Journal of the History of Philosophy

BOOK REVIEWS 249 which the Institute seeks to attain its goaI of a c/ear and precise understanding of the issues. My concern specifically is with what the editors call the "dialectical" method. To quote again from the general foreword "... the Institute's study of these materials is non-historical in aim. It deliberately abstracts from their historical context and pattern. It views them as if they were all contemporary--as if the documents represented the voices of participants confronting one another in actual discussion." My question concerning this kind of method is simple: Can one succeed in gaining a clear and precise understanding of an issue if he abstracts it completely from its historical context? Two specific problems arise out of such a methodology. (1) It seems very doubtful that writers living in widely divergent epochs and societies can speak like contemporaries aboul certain types of concept~. Does and can the ancient Egyptian religious seer mean by justice, for example, what Plato, or the Stoics, or a medieval theologian, or a divine righ! theorist, or an Enlightenment egalitarian, or a Marxist would mean? To try to treat such a concept completely unhistorical/y, it would appear to me, is to distort rather than to clarify it. (2) The unhistorical method--particularly as it exhibits itself in the concentration of attention on distinct, individual concepts---leads to the abstraction of these concepts from the theoretical context to which they originally belonged. How can Aristotle's notion of happiness be adequately understood apart from his entire metaphysics, or Marx's notion of progress apart from the Hegelian dialectic? In making these comments I am not advocating the opposite fallacy in method, historicism, but I would urge that there is a middle path between the extremes, which is more fruitful in its results than either. I noted two small errors in the bibliographies. In The Idea of Justice, Professor Blanshard's name is misspelled (.p. 182) and in The Idea of Happiness, Prichard's article should be titled "Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?" (p. 354) Or A. JOHNSON University of California, Riverxide BOOKS RECEIVED First Editions Azar, Larry, and E F. Centore. Piulosophy Today: A Critical Survey of Current Trends in Philosophy /or the Layman Dubuque: Win. C. Brown Book Co., 1967. Pp. xi+llg. $3.75. Bahra, Archie J. The Heart o] Conyucious: Interpretations of Genuine Living and Great Wisdom. Foreword Thom~ H. Fang. Illus. New York: Walker and Company, 1969. Pp. 159. $4.50. This is a book of selections from Confucian Classic~. Beck, Lewis White. Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969. Pp. xi+556. $15. Brentano, Franz. The Origin o/ Our Knowledge o/ Right and Wrong. International Library of Philosophy and Scientific Method. New York: Humanities Press, Inc., 1969. Pp. xi+ 171. $6. Corte~, Allesandro. Del principio di creazione o del significato. Padova (Teoretica): Liviana Editrice in Padova, 1967. Pp. xii+156. L2,200. Creation: The Impact of an Idea. Ed. Daniel O'Connor and Francis Oakley. Scribner Source Books in Religion. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969. Pp. x+262. Paper, $3.95. Fames, Elizabeth Ramsden. Bertrand Russell's Theory of Knowledge. New York: George Bra- ~iller, 1969. Pp. 240. $6. Frieder, Emma. Alta~ Fires. Second revised edition. Essays in Sacred l.ilerature. New York: Exposition Press, Inc., 1969. Pp. 323. $5. ...