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356 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 33:2 APRIL 1995 May's essay on Socrates is similarly compelling. On the one hand, Socrates is pictured as pursuing thought for its own sake, not the conclusions at which it arrives. On the other hand, and more importantly, he urges restraint of the drive for knowledge, acknowledging the limitations of its origin in social authority. Under Socratic scrutiny, the social myth of "expertise" is unmasked as the rule of convention, sanctioned by merely local criteria and definitions. May's Socrates, whose wisdom rules his thirst for knowledge, is more a Heideggerean hero than the "monster of reason" celebrated and denounced in Twilight of the Idols. May's chapter on Aristotle and Nietzsche is disappointing, working from the single point of the externality of Aristotle's first mover to what is moved. His interpretation of "Ariadne's Complaint," one of the Dithyrambs of Dionysus, is haunting and evocative. Ariadne, the modern soul, trembles with anxiety over the thought of a huntsman-god who has targeted her. The god, says May, is our belongingness to nature; Ariadne's anxiety is caused by the delusion of her independence, the failure to acknowledge that the god is internal to her. Cut free of Christianity, argues May in Nietzsche's voice, immortality is not lost for soul; Ariadne is still supremely valuable, sought, because needed, by the god. This is a deep and erudite book, worthy of a leisurely read by professional philosophers . Few will find its views correct, or easy to endorse, but most will find their automatic allegiance to public knowledge and the community of the believers-andscholars challenged. MICHAEL G. VATER Marquette University Robert W. Burch and Herman J. Saatkamp, editors. Frontiers in American Philosophy. Vol. I. College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 1992. Pp. xx + 366. Cloth, $49.5~. Based upon a major symposium at Texas A & M University in June, 1988, the publication of this first of a promised two volumes of proceedings in characterized by coeditor Herman Saatkamp as both a retrospective on "the origins and plurality of the American intellectual heritage" and as a prospective "through the major developments presently shaping future philosophical inquiry in the United States" (ix). Groupings of essays move from "Whitehead and Mead" to "Technology and the Public Good," to separate sections on "Mead" (again), "Royce: Hermeneutics, Loyalty, and Religion," and "Peirce: Unexplored Issues." A broad and fairly representative sampling of American philosophers is encompassed in these pages: from mainstream figures like Hilary Putnam, Joseph Margolis, and Nicholas Rescher; encompassing distinguished mainstays in the "American Philosophy" establishment, like John Lachs, Beth Singer, Donald Sherburne, and Charlene Seigfried; through elder statesmen and dons like H. S. Thayer and the late Irwin Lieb; to a new generation of American philosophers represented by Kathleen Wallace and Vincent Colapietro. This is an unusual anthology, and may reveal even more about the current state of BOOK REVIEWS 357 American philosophy than its editors intended. One may define American philosophy, and hence its frontiers, either in reference to a classical historical tradition of philosophizing , or instead by surveying what philosophers of American birth, or located on American soil, are currently engaged in doing. On either definition, there are puzzling absences. It is also difficult to determine the criteria that led to the inclusion of authors or their topics. On the second, descriptive definition of contemporary American philosophy, for example: absent are Rorty, Davidson, Rawls, MacIntyre, van Fraassen, and other influential , widely read "American" (born, or adopted) philosophers. Only Putnam, Rescher, and Margolis represent this definition of American philosophy. Margolis actively engages the thought of these absent contemporaries, along with that of Peirce, in a wide-ranging summary characterization of pragmatisms (of many nineteenth- and twentieth-century varieties) as employing reformulated transcendental arguments to redefine the norms of rationality so as to reject universalisms of every sort. Following the logic of his brilliant and widely acclaimed Pragmatismwithout Foundations (Basil Blackwell, 1986), Margolis argues that the intellectual convergence to this antifoundationalist "dawning pragmatism of our age" (43) represents the only viable alternative to the "heroic but impossible modernisms" of Habermas and Apel, the "traditionalism" of Gadamer, Taylor, MacIntyre, and Putnam, and especially to...

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