Young Philosopher Research Articles

NIETZSCHE: APOLO E O ESTADO PARA PROMOÇÃO DA CULTURA

The Nietzsche’s writings of the period of The birth of tragedy informsabout the young philosopher’s concerns with the requisite politicalconditions for a true culture. The pair Apollo and Dionysus, in opposition and harmonized in Greek religiosity, as powers of the nature, results aesthetically in the tragic art, and politically results in a warlike State. Nietzsche assigns to Greeks the capacity to create a culture: art, state and religion jointed by the artistic will of nature, which impels the life of a nation.

From IVF to Immortality: Controversy in the Era of Reproductive Technology

Ruth Deech chaired the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) from 1994 to 2002. At times, she must have felt that she was captaining a small and inadequately equipped vessel in stormy seas, buffeted not just by the waves made by rapid and controversial advances in science, but also by the numerous larger and powerful vessels sailing around her. The media, the fertility industry, dissatisfied patients, conflicting pressure groups and even Parliament were very ready to tell the HFEA when it was, in their view, wrong. Criticism should be heeded but for the HFEA, part of the problem has always been that should one critic be heeded, others will redouble their fury. This book written by Baroness Deech jointly with a young philosopher, Anna Smajdor, is thus rightly sub-titled ‘Controversy in the Era of Reproductive Technology’. One of its great strengths is the practical approach to thorny problems evident throughout the work, an approach that mirrors Baroness Deech's management of the HFEA in difficult times.

An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania (review)

Reviewed by: An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania Otilia Baraboi Marta Petreu, An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2005, 332 pp. The translation of Marta Petreu’s An Infamous Past: E.M. Cioran and the Rise of Fascism in Romania enhances the existing approach to the formation of ideological extremisms throughout the twentieth century, regardless of their left or right orientation. This oversight of Romania’s geopolitical crisis in the Balkans calls into question the role that the interwar Romanian intelligentsia played in the elaboration of the doctrine of the “Iron Guard” (right extremist movement), also known as the “Legion of the Archangel Michael.” Alimented by the discussion of “Romanianism,” a term that sums up a constant quest for identity often seen as the burden of belonging to a downtrodden country, Petreu’s insightful work conjoins an ethical personal drive to account for an “infamous” historical heritage and the epistemological imperative to contribute to the worldwide scholarship on the birth of violent ideologies in general. Furthermore, as Norman Manea notes in his foreword, the close examination of the Iron Guard’s highly problematic claim to ground its political agenda of self-sacrifice in Christian Orthodox spirituality sheds new light on fundamentalist religious terrorism at large. Accordingly, in a passage added to the American edition, Marta Petreu compares the “Legionnaire’s death” confined only to Romanian territory with today’s borderless “suicide bombers” (45). While serving the immediate purpose of capturing the attention of the reader preoccupied by the currently unequal dynamics of power in the world, this parallel needs to be carefully contextualized. Thus, Petreu orchestrates an impressive series of sources (newspaper articles, letters, pamphlets, unpublished personal archives, historical and philosophical writings of both European and Romanian thinkers) on a minutely detailed historical background. To further illustrate her argument, she places at the center of her inquiry the Romanian and French philosopher E. M. Cioran. In so doing, Petreu develops her case study from the vantage point of a work enshrouded by controversy—The Transfiguration of Romania (1936) and several newspaper articles and personal letters that testify to the ups and downs of Cioran’s support of the far right between 1933 and 1941. Petreu thus sets forth the extent to which Cioran’s biography [End Page 225] echoes the dialectical process of transfiguration that the young philosopher wanted for his “primitive” country. Convinced that all his personal achievements were conditioned by the national failure to equal the other leading European countries in power, Cioran believed that the far right violence against older politicians and intellectuals would save him from collective mediocrity. Thus, the Iron Guard’s vision of a dictatorial regime in Romania was in accordance with his plea for a dialectical leap into History, as opposed to a gradual adaptation to the Western European standards preferred by the older generation. Not only does Marta Petreu bring us closer to the parallel between Cioran’s personal turmoil and the political instability of interwar Romania, but she also highlights the significance of his “heretical” stands (pro-Occidentalist and anti-Christian Orthodox) within a group that eventually ceased to acknowledge him as one of its own. Moreover, her analysis of Cioran’s controversial stance regarding Romania’s minorities, especially Jewish and Hungarian minorities, further enriches our understanding of nationhood. In sum, this study is a remarkable and long-awaited attempt to fill in several epistemological ruptures still in place within post-Soviet identity narratives. With this in mind, Marta Petreu first lays the philosophical foundation for Cioran’s view on history as tributary to Spengler’s vitalism, as well as to Hegelian dialectics. Second, by establishing a close connection between Cioran’s “national collectivism” (a mixture of “state socialism” and the Bolshevik agenda) and Ceausescu’s dictatorship, she unravels the continuity between Romania’s Communist regime and the doctrines promoted by the autochthon intelligentsia. Third, by reading the apolitical French Cioran in the light of his endorsement of the Iron Guard, Petreu rightly traces his gradual process of disenchantment and detachment from his early political views in Romania, which culminates in his disapproval...

Writing What Comes Naturally?

