Historical Knowing (review)

252 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY only her value-judgment reading of some of the examples (pp. 84, 85, 94, 466-467) may resist the mark-property analysis. In making 'the M' a name of the property M we are actually doing justice to the source from which Barth developed her notion of logophoric--von Freytag's "concrete universal." Modern logicians trained in the Fregean tradition should not regard people like von Freytag, Pf~nder, or Maritain as doing anything wildly unusual when they predicate 'P' of M--with P being a mark of M. This had been the routine sytle of predication until Frege. The abnormal articles used by those authors are but a belated linguistic fallout of the old Latin predication usages in modern European languages. Barth herself encourages us to take this view of reducing the problem of the articles to the issue of the discrepancies between old and new predication theory when she states that the actual presence of the articles prefixed to M is not essential for her purposes (p. 40). Without articles, the general form of the sentences we worry about is no longer 'the M is P' but 'M is P' (or rather, 'M est P', in Latin), and the puzzles, if any, cannot arise from the absent ("zero") articles. IGNACIOANGELELL1 University of Texas at Austin Historical Knowing. By Leon J. Goldstein. (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1975. Pp. 216. $10.00) Recent Anglo-American philosophy of history is primarily concerned with the problems of historical knowing. Goldstein examies some of those trends in this tradition that proclaim that philosophically justified criteria of reference, truth, and objectivity are fundamental to historical knowing. But it is also argued here that actual historical practice often fails to satisfy these philosophically imposed criteria. Indeed, he claims, many of the criteria from which these requirements emerge are philosophically inadequate or misdirected. Further, the realistic, positivistic, and linguistic strictures to which historical knowing must conform are rooted in theories of perception, causation, and objectivity inappropriate for the philosophy of historical knowing. But the real question of the philosophy of history, claims the author, is not whether history satisfies these externally imposed criteria of cognitive status, but "What is factuality or empirical reference in a discipline practiced the way this one is?" (p. xv). A large part of this work, and l believe the best part, is devoted to a critique of historical realism. The examination of this school is meant to illustrate one of the inadequate aspects of the above mentioned philosophic criteria of historical knowing, the realist criterion. The realist school maintains or supposes the thesis that a real past, as it was when it was being lived, is the touchstone against which we must test the truth or falsity of the products of our historical constructions. In opposition to this thesis, Goldstein maintains that any philosophy of historical knowing should be mainly concerned with what the phenomenologists call the "constitution" of past human events, that is, a description of our access to the historical past by noting how it is constructed in the actual process of historical research (p. xxi). The realist's concern about whether there are objects independent of our consciousness to which our conceptions of things must conform is not properly a historical concern, for no historical past exists in that sense. Abstract considerations about the reality of the past, then, do not fall within the purview of critical philosophy of history, for "history is not interested in the past as such but in the constitution of past human events" (p. xx). Goldstein further argues that philosophy of history as it is practiced in the English-language community does not concern itself with the actual procedures historians utilize in their constitution of the past. Rather, it takes its departure from the finished literary text of the historian, and a faulty common sense, ordinary language view of the historical world. Given this faulty orientation and their failure to attend to the experiences of historical constitution, BOOK REVIEWS 253 contemporary philosophers tend to impose upon philosophy of history conceptions of reference , truth, or factuality that simply do not fit. Goldstein, then, departs importantly from recent approaches...