Books Received

254 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY the sum total of all one's thoughts. In this sense I am identical with the mind: I am a mind. Second, it may be taken to denote the ordering or "generating" principle of the unity of a consciousness , which distinguishes it from all others and is itself not a thought or a sequence of thoughts but their "transcendentar' subject. In this sense I have a mind. These two l's correspond 9 to Kant's phenomenal self and transcendental self. (P. 204) And this uniting principle seems really to be the (individual) body: "Finally, if we recall that the "function" that gives the individuality of a particular mind itself depends upon the spatiotemporal continuity of a sentient body (not to mention the body's role in action and speech), then we see the reason for yet another sense of the I, the one denoting the body. In this sense I am a body" (p. 204). I have given these quotations at length because attempts at paraphrase may not do them justice. I think Vendler has gotten on the Humean track, and all substance has shot out from under him. Something similar happened to Locke, Berkeley, and even Kant. Again, it is Cartesian, but is it Cartesianism? Well, these problems may not have strict Cartesian solutions. Vendler's Cartesianism, nevertheless, rests on a firm foundation. It is shown as much as anywhere in his careful maintenance of Descartes' view that animals are machines. Vendler's gloss is that animals can have sensations just as you and I do, except that animals are not aware of their sensations nor of anything else: Animals do not think. But we do. And what are we? Thinking things. And not, I think, mere bundles of thoughts. At the very least we are unions of mind and body. As Vendler says, Where Descartes, and his age, appealed to God, we appeal to evolution9 To them, it was God who provided his creatures with the necessary equipment--teeth and claws, instincts and ideas-for their appropriate form of life; to us, mutations and natural selection can do the same. For if ideas are neurologically based, as I believe they are, then there is no reason to suppose that the process of evolution somehow failed to operate on this most important base for human life. If claws and teeth, senses and native reflexes, have survival value, how much more value must a native conceptual framework enabling man to deal with the world, with himself, and with his fellows have. It is bad enough that we are born as a "naked ape" in the body; why should we start out with a tabula rasa for a mind as well? I suggest, therefore--but, of course, cannot prove--that the system of native ideas has evolved in the same way as any other part of the native human endowment. (P. 218) The Cartesians are staging a comeback. For some time now ethnologists like Konrad Lorenz have been insisting on how much of human behavior is instinctual, linguists like Noam Chomsky have been demonstrating the innate structure of human language, and now philosophers like Zeno Vendler are reminding us that we have not really ventured very far outside Plato's cave. RICHARDA. WATSON Washington University BOOKS RECEIVED First Editions Aldridge, Owen A. Voltaire and the Century o/Light. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. Pp. xii + 443. $20.00. Baker, Keith Michael9 Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics9 Chicago: The Universityof Chicago Press, 1975. Pp. xiv + 538, $22.00. Barnhart, J. E. Religion and the Challenge o] Philosophy. Totowa: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1975. Pp. x + 312. $4.95. BOOKS RECEIVED 255 Bernard Bolzano: Einleitung zur GrSssenlehre und erste Begriffe der Allgemeinen GrSssenlehre. Ed. Jan Berg. Stuttgart: Friedrieh Frommann Verlag, 1975. Pp. 297. Brann, Henry Walter. Schopenhauer und das Judenturn. Bonn: Bouvier Veflag Herbert Grundmann , 1975. Pp. 114. DM 22,00. Capaldi, Nicholas. David Hume. Boston: Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1975. Pp. 241. $7.50. Chi-Yun Chert. Hsiin Yiieh: The Life and Reflections of an Early Medieval Confucian. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Pp. x + 242. $22.50. Coughlan, Neil. Young John Dewey: An Essay in American...