume is divided into three parts: historical background; vitalism in twentieth-century philosophy and science; and vitalism in twentieth-century literature and aesthetics. There is considerable slippage in this organization (George Rousseau’s essay on the background of vitalism, for example, carries well into the twentieth century, and Sanford Schwartz’s and Richard Lehan’s essays in the third section supply historical backgrounds of their own) but the arrangement is more or less satisfactory. In part 1, George Rousseau supplies a broad and highly particularized historical background to the vitalist movement, beginning with its origins in the biological debates between preformationists (mechanists) and epigeneticists (vitalists) in the Enlightenment and the manifold responses to Cartesian dualism and mechanistic hypotheses that cast doubts upon the active hand of a living creator. He follows the intricate course of vitalism through such romantics as Goethe, Novalis, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Thomas Carlyle, and ends with a consideration of the “new vitalism” of the German scientist and philosopher Hans Dreisch and Bergson. The concluding section of Rousseau’s essay serves in addition as an introduction to a never before translated essay by Mikhail Bakhtin entited “Contemporary Vitalism”—a thoroughgoing critique of Dreisch’s vitalism as founded upon unscientific metaphysical postulates, in particular his notion of equipotential systems and his revivification of Aristotle’s concept of entelechy as an explanatory principle. The first section is completed by more focused essays on particular antecedents to twentieth-century vitalism. Jack H. Hager considers Coleridge, in Hints Towards the Formation of a More Comprehensive Theory of Life and some of his unpublished writings, to have anticipated Bergson in several ways, but as having stopped short of articulating a full-blown immanentist philosophy. Frederick Burwick explores Sir Charles [End Page 175] Bell’s vitalist challenge to William Paley’s mechanistic Natural Theology; particularly in his study of the human hand, Bell argued that a mechanistic physiological explanation of how the sensory organization of the nervous system transmits information to the brain is deficient and requires the study of vital systems, rather than positing the concept of a vital essence to give a full account of this mystery. Finally, Frederick Amrine contests Nietzsche’s status as a Lebenphilosoph; his concept of life is essentially a drained one, at best a “semantic halo” (143). “If Nietzsche stands in...

Replies to Commentators

meanings, its decompositional analysis of underlying sense structure, and its promise of scientific discoveries about the nature of language contradict his purely descriptive approach to meaning. 3.5. Horwich puts forth the surprising view that Wittgenstein does not deny Platonism. If there is one uncontroversial thesis about twentieth century philosophy, it is that Wittgenstein rejects abstract objects in mathematics, logic, and language. Wittgenstein's naturalism is unequivocally opposed to objects which have no spatial or temporal location, are causally inert, and incorporeal. His approach to language is unequivocally against meanings which are perceptually hidden, exist independently of us, and hence stand apart from our form of life and its social practices. His conception of philosophy is unequivocally against essences or universals which are the subject of discoveries of significance in science and philosophy. In Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Basil Blackwell, 1956), Wittgenstein frequently and consistently rejects Platonism. He has a diatribe against mathematical alchemy (RFM, iv. 16). He says, The mathematician is an inventor, not a discoverer (RFM, I, p. 167). Similarly, I am trying to say something like this: Even if the proposition seems to point to a reality outside itself, still it only expresses acceptance of a new measure (of reality) (RFM, II, p. 30). Further,

Encounters and dialogues with Martin Heidegger, 1929-1976

Despite his predominance in twentieth-century philosophy, no intellectual biography of Martin Heidegger has yet appeared. This account of Heidegger's personal relations, originally published in German and extensively corrected by the author for this translation, enlarges our understanding of a complex figure. A well-known art historian and an intimate friend of Heidegger's, Heinrich Wiegand Petzet provides a rich portrait of Heidegger that is part memoir, part biography, and part cultural history. By recounting chronologically a series of encounters between the two friends from their meeting in 1929 until the philosopher's death in 1976, as well as between Heidegger and other contemporaries, Petzet reveals not only new aspects of Heidegger's thought and attitudes toward the historical and intellectual events of his time but also the greater cultural and social context in which he articulated his thought.

Reviews

Book reviewed in this article: Equality and Partiality. By Thomas Nagel. Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition”. By Charles Taylor. Autonomy and self‐respect. By Thomas E. Hill. Dignity and Practical Reason in Kant's Moral Theory. By Thomas E. Hill. Science and Subjectivity: The Vienna Circle and Twentieth Century Philosophy. Edited by David Bell and Wilhelm Vossenkuhl.

