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638 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 31:4 OCTOBER a993 that his intended readers will include beginning students. He keeps the main line of Hume's arguments dearly in focus, the discussion of interpretive issues brief, and he avoids getting bogged down in the complexity of exegetical detail that is the more appropriate concern of advanced students and scholars. Given the amount of controversy over practically every aspect of Hume's thought, one is bound to find that some issue that one considers important for understanding Hume is not addressed, or that one's favored interpretation on some particular issue is not presented. But, aside from this being inevitable in a book of this nature, one should consider that Penelhum's overall presentation prepares the student both to expect differences in interpretation and to recognize that such differences have important implications for philosophical evaluation. This book is an excellent example of a sympathetic approach to the view~of a great philosopher. It looks for merits without ignoring defects. Thus, it will not only teach students a good deal about Hume; it will also teach them a good deal about how to go about understanding any philosopher. MARIE MARTIN Clemson University Peter D. Fenves. A Peculiar Fate: Metaphysicsand WorM-Historyin Kant. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Pp. xii + 3o6. Cloth, $36.5o. An all-too-common feature of Kant scholarship is to overlook or explain away some of the disconcerting or apparently odd aspects of his work in order to focus on the systematic architecture of the three great Critiques. Whatever appears not to fit with Kant's teaching as presented in these, its core, tends to be dismissed as a product of his sloppiness, haste, or enthusiasm. In addition, his "pre-critical" works are treated simply in the light of the "mature" works, with his speculations about, say, life on other planets most often regarded as embarrassing youthful indiscretions, if indeed they are mentioned at all. The leading virtue of Peter Fenves's A PeculiarFate:Metaphysicsand World-Historyin Kant is that he does not take the meaning of the three Critiques as self-evident, but regards them rather as mysteries whose elucidation requires a fresh reading of the other works in the Kantian corpus. In so doing, he takes two approaches: searching for continuities in the concerns of Kant's pre-critical and critical writings, and considering how well his "occasional" writings complement their "systematic" and "philosophical" counterparts. The Kant who emerges from this treatment appears much more eloquent and poetic, and much less drily systematic, than is ordinarily the case. Fenves sets himself the ambitious task of exploring the "peculiar fate" (1) of reason, which, he says, is "the impossibility of rendering a reason why precisely those questions that constitute metaphysica specialismthe nature of God, the rational soul, and the world--have to arise..." (2). While the limits of reason's self-understanding cannot be explained rationally, they can be discerned and described in Kant's "occasional" works, "where the presentation outdoes the basic theses it is supposed to illustrate..." (a). BOOK REVIEWS 639 The book is thus divided into three parts, each juxtaposing an occasional essa)) with "the major metaphysical exposition to which it is an addendum" (288): the Universal Natural History with the Nova dilucidatio; the Idea for a Universal History with the first Critique; and the Conflict of the Faculties with the third Critu~ue. This point of departure gives Fenves a license to explicate the imagery Kant uses and to account for the feelings he associates with reason. The results of such a "literary" study are sometimes interestingly revealing, sometimes irritatingly fanciful . Most interesting is his discussion of the feeling of respect associated with human recognition of the moral law "as an apodictically certain fact, as it were, of pure reason .... "~ Reason's self-legislation--a "fact" produced by a "factory" (~ 19 n. 26), not something given in experience--evokes respect, which "includes no reference to the course of appearances, no relation to the sensible world, no relation to phenomenality at all" (~21). This absolutely necessary respect points to an inexplicable , fateful, or absurd ground of human freedom. While "It]he being of man...

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