As a young philosopher, I was taught to keep my life out of my scholarly work. Who you are was not supposed to make its appearance in what you wrote. Shortly after I was promoted to full professor, however, and for reasons that will appear later, much of my philosophical work became explicitly autobiographical. I wrote about raising my children, about being from a working-class background, about experiencing a temporary disability, about being middle-aged, about being a writer, about teaching as a feminist, and about being a feminist scholar. I put my life?or at least my version of parts of my life?on the page for other philosophers, especially feminist philosophers, to hear and to read about. It's not the only way I do philosophy, but it is one of the ways. I feel I've learned much from it, and readers tell me it has been useful to them. But is autobiographical philosophy something I'd recommend to other feminist philosophers? What are the pleasures and the perils of autobiographical phi losophy? I'm going to explore these questions by trying both to write about autobiographical philosophy and simultaneously to do some autobiographical philosophy. And I'm going to proceed by first talking about bad reasons for doing autobiographical philosophy and then talking about some good reasons for engaging in autobiographical philosophy. The first bad reason for using autobiography while doing philosophy would be the belief that I'm representative?an exemplar of some broader population, whether it be persons of my sex, my race, my class, my age, or my sexuality. I probably am not. As an academic, I belong to a tiny fraction of the population. I'm more educated and more privileged than most; and because I am neither a graduate student nor an itinerant adjunct academic, I am also wealthier than most.

What Makes a Body?

What Makes a Body? Mark Johnson Rediscovering the Body Judging from mainstream Anglo-American philosophy, thirty years ago people did not have bodies. But today, it seems like almost everybody has one. They’re a dime a dozen. It is as if a great embodiment tsunami swept over the philosophical landscape and deposited incarnate minds as it receded. What I mean when I speak of the days of bodies lost is that, were you to survey mainstream logic, epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind and language over the past century, you would not find anything very interesting being said about embodiment. You would find lots of talk about propositions, concepts, reference, truth conditions, justified true belief, logical relations, cognitive meaning, and other intellectualized abstractions, but you would be hard put to show me real flesh, bone, and blood doing the work of being human. So, what happened to move the body from an afterthought to center stage? How did we get our bodies back from the Body Snatchers? Well, the first thing to acknowledge is that phenomenology, especially as practiced by Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, never lost the body as the dynamic locus of human thought, action, and language. Unfortunately, phenomenology got sat upon and pushed aside for a while by the big gorilla in the room, that is, by philosophical orientations harboring implicit ontological and epistemological dualisms. These dominant perspectives directed attention away from the body by focusing on the justificatory conditions of “X knows that P,” by accepting the computational metaphor for mind, and by assuming rational actor models of thought and action. In other words, the body was ignored in mainstream Anglo-American philosophy of mind, language, and knowledge. There were too many philosophers who thought that logic had nothing to do with our bodies and their environments, who regarded “mind” as computational programs run on bodily wetware, and who thought of reason as universal, pure, and abstract. This marginalization of phenomenology consigned the body to the outer darkness.1 The good news is that phenomenology is creeping back in through the enormous explanatory gaps left by the analytic philosophy of mind and language. [End Page 159] Many younger philosophers are turning to the richer, more profound accounts of bodily experience that they find in classical phenomenology and its more recent offshoots. Other developments have also swelled the incarnation chorus, such as feminist concerns with bodily difference, attention to the body in critical race theory, and cross-cultural studies of bodily comportment. As a result, more people are rediscovering, or discovering for the first time, the riches of phenomenological descriptions of embodiment. Another major factor in the upsurge of body mania has surely been the rise of the cognitive sciences over the past four decades. The sciences of mind are many and varied, ranging from biology and genetics to neuroscience, psychology, and linguistics. The relatively new field of cognitive neuroscience has made astounding progress in understanding how brains in bodies interacting with environments give rise to human experience, thought, and symbolic communication (Damasio 1999; Edelman 1992; Tucker 2007). Anyone who has paid serious attention to recent research in this field will be struck by the profound role of the brain and the body in shaping what and how we think, feel, and act. Developmental psychology is studying how infants come to grasp the meaning of their world through their bodily looking, listening, tasting, sucking, poking, grasping, and moving (Gibson and Pick 2000; Stern 1985). Cognitive psychology has moved beyond earlier simpleminded information-processing models to embrace the complexity, richness, and bodily depth of human experience and thought (Gibbs 2006; Overton, Muller, and Newman 2008; Wallace et al. 2007). Cognitive linguistics, developed as a principal alternative to formalist Chomsky-type generative approaches, is exploring the bodily roots of meaning, conceptualization, and reasoning in natural languages around the world (Feldman 2006; Gibbs 2006; Lakoff 1987; Lakoff and Johnson 1999; Langacker 1986). This happy convergence of disciplines that give pride of place to the body has even made it possible for there to be a journal, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, that is predicated on the possibility of convergence and cooperation among approaches that hitherto seemed separate travelers...