A Dialogical Model for Business Correspondence

Despite the fact that letters and memos are the most prevalent forms of written discourse in the business community, there has been little theoretical study of professional correspondence as a distinct rhetorical genre. A theory of correspondence as a form of dialogue can, however, be constructed with the help of two very different scholars, Erasmus and Bakhtin. Erasmus, the Renaissance humanist, offers a pragmatic guide to the practice of dialogue in correspondence, and Bakhtin, the twentieth-century Russian philosopher of language, provides theoretical concepts that define the nature of dialogical communication. The present article combines the ideas of both scholars into a unified theory of business correspondence and then presents both a set of guidelines and a model for the practice of dialogical correspondence.

Author's Reply

122 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31 " 1 JANUARY 1993 examples Watson offers, each case that he sets forth approvingly is one where he thinks that the historical effect of the philosopher's use of a "shadow history" already is part of the history of twentieth-century philosophy, that is, it has already had an influence on philosophical thinking. But suppose at the present moment we are presented with a lecture by a philosopher telling us about Spinoza's impact on Descartes's early thought, and when we tell him that he has his facts wrong, that Spinoza was not alive when Descartes had his early thoughts, he replies that he is only offering a "shadow history" which helps us understand some subtle important point. Should we laugh or cry? Should the historian get off his high horse to meet the philosopher on his low horse? If, a century from now, it turns out that said philosopher has become a central figure, and his or her distortion of history has become part of the way certain ideas are considered, then future historians will have to deal with that "shadow history"; but do we have to now, just in case the misinformation becomes part of the presentation of future philosophical ideas? What are we to do now with presentations of historical claims that appear false or misleading, but which are part of the way a present-day philosopher sees fit to present his or her philosophical point? Why can't the philosopher make the point without the misinformation? There may be dramatic reasons, or rhetorical ones that could constitute an answer. Fictionalizing may help emphasize. Poetic license, like supposed conversations between Plato and Aristotle, may more forcefully bring out certain ideas. So, if there can be "reasons" for nonfactual presentations, should we encourage or discourage this? I really do not know, hut I think we should, whenever and wherever possible, try to get the factual part of a philosophical story sufficiently right by finding the best available data, or omit the historical portion and just deal with the ideas, without giving them spatial and temporal references. Either of these possibilities would avoid needing to create "shadow histories" as evasions from actual history, or no history. And, of course, a century later, either possibility could still turn out to be a "shadow history." RICHARD H. POPKIN Washington University and University of California, Los Angeles Author's Reply I thank the commentators for constructive discussion of the issue. I find Rogers's gloss on my paper fine, even if he protests a bit too much about Yolton's Locke (as does also, I think, Popkin). But it is a good point that Rorty himself is influenced by Yolton. Also, it is good to stress that people in many fields read the history of philosophy. But probably a lot more people in many fields are influenced by books such as Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature than by books such as Ayers's Locke. The saving grace here may be, as Popkin also remarks, that the people who write the popular and influential books are themselves influenced by solid historians such as Yolton. NOTES AND DISCUSSIONS 12 3 The only bait I might rise to in Livingston's commentary is his final remark that certain shadow histories are tedious. I would protest that, on the contrary, Bennett's is fun, Russell's brilliant, Ayer's exciting, Ryle's mesmerizing, and Rorty's thoughtprovoking as narrative in just the way Livingston approves. For the annals of history, I document here that Richard Popkin directed my dissertation and I directed Donald Livingston's. I have never forgotten and often tell students something Popkin said to me at the beginning of my career. I tell it different ways, but the substance goes something like this: It is good to work on minor figures, for after you understand the problems of making sense of someone who may not have known clearly what he was trying to say himself, then you are in a position to ask questions about the standard interpretations of the great philosophers who presumably did. I think I'll leave it at...

