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3~6 BOOK REVIEWS As brief and as few as the articles are, there are some transparent biases, bad ones and good ones. Capitalism is replete with negative indicators as compared with the treatment of Socialism, Communism and Marxism, e.g. " Marxism thus offers to Christians the possibility of being ' doers of the word, not hearers only '." A bright view shines through such topics as Cou,rage, Happiness, Hope, Joy, Leisure, Pleasure. Timely topics include Addiction, Development Aid, Euthanasia, Human Dignity, Liberation, Marriage, Military Service, Racism, Sex and Sexuality, Suicide, Theft and Hostages. An environmental concern is seen in Environment, World, etc. Continual frustration results from the fact that there are noble nuggets lost in the husks. A better treatment of sin is found under Guilt, Conscience , Norms, Godlessness than under its own title Sin. On topics comparable with Beauchamp and Childress, as in Euthanasia, Suicide, Sexuality , it is easier to find the weakness or strength of the " Christian " position in Beauchamp and Childress. There are some very good things said about prayer and lexically under Spirituality. There is a good social orientation in all of the articles, but something must have been lost somewhere in translation when the definition of Social Gospel is: " A liberal Protestant notion which sees sin as inherent in evil social systems, and the kingdom of God and a truly human this-worldly social goal not only as compatible but often as one and the same thing." Wayne State University School of Medicine Detroit, Michigan wALTER A. MARKOWICZ The Unconditional in Human Knowledge: Four Early Essays (1794-1796), by F. W. J. SCHELLING. Translation and commentary by Fritz Marti. Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell University Press, 1980. Pp. ~71. $18.50. This volume collects and explicates Schelling's first philosophical writings, the fledgling attempts, inspired by Fichte, at turning Kantianism into a systematic philosophy. Though they served the reading public as a popularization of Fichte's arid Science of Knowledge and brought the two philosophers into an uneasy master-disciple relationship that would last twelve years, the essays manifest independence of thought and voice many of the themes that later appear in Schelling's mature systems. Taken together, they compose a sustained and lucid meditation on the spirit of Kant's philosophy and provide an interesting glimpse into the philosophic community 's disarray after his attack upon metaphysics. Kant had to be read, understood, and then answered or assimilated. For Fichte and the young Schelling in particular the task was to weld the three Critiques together into a system-a ' Critical Philosophy' they believed implicit in Kant's BOOK REVIEWS 3~7 writings, but undeveloped. Yet barely had the programme been formulated when Schelling began looking back beyond Kant toward Spinoza, raising the question of whether metaphysics had a future after all. " On the Possibility of a Form of All Philosophy" (1794) is a drily logical little treatise which attempts to deduce the three Principles of Fichte's H'issenschaftslehre-the 'I ', the ' not-I ', and the empirical ego wherein' I' ='not-I '-from the formal properties of an axiomatic system. lVfore interesting are the closing pages, wherein a criticism of Kant leads to the proposal that the Critique of Pure Reason be systematized on the basis of the question that Kant forgot to ask, viz. the possible unity of Reason and Understanding. " Of the I as the Principle of Philosophy " (1795) offers extensive argumentation for, and elucidation of, Criticism's transempirical but nontranscendent system-principle, the absolute I. The essay's chief task is demonstrating that an unconditional principle for systematizing our knowledge can be neither objective nor subjective (the way the empirical ego is), but must be 'metasubjective,' characterized by the spontaneity, independence and freedom of the rational I. It is difficult to explicate the postulation of an I that cannot appear in consciousness or as consciousness; the enduring temptation for novice readers of Kant and post-Kantian idealism alike is to reify transcendental subjectivity, turning it into some extraworldly mental thing, some individual Mind that somehow gets ' attached ' to minds like ours. Schelling is quite clear that to assert the absolute I is not to make a transcendent assertion, noi· is it to point...

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