The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken (review)

Reviewed by: The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken James D. Reid S. J. McGrath . The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy: Phenomenology for the Godforsaken. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006. Pp. xx + 268. Cloth, $69.95. Taking its clues from the scholarly work of Kisiel, van Buren, and others on the religious origins of early Heidegger's phenomenology, blending philosophical interpretation and biographical insight, and drawing fruitfully from a wide range of historical and philosophical sources, McGrath's The Early Heidegger and Medieval Philosophy offers a wide-ranging account of Heidegger's complex and evolving (and in the long run antagonistic) relationship to the Scholastic tradition. In a series of chapters dealing with, among other things, Heidegger's philosophical and religious development and his early phenomenology (or "hermeneutics of facticity"), the significance of the Habilitationsschrift on Duns Scotus (and Thomas of Erfurt, as it turned out), Heidegger's engagement with mystical literature and the writings of Luther, and the two lecture courses dealing explicitly with religious themes (on Paul's eschatological letters, in 1920–21, and the tenth book of Augustine's Confessions, in 1921), McGrath argues persuasively that, however skeptical about the significance of Heidegger's religious roots some of us might be, those of us who care about early Heidegger's philosophy and the convoluted path that led to Sein und Zeit (and beyond) cannot afford to ignore the philosopher's theological and religious (at first Catholic, then Protestant, and finally pagan) agenda. Heideggerian ontology is no neutral description of essential structures of human life, but a philosophical interpretation of what we might, with Heidegger, call "ontic" issues and concerns (theological, religious, even ethical). McGrath's primary thesis is that Heidegger arrived at his mature "Godless eschatology" by way of "a systematic, if covert, overthrowing of the medieval theological paradigm" (4). There are theological and (personal) religious struggles hidden beneath much of what Heidegger has to say about the human condition. McGrath develops this overarching thesis fully in several helpful historical analyses. The Chapter on Heidegger's early work on Scotus (and Thomas of Erfurt), written under the influence of Husserl and the neo-Kantians (especially Lask), is possibly the best in the book. McGrath argues clearly and compellingly that, during Heidegger's comparatively short-lived Catholic phase, Scotus helped open the young philosopher's eyes to the pre-theoretical nature of our understanding of being, the close ties uniting modes of signification, intentional forms, and ontological structures, and the "derivative nature of abstract and theoretical language" (117). And Scotus's provocative work on haecceitas clearly prefigures Heidegger's early obsession with facticity and, eventually (although this is missing in Scotus himself), "the understanding of historical life" (105). In another solid chapter on early Heidegger's work on Luther, the author argues that the philosopher's break with the Catholic theology of his youth took shape in dialogue with "Protestantism, Schleiermacher, Dilthey, and above all, Luther" (151). And he suggests that several crucial themes and preoccupations in the mature hermeneutic phenomenology of Sein und Zeit can be traced back to Heidegger's Luther research, including Vorlaufen zum Tode, Desktruktion, fallenness, and conscience. There are, however, some troubling spots in this otherwise interesting account. The significance of Heidegger's intense and lengthy engagement with Aristotle—beginning in the early 1920s and leading up to the publication of Sein und Zeit and shaping some of Heidegger's most compelling philosophical insights on topics central to McGrath's study, including facticity and the historical fabric of human experience—receives scant attention. And the chapter on mysticism, based primarily upon the few scattered notes compiled in Band 60 of the Gesamtausgabe, overstates the role played by mystical literature in Heidegger's developing hermeneutics of facticity. It might be true, as others have already suggested, that Heidegger discovers some parallels between mystical experience and the phenomenological surrender to "the undifferentiated whole of life" (140). But life is not always undifferentiated; and a philosopher (if not a mystic) who went no further than this would hardly have become the gripping interpreter of human experience who speaks in Sein und Zeit and the surrounding lecture courses. [End...

From Neo-Thomism to St. Thomas

Maurice Blondel's appreciation of scholastic philosophy was tempered from the beginning with a definite critique that reflected his own philosophical concerns. Although he drew indirectly on St. Thomas in his doctoral thesis, the young philosopher was highly critical of Thomism in the famous Letter on Apologetics. The ensuing debate pushed him to clarify his own philosophical position in the face of neo-Thomism. It was clear to Blondel that the renaissance in Thomist studies advocated by Aeterni Patris could only take place if scholastic philosophy would assimilate some important elements from the positive tradition. This realization would, in time, drive the French philosopher to a reappraisal of St. Thomas, and neo-Thomism to a confrontation with neglected aspects of its own tradition.

"What's Character Got to Do with It?"

Do you trust your wife? Your husband? Your friend? Your colleague? Your editor? Your students? On what basis does anyone trust anyone? Do we really trust them? Or do we only predict their future behavior? Or, perhaps, we simply assume the stability of their circumstances and predict that those circumstances won't change. But this last has nothing to do with trust, as it has nothing to do with the person's character. Perhaps neither does prediction of behavior, which involves what have called reliance as opposed to trust. But even reliance depends on some sort of stability in a person's character. There is a line in an Elmore Leonard novel, Rum Punch, which was turned into the Hollywood film Jackie Brown. The character played by Samuel Jackson says, I don't need to trust Melanie. know But trust or knowledge, the presumption is that there is a basis for this in the person, a stability or regularity of character. Confidence in the stability of circumstances is not at all the same thing, and given the nature of life, betting on the stability of circumstances is probably a bad bet. trust my wife because know her. True, don't know what she might do in extraordinary circumstances, during a terrorist attack or a Latin American kidnapping. But trust her thoroughly, not just because know her, but because recognize in her a character that is robust and resolute, that has withstood many challenges and temptations, that remains more or less constant throughout an enormous range of different circumstances. want to think about what an enormous loss it would be if any such concept of character turned out to be an illusion. Many young philosophers seem content travelling safely in the well-worn ruts of their established field, its problems, and its already exhausted literature. How delightful, then, to meet a still rather young philosopher who refuses to play it safe and stay in the ruts but instead takes a jack-hammer to the ruts and, perhaps, even to the road. The rather young philosopher is John Doris, who has written an impressive book with the ominous title, Lack of

Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria at war

Pierre Bourdieu’s early trajectory is retraced to highlight the foundational role his fieldwork in colonial Algeria played in his intellectual development and subsequent sociological theorizing. Plunged without forewarning into the midst of a caste society torn by capitalist development and a brutal war of national liberation, the young philosopher turned to empirical investigation in order to understand Algerian society from the inside and to take apart the mechanisms of imperial rule. This article reconstitutes the proximate academic milieu, the intellectual signposts, the personal contacts, and the tragic political conjuncture within which Bourdieu’s youthful inquiries took shape. These inquiries, which entailed dangerous fieldwork in regions fought over by the French military and the guerrillas of the Algerian National Liberation Front, were facilitated by Bourdieu’s social and regional dispositions as a ‘colonized of the interior’ of France and led him to erase the established intellectual division of labor between sociology, ethnology, and Oriental studies. It is in the Algerian crucible, suffused by fear, risk, and ‘ambient fascism’, that an engaged ethnosociology was forged, alive to the complexity of the real and resistant to theoretical simplification. Bourdieu’s first field studies of the uprooting of the Algerian peasantry and the birth of that country’s urban (sub)proletariat are essential to understanding the formation of his intellectual dispositions and bring to light the organic linkage that existed from the outset between his scientific and political engagements.

Home Is Where the Heart Is: National Identity and Expatriation in Charlotte Smith's The Young Philosopher

Home Is Where the Heart Is: National Identity and Expatriation in Charlotte Smith's The Young Philosopher

Wordsworth and Charlotte Smith: 1970

The Dove Cottage Library in Grasmere owns copy of the fifth edition of Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets, printed in London in 1789, which Wordsworth owned and read as an undergraduate at Cambridge. The book contains few marks and annotations by Wordsworth, his autograph signature in several places, and dated inscription in his hand, St. John's Cambridge '89. Two later sonnets by Charlotte Smith, copied out in Wordsworth's clearest early hand, are preserved on the rear fly-leaf. In themselves, the annotations are of no special significance but they call attention to an important early influence on Wordsworth which has not been exlored up to now. (1) Though nearly forgotten today, Charlotte Turner Smith (1749-1806) became for brief period at the close of the eighteenth century one of the most popular writers of her time. Her Elegiac Sonnets and Other Essays, which first appeared in 1784, went through nine editions by 1800. (2) She wrote two other volumes of verse: long poem on the miseries of the French Revolution, called The Emigrants (1793); and posthumous collection, Beachy Head and Other Poems (1807). After disastrously unhappy marriage she supported her large family by writing novels: Emmeline (1788), Ethelinde (1789), Celestina (1791), Desmond (1792), The Old Manor House (1793), and five others. She also published children's stories, play, some Conversations introducing poetry, and various miscellaneous pieces including translations from the French. She achieved considerable critical reputation; Coleridge and Southey admired her work, as did Scott. (3) Sir Samuel Egerton Brydges, recording the impression which Charlotte Smith created in the early seventeen-nineties, in Censura Literaria (1807) noted that the public had received her enchanting fiction with a new kind of delight: It displayed such simple energy of language, such an accurate and lively delineation of character, such purity of sentiment, and such exquisite scenery of picturesque and rich, yet most unaffected, imagination, as gave it hold upon all readers of true taste, of new and captivating kind. (Hilbish, 131) The outward aspects of Wordsworth's relationship to Charlotte Smith are fairly clear, with one exception: certain obscure business dealings with her by his family. (4) Charlotte Smith's husband Benjamin Smith, feckless and unsuccessful West Indian merchant from whom she separated, was imprisoned for debt in 1783, and the following year Wordsworth's cousin, John Robinson, M.P., managed to get Smith out of jail by agreeing to become trustee of Smith's tangled affairs. A co-trustee was Anthony Parkin, cousin of Wordsworth's father, and employer of Wordsworth's older brother, Richard Wordsworth, in London. (5) In 1793 one of Charlotte Smith's sons brought suit against Robinson, apparently for failure to administer their affairs. The result was that Charlotte Smith satirized Robinson in several of her novels, notably in the person of Sir Appulby Gorges in The Young Philosopher (1798). Exactly when the troubles between Robinson and the Smiths began, and to what extent Wordsworth was aware of it, we have no way of telling. In any case, the imbroglio had not proceeded far enough to prevent Wordsworth from acquiring her Elegiac Sonnets at Cambridge, or from visiting her home at Brighton, on the way to France, in the autumn of 1791. was detained, he wrote shortly afterwards from Orleans to his brother Richard. at Brighthelmstone from Tuesday till Saturday Evening which time must have past in manner extremely disagreeable, if I had not bethought me of introducing myself to Mrs. Charlotte Smith, she received me in the politest manner, and shewed me every possible civility. This with my best affection you will be so good as to mention to Captn. and Mrs. Wordsworth.... Mrs. Smith who was so good as to give me Letters for Paris furnished me with one for Miss [Helen Maria] Williams, an English Lady who resided here lately. …