Russell's Theory of Meaning and Denotation and "On Denoting"

Russell's Theory of Meaning and Denotation and "On Denoting" RUSSELL WAHL 1. INTRODUCTION BERTRAND RUSSELL DEVELOPEDhis theory of denoting in ThePrinciplesofMathemat /cs (hereafter Principles)and later rejected it in "On Denoting." The theory is of interest in part because of the problems it was designed to solve, in part because of its similarity to certain related doctrines (such as Frege's distinction between sense and reference, to which Russell likens his theory in the appendix to Principles)and in part because it is not at first clear from the arguments given in "On Denoting" why Russell gave up the theory. The theory is of interest, also, because Russell expanded it considerably in the years between Principles and "On Denoting," actually grafting onto it a theory of meaning and designation not present in Principles, and because he had grander designs for it than are indicated in his published works. "On Denoting" is one of Russell's most important works, for it contains his new theory of descriptions, which many consider to be Russell's most important contribution to twentieth-century philosophy. His theory of descriptions is widely known, if not generally accepted in the form Russell presented it, but the central arguments of "On Denoting" have resisted the many attempts that have been made to understand them. While many of the recent attempts to make sense of the arguments shed some light on them and indicate important points being made by Russell, they ultimately fail in displaying Russell's actual argument.' This paper was written with the help of an NEH Travel Grant for travel to the Bertrand Russell Archives in February of 1989. I wish to thank the NEH and Kenneth Blackwell, the archivist who made many of these manuscripts and letters available to me. I also wish to thank Nicholas Griffin for many helpful comments. Some earlier attempts which reveal much of the argument are Chrystine Cassin, "Russell's Discussion of Meaning and Denotation: A Re-examination," in Klemke, ed., Essays on Bertrand Russell and J. R. Searle, "Russell's Objection to Frege's Theory of Sense and Reference," in [71] 72 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:1 JANUARY X993 In what follows, I will first give a brief account of Russell's theory of denoting as presented in Principles. This will occupy section 2. Section 3 will present modifications to the theory as Russell developed it in the unpublished manuscripts of 1903 - 1905 ." In these manuscripts, Russell developed a theory of meaning and denotation which many have seen to be simply a continuation of the theory of denoting found in Principles. But the manuscripts reveal that Russell's primary purpose in developing this distinction was to solve the Russell contradiction and related paradoxes which he later handled with the ramified theory of types. This aspect of Russell's theory of meaning and denotation has been ignored, despite the fact that in his unpublished writings on meaning and denotation written during 19o3- 19o5 Russell was concerned with the contradiction and methods of resolving it. Russell gave up the project of solving the contradiction by means of the distinction between meaning and denotation, and this is certainly one reason why he never published any of this work. Nevertheless, this aspect of his work on meaning and denotation was important to the development of the argument in "On Denoting." In section 4 I will examine Russell's project of solving the paradox and developing a theory of classes using the distinction between meaning and denotation. This background is crucial to understanding Russell's actual argument against the old theory of denoting, which is the subject of section 5. This argument has its roots in doctrines espoused in Principles and in the unpublished manuscripts. It was in fact formulated in the last of these manuscripts, "On Fundamentals," which has written on it, in Russell's hand, "begun June 7, 19o5," and "Pp. 18ff contain the reasons for the new theory of denoting." This argument is repeated in cryptic form in "On Denoting." While this manuscript is not at all easy to follow, it reveals the complexity of the theory Russell was developing and sheds much light on his reasons...

Cartesian Method and the Problem of Reduction (review)

