Brief Notices

BRIEF NOTICES Der Begri!J der Geschichte als Wissenschaft. By RENE VoGGENSPERGER. Fribourg, Switzerland: Paulusverlag, 1948. Pp. 130. In many respects, the modern mind is tilted toward Plato more than toward Aristotle. Though it is dangerous to press this point into its details, lest similarities become strained and history over-simplified, there is a way in which Plato represents that interest in the past which has caught fire in modern scholarship. It is a belief that, by probing back through the past, the present can be explained, the laws of things can be understood, and the secrets can be wrenched from the universe about its origins. Much more than Aristotle, Plato had a genetic approach to cosmology, and when the Renaissance ushered in the distinctively modern era it returned to Plato rather than to Aristotle. From this point, Voggensperger briefly traces out the modern ardor in regard to history, showing how Comte, Hegel, German historicism, and also the pragmatic view of history as magister vitae make the project, described in his title, a very timely enterprise. Though Dilthey is treated, the author might have given an even more pertinent aspect to his study had he mentioned the problems of history in Jaspers and Heidegger. Communism likewise leans heavily upon history for support of its dialectical philosophy, and American naturalism, Voggensperger might have said, is at pains to appeal to the past in order to define philosophy and to locate its present opportunities. But the author has done more than time his topic, the concept of history as a science. He has said a great number of interesting and important things about the subject and has shown a commendable interest in uniting what is good in Aristotle with whatever truth an Aristotelian spirit can discover in modern philosophies. It is well known that Aristotle did not value history very highly in the world of knowledge, even ranking it below poetry which he felt rose above historical singularities to a kind of universal insight. It is a bold project then to ask where history fits into to the realistic Aristotelian definition of science. The author, appealing to authority and using his own arguments, concludes to the following definition of history: "History is a science which studies, in their many-sided individuality and according to their causal and teleological coordination, socially relevant events and circumstances produced by human wins " (p. 50) . At first sight, this definition of what a science is taken to be today does not square at all with Aristotle's idea of what a science ought, to be. A certain knowledge in terms of causes, which is the Aristotelian account of 524 BRIEF NOTICES 525 genuine science, must be evident in character, causal in method, necessary and universal. But history is a study of individuals. It involves acts not necessary but flowing from human freedom. Historical knowledge does not attain the essences of things. This, then, is the central problem of the author: To fit in the modern definition of science as a fait accompli with the rigor of Aristotle's definition. Voggensperger is impressed with Maritain's attempt to show the empirical sciences in terms of so-called perinoetic intellection. It will be remembered that Maritain argues that such empirical disciplines gravitate to areas like mathematics or philosophy which are more truly scientific. There is something of this same thought which remains in Voggensperger's approach to history, for his final solution of the problem is that Aristotle's account of science, which is after all what realism commands, must be retained at all costs. But Voggensperger argues that the modern idea of science is not altogether alien to Aristotle's. History, he concludes, is a scientia in fieri. It is condemned forever to aim at a truly scientific character and can be scientific only to the extent that it participates in what Aristotle required of episteme. But this actual elevation into a truly scienific status history as knowledge can never claim. Its actual achievement will always fall short of its ambition. As a science, it will always be in fieri. This is a challenging idea, capable of extension, if it is true, to much wider horizons in the...