The Very Rich Hours of Jacques Maritain: A Spiritual Life by Ralph McInerny

BOOK REVIEWS 653 master pattern is the Word-Son" (458). These "impressions" derive from Aquinas's commentaries on Aristotle, in this case, the Metapbysics and Posterior Analytics. From the first, we are directed to "Aristotle's inquiry into the most appropriate way to come to know the nature of things" (459). Here, it seems, every relevant form of inquiry is demanded, though all need to be sifted; poets have their place as well, though it will be relativized. What counts, of course, is the act of sifting, which Aristotle identified with the dialectic of Plato. From the PosteriorAnalytics, we are treated to the vexing issue of foreknowledge needed to come to know anything-the famous "Meno-problem, which leads us into the presumption dear to both Aristotle and Aquinas, of a "profound harmony between the steps of reason and processes of nature" (466)-yet one for which Aquinas's creation-centered scheme can more effectively account. Finally, also from the Posterior Analytics, we note how one must recognize "wisdom as a habitus for first principles" (468), and we are invited to link this commentary on Aristotle with Aquinas's commentary on John, where "Christ is explicitly designated as the unique principle of science" (479) as, of course, the Word though whom the universe is created. So this work mimics the journey of discovery which is the Summa, and does do by detailing for us the manner in which it has explicitly been constructed, and the relevance such construction has to our efforts to understand in these arcane arenas. Such a rediscovery of Aquinas's genius for literary composition can return us to an attentiveness which conceptualist modes of thought had all but obscured, and reawaken our appreciation of the literary challenges that constructing an authentically analogous mode of discourse will pose. Caveant scriptores, yet accomplishments like this one can display the fruits of genuine apprenticeship to a literary master ofphilosophical theology. We are promised two successor volumes, to carry this thesis into more explicitly philosophical and then theological domains. The second has been completed, and the third is in process. Ad multos annos! University ofNotre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana DAVID B. BURRELL, C.S.C. The Very Rich Hours ofJacques Maritain: A Spiritual Life. By RALPH MCINERNY. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Pp. 235. $32.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-268-04359-0. The Very Rich Hours ofJacques Maritain is a relentless statement of the relationship between philosophy and faith in the man whom Yves Simon called the only genius in Catholic philosophy in three hundred years. It is also Mclnerny's testimony to the sanctity of Maritain and the magnificent e~ple 654 BOOK REVIEWS he was for Catholic students of philosophy during the golden years of twentiethcentury Thomism, which supported philosophizing in an atmosphere of faith. The intriguing title shows that the real biography of Maritain is a spiritual biography, which Mcinerny divides according to the liturgical day. Using the hours from Matins to Compline as the frame for the birth-to-death events of Maritain's life and work, Mcinerny begins the book with an "invitatory": an account of the visit of Edith Stein in 1932 to the Thomistic Study Circle at the Maritains' home in the Paris suburb of Meudon. Mcinerny uses her visit to illustrate the spiritual as well as intellectual attraction of the Maritains' lives and thought, in this case an appeal felt by a brilliant young philosopher who would one day become a saint. For those who have read much of Maritain, this book may disappoint, for it is not a thorough treatment of the Maritainian corpus. Neither is it an intensive examination ofJacques's spiritual life in the typical way of spiritual biography, whichwould have required more personal details about his life in Paris, Toronto, etc., and included correspondence with spiritual intimates and testimonies from friends. The real audience for the book is persons wanting a provocative account of philosophy as found in a Catholic thinker whose fundamental interest was faith, sanctity, and union with God. Mcinerny repeats the factual elements of Maritain's life, ones familiar to readers ofMaritain and to be found in other works, including Raissa's...

TWO DOGMAS OF EMPIRICISM. FIFTY YEARS AFTER

W. V. Quine’s “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, first published in 1951, is one of the most influential articles in the history of analytic philosophy. It does not just question central semantic and epistemological views of logical positivism and early analytic philosophy, it also marks a momentous challenge to the ideas that conceptual analysis is a main task of philosophy and that philosophy is an a priori discipline which differs in principle from the empirical sciences. These ideas dominated early analytic philosophy, but similar views are to be found in the Kantian tradition, in phenomenology and in philosophical hermeneutics. In questioning this consensus from the perspective of a radical empiricism, Quine’s article has had a sustained and lasting impact across all these philosophical divisions. Quine himself moved from the abandonment of the analytic/synthetic distinction to a thoroughgoing naturalism, and many analytic philosophers have followed his lead. The current collection differs from other anthologies devoted to Quine in two respects. On the one hand, it focuses on his attack on analyticity, apriority and necessity; on the other, it considers implications of that attack that far transcend the limits of Quine scholarship, and lie at the heart of the current self-understanding of philosophy. The contributors include both opponents and proponents of the dichotomies attacked by Quine. Furthermore, they include both eminent figures such as Boghossian, Burge, and Davidson, and up and coming younger philosophers.

