The Logic of the Articles in Traditional Philosophy (review)

250 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY high degree of subtlety and fine-grained systematic rigor, especially in consideration of the range of subjects treated. The reader who is able to follow the argument for entering upon the transcendental path that is taken will realize that a counterpoint of some scope would be required, in addition to the foregoing summary, to provide the basis for the kind of critique of which the work is deserving. To the reader who cannot enter upon that path, that the postulate of freedom, upon which everything seems to hinge, cannot be illustrated by reference to empirical examples of protocol statements may prove to be a decisive roadblock. This is because, as in the case of Kant's concept of freedom, it pertains to the conditions for the constitution of such examples or statements. Other readers may feel that they are on strange and unfamiliar ground when it is noted that Klein regards the postulate as concrete, the point of reference conditioning reflection upon it. These should not be regarded as criticisms so much as signposts of some obstacles to understanding at points of access to Klein's conceptuality. It may be noted that Klein has consistently accorded a fullness of systematic development to those principal themes within Kant's philosophy that take him furthest beyond the limits of theoretical reason. (In doing so, he integrates elements of the scholastic tradition--one of the most arresting features of the work.) The result is finally a kind of theologization of philosophy, with a kind of philosophical faith being uniformly presupposed. This is not to suggest that critical principles have been abandoned. It does, however, set a kind of limit upon the type of expectations the work can fulfill. If Fundamentalphilosophie is as perennial as it appears, even while yet exhibiting a cumulative history, this is a work that will find a competent readership for some time into the future and be taken into account. DARREL E. CHRISTENSEN Salzburg, Austria The Logic of the Articles in Traditional Philosophy. By. E. M. Barth. (Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, 1974. Pp. xxv + 533) In traditional logical works in the modern European languages one often finds the definite articles (the, der, le, etc.) prefixed to a predicate M without making up thereby a "definite description" of the unique object x that is M, as students of modern logic would expect. An exploration of this portion of traditional logic is surely justified and constitutes the main topic of Barth's book. Although the use of articles that depart from definite descriptions has been known for a long time among modern logicians (at least since Moore's comments on Russell's theory), Barth's work is the first attempt systematically to examine them in the history of logic at large--indeed on an extraordinarily wide historical basis. Before proceeding to examine the "abnormal" expressions 'the M', 'der M', and so on, Barth makes the following additional stipulations about them: the expressions 'the M' that she is interested in (apart from not referring to the unique x that is M) are such that the sentences 'the M is P' are not equivalent to (cannot be replaced by, pp. 45,458) 'all M are P' or 'the class M is contained in the class P' and that, in particular, for the case M = P, the sentences 'the M is M' are always true (p. 39). Expressions 'the M' used according to these conditions, and the sentences containing them, are called "logophoric." Rather than inquiring into the meaning of logophoric expressions in isolation, Barth aims at discovering their logic, that is, the rules (if any) given for them by the traditional logicians under consideration. For example, given "the Bantu is primitive" and "Saul is a Bantu," should we infer that Saul is primitive? The results of Barth's search for the logic of logophoric expressions among traditional logicians are quite negative: she finds "complete mystery" (p. 185), "deplorable uses of language" (p. 460), and expressions that are not even "dialogically definite" (p. 480). BOOK REVIEWS 251 These results are reached through rigorous, profound analyses of a great variety of authors (such as Hegel, Pf~mder, Wundt, Maritain) that make this...