Descartes (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 157 Liberty (in his posthumous book John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty") holds a different view regarding the son's intellectual debt to his father. He points out that, in his doctrine regarding the quality of pleasures and his conception of individuality and selfdevelopment in Liberty, Mill "moved far beyond his Utilitarian inheritance .... James Mill and Bentham did not evince any great concern about the cultivation of individuality or about the dangers which John Stuart saw threatening it from the growing power of public opinion" (49-5o). Rees argues, convincingly I think, that it was in terms of the value he placed on individuality that John Mill construed the notion of'harm', and that this implies a substantial departure from his father's views. Professor Rees" book consists of a number of papers, many of them previously published, which he was in the process of turning into a critical account of Mill's Liberty when he died. Nevertheless, the book as we have it is sufficiently coherent and serves to bring into focus work which is central not only to contemporary discussions of Liberty but also to a proper understanding of it. Two of the chapters deal with the influences on Mill's early and later views. It should be noted that though Rees gives to Mill's views an original direction, he does not deny the considerable influence of both Bentham and James Mill in specified areas. We also have a chapter devoted to the early (nineteenth-century) critics of Liberty and another to modern critics. Finally, the book contains Rees' well-known account of Mill's distinction between self-regarding and other-regarding conduct in terms of actions which merely affect others and those which also affect the interests of others. This distinction is considered further in a hitherto unpublished paper, here called "Liberty and Justice", and an attempt is made to furnish more definite and reliable criteria for determining interests than the original appeal to prevailing social norms. Rees claims to find these criteria in Mill's account of justice in Utilitarianism, viz., in the "rules ofjustice" supposedly common to all mankind which serve to ensure minimal 'security' for the individual, or as sources of 'individual rights', or to determine the 'essential' or 'vital' interests. It is the Violation of these interests that constitutes harm and thus serves to define the area of self-regarding conduct. We can now view as self-regarding (and, thus, free from interference) actions that cause pain to others simply because they are disliked or disapproved of and also actions that may violate interests which are not sanctioned by the rules of justice. It seems to me that Professor Rees' proposal constitutes a most valuable contribution to our understanding of Mill's great essay. R. F. KHAN Monash University Marjorie Grene. Descartes. Philosophers in Context. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, x985. Pp. x + ~5. Cloth, $35.oo. Paper, $14.95. Having philosophized for a lifetime against Cartesianism, Marjorie Grene as emeritus professor has written what one supposes to be the inevitable book. Like the half dozen or so volumes hearing the same title, this appears in a series catering to undergraduates . Since philosophy instructors, in the main, attend only to Cartesian metaphysics 158 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 26:~ JANUARY ~988 and method, one knows in advance rather what to expect. The operation of this autocatalytic process bids fair to eliminate, at least in the Descartes industry, grounds for the objection that philosophers never agree. Cartesian metaphysics is now a thoroughly stereotyped teaching routine. Happily, Grene is maverick enough to ignore some of the prescribed mazes and to run the familiar ones in a new pattern. She approaches Descartes as a philosopher largely contemporary with us, for he is the arch-exponent and initial designer of the mechanical hypothesis as a world conception. This conception throws up a host of great questions and problems: the replacement of the heterogeneity of sensed nature by the homogeneity of res extensa in its infinite mutations; the tangle of credibility problems for sense and intellect arising from this replacement; the degradation of human corporeality and its accompanying experience, and so on. Thus, for...