The Young Philosopher by Charlotte Smith

102 restricted for all but the most traditional teachers. Jack Lynch Rutgers University CHARLOTTE SMITH. The Young Philosopher , ed. Elizabeth Kraft. Lexington: Kentucky, 1999. Pp. xxxvi ⫹ 397. $47.50; $17.95 (paper). Ms. Kraft’s ‘‘classroomedition’’is‘‘an instrument for teaching.’’ Her account of Smith’s life and works in the introduction not only gives pertinent information about the circumstances of Smith’s life but also provides an important cultural and social context for the position of women in eighteenth-century literary culture. She stresses that Smith’s self-presentation as suffering victim was a conscious choice made in response to her understanding of the literary marketplace . The suffering heroines—particularly Laura and Medora Glenmorris in The Young Philosopher—are not mere idealized figures, Ms. Kraft shows, but help to present Smith’s critique of the overdependent role thrust on most women of the time. Furthermore, Ms. Kraft also emphasizes the political concerns that were an important feature of Smith’s career as well as her occasional but vigorous defenses against critical attacks, thus illustrating that a professional woman writer could use her demure public persona to take positions often thought to lie outside her scope. A few minor problems creep into the notes. One quotation from Burke’s Reflections is not noted, but another one from the same paragraph is. Occasional notes do not provide full information.For example, when Laura Glenmorris refers to the story of the Countess de Guiche, Ms. Kraft reproduces Smith’s note giving the source of the story and remarks that Smith translated the work in question,but she does not summarize or explain what the story is. Yet The Young Philosopher is a novel worth having in the classroom, and Ms. Kraft’s work makes itaccessible. Marta Kvande Keirstead University of Delaware MURRAY G. H. PITTOCK. Inventing and Resisting Britain: Cultural Identities in Britain and Ireland, 1685–1789. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997. Pp. x ⫹ 189. $69.95. A Union of Multiple Identities: The British Isles, c. 1750–c. 1850, ed. Lawrence Brockliss and David Eastwood. Manchester : Manchester (distributed in the U.S. by St. Martin’s), 1997. Pp. xviii ⫹ 222. $69.95. Mr. Pittock shows the extent to which Scotland, Ireland, and Wales in the seventeenth century maintained a good degreeof independencefrompoliticallyand culturally dominant London and its environs . Wales, ever considered more barbarous by the powerful neighbors to the east, was less distinct because it was the original Britain of ancient myth. Unlike mostrecentstudiesofBritishidentity,Mr. Pittock’s places Jacobitism at the core of the debate, but avoids the excesses of his fellow travelers. And along hegoes,holding that his period is ‘‘the Jacobite century ,’’ which is moot, and then suddenly ‘‘Those who adopted the High Church position arguably realized that 1688–9 represented a serious decoupling of the Church from legitimistcaesarosacramentalism .’’ His study shows, more clearly than this example, how Jacobite vocabulary was maintained, not necessarily in a pro-Jacobite movement, but in antiWilliamite literature. Thus Dryden’s ‘‘The Lady’s Song’’contains coded iden- ...

The Young Philosopher , and: Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah (review)

98 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 13:1 effet, d'esquisser «un nouveau visage de Robert Challe» où «vigueur protestataire» et vertiges de l'inquiétude religieuse s'expriment avec bien plus de force. Qu'on en juge par un exemple. Jusqu'à présent, lorsqu'on lisait: «je retombais toujours dans les travers que donnent les affreuses terreurs dont on a été bercé», on ne s'imaginait pas que le texte était: «je retombais toujours dans les transes que...». On voit ici à quel point la confrontation avec le manuscrit nouvellementmis aujour est fructueuse et «donne un sens à des détails qui, autrement, passeraient inaperçu». C'est d'ailleurs l'un des mérites de cette édition nouvelle: outre une pagination qui permet de se reporter sans peine aux éditions antérieures et au manuscrit luim ême, on retrouve un index où figure une liste des variantes les plus significatives, une bibliographie critique, un glossaire, en bref, tout un apparat critique qui font de cette édition un ouvrage de référence et le compagnon indispensable des études sur Challe et sur l'histoire de la philosophie clandestine de l'âge classique. Marc André Bernier Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières Charlotte Smith. The Young Philosopher. Ed. Elizabeth Kraft. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999. xxxv + 397pp. US$47.50 (cloth); US$17.95 (paper). ISBN 0-8131-211-6 Elizabeth Hamilton. Translations of the Letters of a Hindoo Rajah. Ed. Pamela Perkins and Shannon Russell. Peterborough, Ont.: Broadview Press, 1999. 339pp. $15.95. US$12.95; £8.95. ISBN 1-55111-175-6. Charlotte Smith and Elizabeth Hamilton are conventionally positioned as ideologically opposed by critics who make the authors' responses to the revolutionary debate symptomatic of a pervasive and entirely adversarial radicalism and conservatism . These two novels, along with their excellent introductions and notes (and, in the Hamilton edition, appendices that provide a range of contemporary materials), should do much to disallow the reductiveness of such a narrowly political approach, and to encourage a more comprehensive estimate of their authors' strengths. More particularly, both fictions reveal, in very different ways, how seemingly incompatible strands of orthodox and iconoclastic opinion can comfortably, and sometimes creatively, coexist in a single work. By 1798, the year in which The Young Philosopher was published, Charlotte Smith's support for revolutionary principles was more muted than it had been in the earlier Desmond (1791). She still works here with radical metaphors, however, brilliantly literalizing, for example, Godwin's representation in Political Justice of the old order as a small group of custodians oppressing the unawakened masses, through the device of the madhouse to which the heroine's mother, Mrs Glenmorris , is confined by her parody of an aristocratic mother, Lady Mary. And the contrast between the virtuous George Delmont and his dissolute brother Adolphus Delmont is characteristically established through their respective affiliations REVIEWS 99 with radical and anti-Jacobin positions. But many of the narrative innovations in The Young Philosopher—especially the deviations from standard English— reveal a hierarchical frame of mind that sometimes verges on the reactionary. These deviations—of dialect, of class affectation, of false learning—do not affirm aspects of a distinctive culture, as idiomatic speech in Walter Scott does. Instead, as we see in the hero's mediations on the suffering of the heroine from her contact with "the inferior ranks of people, whose grossness must shock her, whose licentious freedoms terrify her" (p. 278), they mark out for condemnation or patronizing those outside the landed gentry, especially the newly rich. Elizabeth Hamilton, too, works at once within and against a numberofdiscursive conventions associated in this instance with her conservative politics. An antiJacobin on subjects relating to religion, she held views on women's education that intersected at key points with those of the radical feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Rejecting an older reading ofHamilton as party political hack, Perkins and Russell apply the insights of feminist, historicist, and postcolonial theoreticians to show the ways in which, both formally and conceptually, Translations ofthe Letters ofa Hindoo Rajah develops its didactic impulses without tendentiousness. Preserving and, where necessary, extending Hamilton's notes (a rich source of references to contemporary antiquarian and orientalist commentary...

