Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (review)

264 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY is that it doesn't. Hutcheson did not see the problem at first, because he was absorbed in the refutation of egoism. In the Illustrations he was more concerned to criticize the rationalists, and here he distinguished between "exciting reasons" and "justifying reasons"; the former, he argued, presuppose instinctive desires (such as benevolence), while the latter presuppose the feeling of approval that constitutes the moral sense. The question remains, however: when an agent judges of his own actions, cannot a "justifying reason" form a motive to action? Jensen does not see the problem quite as I do, at least so far as Hutcheson's initial situation is concerned. He is especially careful in exploring Hutcheson's later distinction between exciting and justifying reasons. Both on this topic and on the character of the moral sense his book is a helpful guide to understanding Hutcheson. Jensen has a sound knowledge of relevant modern commentary and his critical account of recent interpretations of Hutcheson is entirely judicious. If he has a fault, it is that he does not give enough attention to the historical dimension. (I should say the same about my own earlier studies in this field.) He certainly does not ignore it. For example, he tells us on p. 43 that the third edition of the lnqtdry makes an important change in emphasizing the term "approval," and he is well aware that the thought of the System differs substantially from that of the earlier books. But in dealing with his main theme, the relation of the moral sense to motivation, he might have done well to consider the effect of historical development as between the Inquiry and the Illustrations. Again, it is helpful up to a point to compare Hutcheson's theory of moral judgment with the niceties of modern analysis in ethics, but this sort of thing can go too far. Hutcheson and Hume were not facing the kind of questions brought up by modern thinkers who distinguish "non-cognitivism" from "subjectivism" and who divide the latter into a simple and a "trans-subjective" form. Patient analysis of the different possibilities and of their several difficulties is all very well in a Ph.D. thesis, where it can contribute to training in philosophical method, but when the thesis is turned into a book as a study in the history of ideas, such irrelevancy needs to be pruned away. I conclude with two points of detail. Jensen writes in his Preface and on p. 8 as if Selby-Bigge's British Moralists contained the whole of the second treatise in Hutcheson's Inquiry; in fact there are omissions. On p. 108 lensen offers a novel (though, as he realizes, somewhat far-fetched) suggestion for interpreting a puzzling remark about self-approval made by Hume in a letter to Hutcheson. I think this remark of Hume's must be understood as regarding a statement of Malebranche ("all the passions justify themselves") that seems to have been a favourite with the Scottish moralists. It is cited by Hutcheson in Inquiry concerning Moral Good and Evil, II.4, and by Adam Smith in Theory o] Moral Sentiments, III.4. D. D. RAPHAEL Imperial College, University of London Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study. By Alexander Altmann. (University, Alabama : The University of Alabama Press, 1973. Pp. xvi+900) There was a time, not so long ago, when Moses Mendelssohn, "the hunchback philosopher " of Dessau and Berlin (1729-1786) was widely admired for ushering in the period of Jewish Emancipation. The great nineteenth century historian of the Jewish people, Heinrich Graetz, called him "the initiator of the rejuvenation and the renascence of the Jewish people" and began the eleventh and concluding volume of his Geschichte der Iuden with a description of Mendelssohn's life and work. Others, especially after the rise of the Jewish national movement and modern Zionism, saw in Mendelssohn the thinker mainly responsible for the growing assimilation of the BOOK REVIEWS 265 Jews to their respective non-Jewish majoritieswa trend which they denounced as a major threat to Jewish survival. While admitting that this offshoot of the German-Jewish ghetto, turned into a representative figure of the German Enlightenment...