Il pensiero degli Idéologues: Scienza e filosofia in Francia (1780-1815) (review)

378 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY and thus are not subject to an analysis which treats them as empirically affected. Or: meaning and truth cannot themselves be explained empirically without empiricism itself becoming a dogmatism. But, a sufficient, non-question-begging explanation would necessarily have to be "non-empirical" in Prauss's sense of "transcendental." As Kant puts it, the question to ask is not about the "origin" of experience, but what "in ihr liegt." However, the last remarks by Prauss so exclude the "thing---considered in itself" from any relation with the issue of empirical affection, that he ends up leaving out any consideration of the one non-empirical, transcendental second-level concept that has traditionally been most problematic in formulating the Kantian theory of experience -the notion of "Angewiesenheit" or directedness from the given. In one sense, or as he would say, on one level, the problem of such "guidance" is simply empirical, as is the problem of affection. But, at the transcendental level, it must be possible to explain in what positive sense "thinking" (denken) an empirical object as "in itself" can contribute to an understanding of how, or by virtue of what, empirical knowledge is guided by empirical experience. But on this point, Prauss is simply ambiguous; occasionally calling such speculation "metaphysical"; at other points not condemning metaphysics, but, apparently, opening the way for considering it in its proper (perhaps practical) context. ROBERT B. Pn,riN University of California, San Diego II pensiero degli ld~ologues: Scienza e filosofia in Francia (1780-1815). By Sergio Moravia. (Firenze: La Nuova Italia, 1974. Pp. 865. Lire 13,000) The second volume of Sergio Moravia's magnum opus on the French Id6ologues richly rewards the reader with careful scholarship and inspired insights into the late Enlightenment effort to construct the sciences of man and society. Where the historical and political study in the first volume (ll tramonto dell'illuminismo [Bari, 1968]) had dramatic and narrative continuity, this sequel excels in cogent Ideengeschichte of specific Id6ologue themes. The major, Well-substantiated thesis is the critical re-evaluation by Id6ologues of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era of the thought of eighteenthcentury philosophes such as Condillac, Diderot, Holbach, Helv6tius, and Turgot. Two of the four related but autonomous sections of the book are entirely new: Part I, "Cabanis and the Foundation of a Materialist Anthropology," and Part II, "The Reform of Psychology in France between the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries." Part III, "Philosophy and Geography in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century," is a revision of an article published in Studies on Voltaire in 1967, while Part IV is an augmented and refined version of La scienza della societd in Francia alia fine del secolo XVIII, accessible with some difficulty in the Acts of the Tuscan Academy for 1967. The reader must be grateful to Moravia for bringing together in one volume the results of ten years of research. One regrets only the lack of an anthology of his many valuable articles on similar" subjects. Moravia attaches the most importance to the section on the physician-philosopher Cabanis, who wrote the Rapports du physique et du moral (1796-1802). He justifiably emphasizes the distance between Condillac's "statue-man" and the physiological empiricism of Cabanis. My own independent investigations of Cabanis fully support Moravia's contention that Cabanis revised the Cartesian "static-inert" view of matter with its requirement of a soul in man into a monist human physiology based on Haller's concept of the living fiber and the "sensitivity" of the Montpellier school of medicine. Moravia aptly compares Cabanis's anti-mechanist reductionism to the "materialism" BOOK REVIEWS 379 of Diderot and Holbach, though he could have more closely linked his discussion of La Mettrie with the excellent paragraphs on Hailer. While he does emphasize Cabanis 's belief in a hierarchy of forces from physical gravitation to animal sensitivity, Moravia uses the term "materialism" (p. 108) too interchangeably with monism (pp. 30, 118-119). For all Cabanis's naturalism, there is speculation in the Rapports (ed. Lehec, I, 531) that gravitational attraction might well be explained as a "vague instinct " rather than sensitivity as a higher-order gravitation. Moravia also underrates...