Charlotte smith, the young philosopher

Charlotte smith, the young philosopher

Magic in classical Persian amatory literature

jamālat muᶜjiz-i ḥusn ast līkanḥadī-i ghamzihat siḥr-i mubīn astThe Belief that Persia is the Center of Magic has been Deeply ingrained in Western culture. In fact, the generic term for magic is derived from the name of the Zoroastrian priests, the magi, and Persia has been depicted from antiquity up to the present age as the ancient fountainhead of magic and wonders in Western literature. When in the second century B.C.E. the young philosopher Apuleius of Madaura married a woman fifteen years older because of her wealth, he was suspected of having used magic.

Moral Truth and Moral Tradition: Essays in Honour of Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe ed. by Luke Gormally

BOOK REVIEWS 493 Person of the Trinity. His arguments for refusing to identify Christ and the Word are thin. Lastly, Ward discusses the implications for religion of changes in thought since the Enlightenment. He makes a number of questionable generalizations about the implications of science for Christianity (e.g., "in a universe which is between ten and twenty thousand million light-years wide, human beings seem to shrink in virtual insignificance in the cosmic scheme of things" [285]), but gives a good defense of the reasonableness of believing on the basis of authority. The shortcomings of Religi.on and Revelati.on do not result from the actual positions that Ward espouses. A strong case can be made for these positions, hut when Ward agrees with the dominant liberal outlook he does not seem to feel a need to make such a case; it is more as if he simply goes with the flow. Queen's College Oxford, England JOHN LAMONT Moral Truth and Moral Tradition: Essays in Honour of Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe. Edited by LUKE GORMALLY. Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1994. Pp. ix+ 246. $45.00 (cloth). How does one put together a traditional festschrift that honors the life's work of not just one philosopher, hut of two, especially when that cumulative life's work courses throughout a bevy of philosophical disciplines common in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition? This is the question that faced Luke Gormally as he planned a volume of studies to honor the philosophers Peter Geach and Elizabeth Anscombe, both important figures in Englishspeaking philosophy in the second half of this century. The answer to the question was to produce a volume of studies written by "Catholic philosophers known to value Peter and Elizabeth's work" (4). But the proposed principle of unity goes beyond appreciation by the various authors of Geach's and Anscombe's work, for Geach and Anscomhe have been united together in fifty years of Catholic matrimony, a half century that has profoundly affected these two rigorous thinkers. Thus this volume of studies is an intellectual celebration of the couple's fifty-year marriage, and centers upon issues pertaining to ethics-largely because of the needs of the publisher to have some general category into which to place the book, even though ethical matters have not been main focus of either Geach's or Anscomhe's work. But then, when the two have written on ethics, their contributions have been significant and lasting; 494 BOOK REVIEWS one thinks of Geach's The Virtues (Cambridge, 1977); Anscombe's seminal article "Modern Moral Philosophy," Philosophy 33 (1958): 1-19; and her Intention (Oxford, 1957). The title of this book, Moral Truth and Moral Tradition, therefore serves as the widest possible embrace for the thirteen articles that comprise it. The editor has tried to provide some thematic unity among the contributions , clustering the thirteen papers into four categories: (1) Tradition and Truth; (2) Human Fulfillment, Divine Love, and Virtue; (3) Responsibility and Intention; and (4) Sex, Marriage, and Children. This, again, is a largely successful attempt to bring some order to the chaos that usually obtains in a festschrift, and at least has the merit of helping individuals and university libraries to categorize and catalogue the volume's contents for database searches, etc. But it is to be expected that, as also obtains in festschriften, the authors' contributions have no internal connection to one another, such that the ordering remains always ab extra. The volume commences with a graceful foreword by Cahal B. Daly, cardinal archbishop of Armagh, who learned from both Geach and Anscombe at philosophical retreats in the 1950s. His perspective is that of a once-teacher of philosophy, now a pastor of the Church, indebted to these two philosophers not only for their treatment of him as a young philosopher, but also for the contribution they have made to showing that "Catholic orthodoxy is philosophically respectable, as well as being a foundational element of integral European humanism" (ix). Luke Gormally's introduction to the volume sketches the careers of both Geach and Anscombe, the tenor of their interests, as well as his reasons for pursuing a volume of studies...