612 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 30:4 OCTOBER 199 2 October 1629; Castelli to Galileo, 6 April 163o.... But this is a small fault, an omission that (one hopes) will be remedied in a later edition. ERNAN McMuLLXN Universityof Notre Dame Emily R. Grosholz. Cartesian Method and the Problem of Reduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. viii + 161. Cloth, $4e.5 o. Philosophers write about other philosophers for a wide variety of reasons. One of them is the feeling that they have gone wrong and have caused philosophy to veer in the wrong direction. It is one of the virtues of Emily Grosholz's book that she does not disguise her "negative animus" towards Descartes and his baneful influence on twentieth-century philosophers. She sees the rot at work in the "eliminative reduction" prevalent among those who would replace philosophical discourse with the description of neural states. I say this is a virtue because we can learn much from Emily Grosholz if we realize that her target is not so much Descartes, the seventeenth-century recluse and sage, but the Churchlands and contemporaries of the same ilk. As far as the historical Descartes is concerned, I cannot help wondering whether he would not find that he has been greatly reduced, not only in stature and reputation, but in what he would take, if not for his philosophy, at least for his philosophical intent. Emily Grosholz writes her book as a critique of Descartes. Without taking up the cudgels for her opponent, I have the easier task of introducing her work to an audience that can make up its own mind about the merits of her indictment of Cartesian philosophy. The book opens with two interesting chapters on Descartes's Geometrywhere the relation of Descartes's mathematics to his method is scrutinized and shown to be at variance with the common belief that it is simple and straightforward. The limitations of Descartes's approach are stressed and the reader is reminded that the French philosopher was no Leibniz. Chapter 3 expounds some of Descartes's difficulties in formulating the basic notions of his cosmology as it appeared in the Principles ofPhilosophy of 1644. Chapter 4 discusses the infamous Cartesian laws of motion. Chapter 5 purports to provide the context of Cartesian physics but can more properly be said to address his treatment of freely falling bodies and projectile motion. Chapter 6 offers an analysis of Descartes's physiology where the scientific advantages are seen to have been purchased at an exorbitant epistemological price. The concluding chapter, which is in many ways the most interesting, is a re-examination of Descartes's Meditations in the light of Grosholz's interpretation of his method as intuitionist and reductionist. She initially follows Martial Gueroult's persuasive reconstruction of Descartes's "ordre des raisons," but she soon turns him into a sparring partner. He is obviously in her league, hut unable to fend off her trenchant arguments against the way Descartes reduces the idea of material extension to a property of the unextended mind. Faced with these difficulties, Gueroult changes tack and circumvents them like shoals in an otherwise placid sea. Emily Grosholz has produced a lively and persuasive account of the dangers that BOOK REVIEWS 613 beset reductionism. I am sorry, however, that she did not choose to quote one of the rare texts that I have come across where Descartes explicitly mentions reduction. The passage occurs in his notebook for the years i619-169I, and is a reference to the celebrated mnemonist Lambert Schenkel to whom Descartes paid the unusual compliment of reading his book on the art of memory. "I thought," writes Descartes, "of an easy way of making myself master of all I discovered through the imagination. This would be done through the reduction of things to their causes. Since all can be reducedto one it is obviously not necessary to remember all the sciences." Descartes then offers an interesting improvement of the way that images can be constructed to assist in the recollection of the causal chain. There are many kinds of reductions in Descartes, some are successful, like the one he performs with his compass...

The New Intensionalism

From the beginning of the linguistic turn in this century to the present, philosophical discussions of language have consistently assumed that intensionalism, the doctrine that expressions of natural language have sense as well as reference, can only be Fregean intensionalism. In earlier papers (Katz 1986 and 1990a), I argued that this widespread assumption is false because there is another form of intensionalism fundamentally different from Frege's, and, further, that the failure to recognize such an alternative has led to the acceptance of criticisms of the intensionalist position which, in fact, are only criticisms of Fregean intensionalism. Since then I have come to think that the assumption is false for a different and deeper reason, namely, that the systematic semantics that Frege developed and that Carnap refurbished is not intensionalism at all. In this paper, I want to explain why I now think this. In the process, I hope to provide a new perspective on the linguistic turn in twentieth century philosophy and a new conception of the relation between the analytic and the necessary and a priori.

Thomas Hobbes on "Discourse" in Politics

The salience of language in Hobbes's work has been recognized, but interpretations of his ideas on this subject have been remarkably discordant. The principal reason, this article argues, is that Hobbes is interpreted in the light of modern theories of meaning in language, whereas a coherent account can only be given by understanding the idea of signification current in the seventeenth century. The author contends that an appropriately contextual explication of signification shows not only that Hobbes's ideas on language are very nearly the reverse of those at work in most twentieth-century philosophy of language, but also sheds light on several important aspects of Hobbes's work.

Bachelard et les arts plastiques

The philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962), who was also a philosopher of science, spent most of his time in the company of poets and artists. Bellmer, Segal, and Chagall even painted him, and there are portraits of him by the engraver Flocon and the draughtsmen Fouquet and Lapoujade. Bachelard's most important essays on twentieth-century philosophy and aesthetics concern artists and the imaginative power of material. The eye and the prophetic look, the dynamics of the hand, and the color variations of the soul-all these analyses show that Bachelard's hitherto neglected theory of art goes back to his philosophy of the four elements, his conception of dreams, and his phenomenology of the imaginary.

