Philosophy, its History and Historiography (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 679 social. At the heart of Kuntz's position is his view that Russell exhibits an unresolved tension between the Puritan individualist who had been taught that God did not reveal purposes intelligible to human knowledge, and the Catholic and metaphysician who saw glimmerings of an intelligible organic universe in which mankind belonged. One may balk at Kuntz's view that Russell's failure to develop a metaphysic was at bottom a failure of nerve, a failure of the Protestant and the Catholic to unite. The philosopher will not find that the case for metaphysics has been made and the political thinker will not be satisfied with organicism until it has been developed into a meaningful social and political doctrine. For my part I find that the concentration on Russell as a nascent metaphysician has led to the omission of many important topics in Russell's moral and political writings. But Kuntz's view that the tradition implies a philosphical quest for "the true and the good" has opened the way for a meaningful probe that takes us into the heart of Russell's writings and shows that even his most technical works are penetrated by intimations of a moral and metaphysical quest. L. GREENSPAN McMaster University A.J. Holland, editor. Philosophy, its History and Historiography. Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel, 1985. Pp. x + 335. $49 .oo. This valuable and well-edited anthology derives from a Royal Institute of Philosophy conference held at the University of Lancaster in 1983 . About one third of the volume is given over to discussions of Rorty's End-of-Metaphysics claims, and to that extent is already passe. Nonetheless, some of the papers in this part of the collection are of continuing interest: Jonathan R6e's, for example, shows how conceptions of the history of philosophy come to function as inflexible and a priori forms of that very history, thus obviously limiting the value of any study of our philosophical past. Michael Ayers's paper effectively underscores this point by accounting for the uneasiness he feels because "there is so little openness in Rorty's atittude to history, that is to say, to the possibility of learning something significant from it, whether about the past or about philosophical truth" (35). The remaining two-thirds of the book is devoted to seventeenth and eighteenthcentury philosophy, with the earlier century represented by eight of the remaining twelve contributions: G. MacDonald Ross and Simon Schaffer on occultism and philosophy ; Gary Hatfield on the relationship of Descartes's metaphysics and his natural philosophy; Desmond Clark on Cartesian Science in France, 166o-17oo; Richard Francks on caricatures of Spinoza; Stuart Brown on Leibniz's relationship to Cartesian rationalism; and Edwin McCann and J. R. Milton on Locke and mechanism. Without intending to detract from the remaining items, I call attention to the Ross and Schaffer pieces, whose authors agree that the seventeenth century "was above all a century in which philosophy and science cannot be sharply demarcated from the occult" (lo 9, 1x7) and in doing so emphasize the ambiguity of seventeenth-century uses of reason and experience, and hence the inadequacy of those terms of demarcation, rationalist and 680 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 26:4 OCTOBER 1988 empiricist, so favored by the unhistorical. The reality to be described defies these neat templates, however convenient their use may seem, while it is precisely the use of such crude analytical tools that (among other things) prevents us from "learning something significant" from the past. The history of eighteenth-century philosophy is represented by two papers on Hume, one by M. A. Stewart, the other by Nicholas Capaldi. The former takes up Hume's references to the "metaphysical argument a priori," while the latter offers an account of the significance of Hume's theory of the self. Eckart F6rster contributes a discussion of Kant's refutation of idealism, and Paul Wood brings the volume to a close with "The Hagiography of Common Sense: Dugald Stewart's Account of the Life and Writings of Thomas Reid." Of these pieces I found the first and last especially helpful. Stewart's combines a close analysis of Hume's perfunctory comments...