The Credibility of Divine Existence, The Collected Papers of Norman Kemp Smith (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 307 attempt to show the relationship between kinaesthetic consciousness and transcendental subjectivity: Kinaesthetic consciousness, being caught up in bodily movement in the world, is necessarily mundane, naive consciousness; but it is not all of mundane consciousness, which also includes the actual hyletic data given to consciousness. Kinaesthetic consciousness is the formal, invariant eidos of mundane consciousness. Then kinaesthetic consciousness is related to transcendental, reflective consciousness as the state which always precedes the latter; reflective phenomenologieal consciousness always finds itself as "having been" kinaesthetic and mundane before reflection sets in. The transition between these two must be examined by a genetic analysis, and Claesges ends by showing that the dimension of temporality must be brought in to complete the static analysis he has given. Part III is an attempt to systematize several themes in Husserl. Claesges makes many equations that Husserl does not explicitly carry out. His systematization is interesting and shows many relationships that help organize Husserl's thought, but some of them seem too sehematized. (For instance, how can he, on pp. 124-125, interpret a "second sense" of constitution as the total pattern of structures that allow perceptions of things to occur? Structures function in constitution, but can we say they "are" constitution in any sense?) Also, more documentation would be useful in Part III to show how much is precisely an exegesis of Husserl and how much the author's interpretation. The book shares the Hegelian flavor that many studies of Husserl made at Cologne seem to have. The author is well aware of the philosophical issues underlying Husserl's writing, so the book is not only an illuminating study of the man's thought, but a good philosophical treatise as well. I~OBERTSOKOLOWSKI Catholic University Washington The Credibility of Divine Existence, The Collected Papers o] Norman Kemp ,~mith. Eds. A. J. D. Porteus, R. D. MacLennan, and G. E. Davie. (London: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's Press; 1967.Pp. viii -}-446. $11) This is more than a collection of Kemp Smith's articles in British and American periodicals, published during his varied career from 1905 to 1957; but even the gathering of scattered essays alone makes the volume of great value. Kemp Smith's three friends provide biographical essays that inform the reader of his academic attachments both in Great Britain and America and also of his philosophical development. The only one of Kemp Smith's essays included in this volume that had not been published in periodicals is his charming description of John Locke. This portrait of Locke as a reasonable Englishman contrasts strikingly with his portrait of Hume as a Scottish naturalist. G. E. Davie analyzes the ways in which Kemp Smith was led to his attack on "awareness of awareness" under the influences of Avenarius, Malebranche, Bergson, Samuel Alexander, and Whitehead, and summarizes his account in the following way : Kemp Smith's great achievement has been to challenge the progressive view (what one might call the Whig view) of intellectual history. From first to last, the central theme of his Kant and Hume and Descartes books has been a calling in question of the Romantic-optimistic dialectic alike in the 'Germanic-Coleridgean' version according to which one-sided outlooks of a pluralistic and subjective kind prepare the way for a final revelation of monistic mysticism, and equally in the Benthamite-utilitarian version according to which a primitive legacy of mystical monism is in process of being replaced by the ultimate clarity of a behaviouristic-pluralistic logic. Setting aside altogether this progressivism, Kemp Smith brings out in lucid detail how the great philosophers (including David Hume and Descartes) were not tied to the artificially simplified extremes of either monism or pluralism, of either subjectivism or behaviourism, but were, one and all, striving to express, in one form or another , the balanced tensions of complicated position or counter-position. In this way, Kemp Smith sees historical philosophy as a series of recurrent intellectual crises in which a position of moderate centrality is each generation struggling to reassert itself and to reformulate itself 308 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY (not always successfully) in the face of the competition and clamour of one-sided extremism (pp...