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Reviews109 sibility" tackles fundamental issues concerning ethics, social responsibility, and the hitherto unresolved relationship between causal determinism and the freedom of the will. The three essays appended here by the English translator to the original six from The Little Book are all concerned with values: their essence, relativity and morality, and the material and manner in which their manifestation is realized. They are examples of conceptual ordering, attempts at specific phenomenological analyses, and evidence of Ingarden's axiological pluralism. Absent from these essays on value, as from the one on responsibility, are actual pronouncements on value or even the slightest trace of an engagement. Ingarden's definitions of works of art as "purely intentional objects" owing to the artist's acts of consciousness are accompanied by occasional, seemingly peremptory statements on the autonomy and objectivity of aesthetic value. While such qualities seem to be desired by the author, he fails to demonstrate their existence. The integrity of Ingarden's thought remains intact in both categories of essays. His fundamental ontological investigations into man's reality and into art both move in the same privileged sphere of intentionality and consciousness. Ethical and aesthetic values seem to be born from the encounter between the causal determinism coming from the real world and the exercise of free will. The most fascinating and vibrant of Ingarden's essays included in the present volume is the one on "Man and Time," written during the war. It confronts the need for self-realization within the annihilating passage of time. Man's agony about his passing on and the frailty of his existence are met and comforted with the healing virtues of value created through man's intentional acts of consciousness . While the diree "heavier" essays on value exemplify Ingarden's only mildly critical but frequently criticized philosophical Gestalten, the six "innocent" essays from The Little Book constitute the soul of the collection. They reveal some previously unsuspected essence and unsurfaced preoccupations that may have induced Ingarden to find his own human value in the production of multiple axiologies of idealist phenomenological thought. United States Naval AcademyEva L. Corredor The Concept of Reason in French Classical Literature: 1635-1690, by Jeanne Haight; xiv & 208 pp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982, $35.00. At first glance, Jeanne Haight's monograph seems to be the typical philological study: modest and meticulous, almost to a fault. We are treated to chapter after chapter on the various contexts in which raison appeared in 1 10Philosophy and Literature seventeenth-century French works: aesthetic, literary, political, theological, scientific, moral, and metaphysical. Haight even appends a list of the definitions of raison and related words according to dictionaries of the time. The strength of this book lies in Haight's sensitivity to the differences in nuance conveyed by raison, even within the same text. Its weakness stems from the inevitable vastness ofthe survey, coupled with the relatively undeveloped state of scholarship in this area. The result is that the book may be a rather boring read for someone used to research spiced with theory and polemic. But this deficit can be easily made up, if Haight is read as offering die kind of evidence needed for evaluating the perennial attempts at reinterpreting that pivotal term ofthe pivotal period in the emergence of modern philosophy and science. Once theoretically informed by the reader, Haight's book presents an intriguing and disturbing picture. Largely through the efforts ofthe deconstructionists, we have nowadays become used to (if not accepted) the idea that seekers after The True, The Good, The Beautiful — and The Rational — have been united more by a common word or cluster of words whose presence can be traced through a series oftexts dian by a common (Platonic) object which diey have all aimed to define. And it is easy to imagine this "dissemination" resulting from a proliferation of contexts in which die same word acquires different local usages. However, there is one part of this story that most philosophers continue to doubt, and it is here that Haight can provide ample testimony. Foucault and Derrida have said much against "The Babel Mentality" we tend to have about the nature of philosophical disputes. For example, even...

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