The Eighteenth-Century British Reviews of Hume's Writings

The Eighteenth-Century British Reviews of Hume’s Writings James Fieser The first printed reactions to Hume’s publications were usually book reviews which appeared in British, German, and French journals. Until recently, the most complete catalogs of these reviews were in T. E. Jessop’s A Bibliography of David Hume (1938), and E. C. Mossner’s The Life of David Hume (1954). 1 Since Jessop and Mossner, knowledge of the German reviews has advanced dramatically with two studies. First, Manfred Kuehn (1987) provides a comprehensive bibliography of references to Hume as they appear in Germany’s foremost eighteenth-century review journal, the Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen. 2 Second, Gunter Gawlick and Lothar Kreimendahl (1987) attempt a comprehensive analysis and catalog of eighteenth-century German discussions of Hume as appeared in both books and review articles. 3 These studies expand the list of German reviews of Hume from the five or so listed in Jessop and Mossner to several dozen. The German studies also suggest that more work is needed in cataloging the reviews from other countries, especially those from Great Britain. This essay will update the standard list of eighteenth-century British reviews of Hume’s writings by providing references to additional reviews which do not appear in the Hume literature. To Jessop’s list of eighteen British reviews, 4 thirteen new reviews are listed for first edition publications of Hume’s writings, and eight new reviews are listed for eighteenth-century abridgments and collections containing Hume’s writings. [End Page 645] A History of the Early British Review Journals The first European journal devoted exclusively to reviewing new books was the French Journal des Sçavans, founded in 1665. The journal focused on scholarly books, as opposed to popular publications, and the format of the articles consisted largely of extended excerpts from the book under review. This format was quickly adopted in Great Britain by newly founded review journals such as Weekly Memorials for the Ingenious (1682), The History of Learning (1692), The Complete Library (1692), and Memoirs for the Ingenious (1692). Most of these review journals survived only a few years and were frequently reincarnated with slight alterations in their titles. Because of their failure to tap into a stable readership market, the inconsistent appearance of the British review journals continued throughout the first half of the eighteenth-century. When Hume’s Treatise first appeared in 1739, the History of the Works of the Learned, edited then by Jacob Robinson, was the only review journal in publication. Like its forerunners, the History of the Works of the Learned had a fifteen-year checkered history of title changes and mergers with other journals (1728–43). The title “History of the Works of the Learned” was borrowed from a short lived early eighteenth-century journal by the same name. Typical of the review journals of the time, it was highly selective and focused only on scholarly publications. It is in this context that the History of the Works of the Learned reviewed Book I of Hume’s Treatise in 1739 and 1740. In a letter to Francis Hutcheson, Hume describes the review as “somewhat abusive.” 5 Indeed, the review contains a succession of sarcastic comments, such as “these are too dazzling for my weak Sight,” “our Author’s superlative Modesty,” and “A most charming System indeed.” Upon the publication of Hume’s Life in 1777, two writers commented on the demeaning tone of the review of the Treatise. The first notes that the review so highly provoked our young philosopher, that he flew in a violent rage, to demand satisfaction of Jacob Robinson, the publisher; whom he kept during the paroxysm of his anger, at his sword’s point, trembling behind the counter lest a period should be put to the life of a sober critic by a raving philosopher. 6 This story is countered by the second writer: We remember however, that it [i.e., the Treatise] was distinguished by the Reviewers of that time, though not in a manner suitable to the [End Page 646] expectations or wishes of the Author. It was treated with some degree of contempt by the Writer of the History...

From Königsberg to Vienna: Coffa on the Rise of Modern Semantics

Shortly before he died Alberto Coffa said he was writing “a very grumpy book.” It has turned out to be grumpy indeed, but also funny and deep and wonderful. When he began his work nearly 20 years ago he chose what must have seemed the most unpromising topic imaginable: the history of the a priori, both in the nineteenth century and especially among the logical positivists in the decade following 1925. In the early 1970s it was risky for a promising young philosopher of science to concentrate on historical topics. The nineteenth century was, with a few notable exceptions, terra incognita to analytically inclined philosophers. The positivists were pariahs. And many philosophers were convinced that there was no such thing as the a priori to be studied. Times have changed a bit, but this book still covers new territory. And though I cannot accept all of his conclusions, Coffa has much to teach, perhaps especially to those who would have found the whole investigation unpromising.