The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (review)

306 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 34:2 APRIL ~996 exposition of Siris but also in the way he is able to tie it thematically to the earlier periods of Berkeley's life. Much of the content of this book has already appeared in articles published by Berman within the past twenty-odd years. Yet, since some this material resides in journals difficult of access without an excellent library, the volume is a welcome addition to the Berkeley literature. In the enormous wake of his mentor, A. A. Luce, Berman has carefully and skillfully plotted his own course, presenting us with a balanced and compelling account of Ireland's greatest philosopher, one in which the man is a more sympathetic and fallible figure that that presented in either Luce's portrait of the "good bishop"--"the man with vision but in no sense a visionary" (2o7)--or Yeats's sketch of a darker and more devious character. While Berman's Berkeley is one who "united the (seemingly) incompatible virtues of worldly wisdom and childlike innocence ," and had "a delicate sense of what was required if the world was to be changed" (~ 11-12), Berman does not hesitate to examine Berkeley "at his worst: in his biblical endorsement of slavery; his approval of kidnapping for the sake of converting the American Indians; in his theological rejection of all rebellion, no matter how tyrannical the ruler; [and] in his intolerant attitude to free-thinkers" (213). Even for those who will be dissatisfied with the sketchiness of Berman's treatment of Berkeley's metaphysics , his account of Berkeley's life, uniting as it does the philosophical with the biographical , is well worth serious examination. ROBERT MUEHLMANN The Universityof WesternOntario Susan Neiman. The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp. viii + ~16. Cloth, $37.oo. Kant thought of his critical philosophy as a whole that reintegrates its own principal division between the foundations of knowledge and the foundations of morality into a comprehensive account of human rationality. Each of the three Critiques addresses the overall unity of reason, with the CritiqueofJudgnwnt to a large extent devoted to the envisioned final synthesis of the theoretical and the practical. Yet Kant's goal of elucidating the unitary nature of reason was held in check by his agnosticism regarding the deep structure of human subjectivity. Unlike his idealist successors, Kant did not see himself entided to offer genetic reconstructions of the structure of rationality, thus inviting his readers to find alternative ways of articulating the unity of reason as well as that of the critical system itself. Susan Neiman's contribution to the longstanding debate about the unity of Kant's philosophy and its primary object, human reason, is a comprehensive account of the regulative function of reason in Kant. Neiman focusses on the specific meaning of reason in Kant as the faculty of ideas and ends, as opposed to its wider conception as the entire upper, "rational" register of the human mind. Accordingly, she contrasts reason with the understanding, arguing that these two forms of mental activity have totally different functions, as expressed in Kant's own distinction between the role of BOOK REVIEWS 307 the understanding in the constitution of knowledge and the role of reason in the regulation of human practice. For Neiman the separation of understanding and reason in Kant amounts to a radical dissociation of "the rational," which addresses how things ought to be, from "the cognitive," which is concerned with what is the case. It is her central thesis that the regulative function of reason is already practical and that practical reason consists in nothing other than the regulative use of reason for human practice. Hence the unity of reason is the identical, regulative function of reason in all human practice. Neiman analyzes the regulative-practical conception of reason in three main areas of Kant's thinking: science, ethics, and religion. The discussion of the role of reason in each of those areas takes up the three chapters in the middle part of the book, which are preceded by an introductory chapter on the historical background of Kant's doctrine of reason and followed by...