Philosophy of History by Robert Paul Mohan (review)

482 BOOK REVIEWS Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, which he regards as a philosophical refinement of commonsense wisdom. He goes on to say that the " most accurate description of what I have done, it seems to me, would be to say that certain things to be found in Aristotle's Ethics constitute my point of departure and control the general direction of my thought, but that I have gone further along the line of thinking about moral problems laid down by Aristotle--adding innovations to his theory, as well as extending and modifying it." (p. 237) I should like to suggest two points in this connection. The first is that, overall, Adler has magnificently achieved what the quoted sentence says he sought to do. The second point is that the primary reason why the book so successfully achieves its objective is precisely because it carries out what a philosophical venture ought to do: it relies on the accumulated wisdom of past philosophers while making its own original contribution. To play a bit on " original," Alder is original on two scores. He has made use of the origins of philosophical wisdom found in Aristotle and others from the past; he is also an origin himself in developing, modifying, and applying such wisdom to the present while also adding his own insights. To be "original" without knowing and benefitting from the past is inevitably a thin contribution and quite liable to errors already made. To repeat the past without regarding what is novel in the present is to invite the tedium of the twice-told tale. This book of Adler's in avoiding both extremes, is an original contribution to the important philosophical, and practical, issues that confront us now. Uni'versity of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana JoHN A. OESTERLE Philosophy of History. By RoBERT PAuL MoHAN. New York: Bruce Publishing Company, 1970. Pp. 191. $3.50. The author adduces ample justification for this admirable and useful little work when he writes: " The philosophy of history is not only a significant chapter in the history of ideas, but it is particularly reflective of the contemporary crisis of a generation which seeks increasingly to understand itself and the long-term significance of the events of our time." (p. 171) This understanding will come from no source more securely than from history " because every voyage into the past begins in a present whose concerns influence both inquiry and inquirer." What the author has sought to do-and succeeded admirably in doing-in this rich and compact little volume is twofold: to place the reader in possession of the general patterns which the quest for meaning in history has BOOK REVIEWS 483 taken heretofore, and to open out to him the patterns of inquiry which that quest may hope to take in the present and the immediate future with some hope of a rewarding increase in understanding. The book itself thus possesses the form which every speculatively historical work spontaneously takes on: through the concerns of the present it links both past and future. The historical account of what the philosophy of history has been in the past is rich, compact, and well-ordered. The author immediately satisfies the question which must inevitably present itself to a culture so sophisticated by written history as the modern age: the relation between philosophy of history and the writing of history. It is well-known with what suspicion the practicing historian has, in the past, come to look upon the constructions and lucubrations of the philosopher of history; how much emphasis, by contrast, he has placed upon the austerity of his method by which he understood precisely its freedom from any speculative presuppositions . The author relaxes this tension by pointing out simply and succinctly that the two enterprises go quite naturally hand in hand. The history which the practicing historian seeks to compose is the criterion which the philosophy of history naturally accepts as the measure of its own achievement; the meaning which is the overt concern of the philosophy of history is also the concern of the historian once he passes, as Croce has noted, beyond the point of mere chronicler and has begun to reflect upon...