The Politics of Polyphony: The Fiction of E. L. Doctorow

chief business of twentieth-century philosophy, R. G. Collingwood remarks in his Autobiography, is to reckon with twentiethcentury history. In the fifty years since Collingwood wrote those words that reckoning with history has become increasingly problematic, especially when considering the situation of the contemporary writer. Describing the writer's alienation from history in the modern period, as well as his loss of faith in the direction of history, Georg Lukacs, in his work The Historical Novel, observes that history for the writer becomes either collection and reproduction of interesting facts about the past or chaos to be ordered as one likes (176, 181). More recently, Philip Roth and David Lodge describe a similar division among recent writers, who have largely abandoned the social and political realm for the exploration of the self. As Lodge puts it: Art can no longer compete with life on equal terms, showing the universal in the particular. The alternatives are either to cleave to the particular . . . or to abandon history altogether and construct pure fictions which reflect in an emotional or metaphysical way the discords of contemporary experience (33). As Tony Tanner puts it, this means that novelists have lost faith in the idea that the individual can ever realize himself in

Einstein and Duhem

Pierre Duhem's often unrecognized influence on twentieth-century philosophy of science is illustrated by an analysis of his significant if also largely unrecognized influence on Albert Einstein. Einstein's first acquaintance with Duhem's La Theorie physique, son objet et sa structure around 1909 is strongly suggested by his close personal and professional relationship with Duhem's German translator, Friedrich Adler. The central role of a Duhemian holistic, underdeterminationist variety of conventionalism in Einstein's thought is examined at length, with special emphasis on Einstein's deployment of Duhemian arguments in his debates with neo-Kantian interpreters of relativity and in his critique of the empiricist doctrines of theory testing advanced by Schlick, Reichenbach, and Carnap. Most striking is Einstein's 1949 criticism of the verificationist conception of meaning from a holistic point of view, anticipating by two years the rather similar, but more famous criticism advanced independently by Quine in ‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’.

Philosophy of economics: on the scope of reason in economic inquiry

The first work to seriously and successfully to bridge the gap between twentieth century economics and twentieth century philosophy. Subroto Roy draws these two disciplines together and examines the basic intellectual roots of economics. This book should be of interest to advanced students of philosophy and economic theory.

The rebirth of classical political rationalism: an introduction to the thought of Leo Strauss: essays and lectures

This concise and accessible introduction to Strauss's thought provides, for wider audience, a bridge to his more complex theoretical work. Editor Pangle has gathered five of Strauss's previously unpublished lectures and five hard-to-find published writings and has arranged them so as to demonstrate the systematic progression of the major themes that underlay Strauss's mature work. [These essays] display the incomparable insight and remarkable range of knowledge that set Strauss's works apart from any other twentieth-century philosopher's.--Charles R. Kesler, National Review

Merleau-Ponty and the foundation of an existential politics

Drawing on previously unexplored sources, Kerry H. Whiteside presents the political theory of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961), one of France's best-known twentieth-century philosophers. Whiteside argues that Merleau-Ponty's objective in his political writings was to make existentialism into the foundation for a philosophically consistent mode of political thinking. This study discusses the inadequacies Merleau-Ponty found in the traditional philosophies of empiricism and idealism, and then examines the subject-object dualism that he believed deprived previous forms of existentialism of political significance.Whiteside shows how Merleau-Ponty overcame these problems by grounding political reasoning in a theory of consciousness that emphasized both its individuality and its need for socially created meaning. After explaining Merleau-Ponty's modifications of the views of Sartre, Aron, and others, the book investigates how he applied his political theory in editorial exchanges with Communists and liberals. Throughout this study, Whiteside traces and criticizes the changes in the philosopher's concept of Marxism and points to his many ideas that bear on current controversies in political theory.Originally published in 1988.The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

The Insufficiency of Nomological Explanation

Within the broadly Humean tradition of twentieth-century analytical philosophy, causation and explanation have both been analysed in terms of logical or probabilistic relations among true propositions, some of them natural laws. It has been thought, or hoped, that explanation could be fully captured in terms of such an analysis. To understand causation, on the other hand, has usually been thought to involve additional elements. In Hume these additional elements are the temporal priority of the cause and, perhaps, the contiguity of cause and effect. The customary transition of the mind from the impression of the cause to the idea of the effect and from the impression of the effect to the idea of the cause is best interpreted as an element in a sketchy pragmatic analysis of the notion of a law and thus involved in both the analysis of explanation and causation, not as an additional element needed particularly for the analysis of causation.

Editor's Introduction, Part II

Feng Youlan, professor of philosophy at Beijing University, was born in 1895. He is twentieth-century China's foremost philosopher and historian of Chinese philosophy. The present translation is based on part of Feng's Sansong tang zixu (The Hall of Three Pines: A Preface), published by Sanlian shudian in 1984. The author has referred to this work as his "memoirs," but his own introduction explains that the book should also be taken as a preface to the writings of his entire lifetime.