Interpreting Modern Philosophy (review)

410 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY a libertine, but the principal thrust of his chapter is to tell us that Moli~re's thought is impenetrable. Perhaps it would have helped to know what the eighteenth century saw in Molibre, rightly or wrongly. However careful the author may be, in the last analysis his Enlightenment mentality does distort the perspective of his work. What is most distressing is that I suspect that the majority of his readers will be Enlightenment specialists, the very ones least likely to be able to guard against this bias. Gassendi, we are told, possessed "more than a fair amount of timidity" (p. 207). Why timidity? He published the only truly clinching arguments for the heliocentric theory a mere nine years after Galileo's condemnation. Was that timid? There is no doubt, Professor Wade concludes, that Pascal was, like Descartes, "un franc rationaliste, un rationaliste sans drfaillances" (p. 289). Or again, "it would be embarrassing if the founder of the Enlightenment [Bayle] turned out to be merely confused. Indeed, it would be more embarrassing still if he turned out not to be its founder.... Bayle could thus be characterized as a free-thinking philosopher well on his way toward becoming a 'philosophe'" (p. 581). Evidently he just missed the boat. When will we stop thinking of Bayle and Fontenelle merely as precursors? No man ever aspired to be a precursor. If I had to label this book, I would write "Handle with respect--and care." CRAIGB. BRUSH Fordham University Interpreting Modern Philosophy. By James Collins. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972. Pp. x+463. $14. Paper, $7.50.) The erudite Professor James Collins has contributed an imaginative philosophical study to the renewed historical interest in modern philosophical texts, from Descartes to the present, as evidenced even by some first-rank original minds now at work. Collins claims that a creative historical questioning is now underway, both in analytical and phenomenological camps. Leading philosophers no longer divorce textual exegesis and reconstruction from lively criticism (hence overcoming "the purist split"); neither do they "sequester" the modern texts in a special classics department nor completely separate their own sometimes original philosophizing from insistent concern for discussions of the texts themselves. Consequently the historical study of philosophy has become philosophically alive. Professor Collins suggests that this historical phenomenon can best be understood in light of a "theory" (would "rationale" have been a better word to use?) which recognizes the insistency of the modern sources, the power of the dominant leading questions they raise and the vital contemporary "movements" occurring in "the interpreting present." The author has many penetrating, even sometimes significantly original remarks about modern figures, the "greats" like Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant and Hegel; as well as analyses of lesser but historically recognized thinkers like Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Mill and Nietzsche. His reading is impressive, including a grasp of the worth of contemporary philosophers like Husserl, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and Ryle, to name just some of the persons treated in this book. The author also shows a rich knowledge of available scholarly interpretations of the leading figures. Yet Professor Collins carefully restricts the application of his proffered "theory" to an historical interpretation of modern Western philosophical sources, excluding it from "'the historical study of ancient and medieval, renaissance and eastern philos- BOOK REVIEWS 411 ophies" (pp. 406-408). His main justifying reason for this exclusion is that the concern for man's nature ("the theme of humanity") is claimed to run as a uniquely underlying thematic one through both the modern and contemporary texts, in ways foreign to these other eras and cultures. This tolerant, even pluralistic "theory" is richly defended in a series of tightly written chapters, showing the author's wide-ranging awareness of major sources as well as of different yet related conceptual themes in our own age. Chapter II (pp. 35-96) treats the insistent modern sources, including a thorough and valuable analysis of "the demanding text of Descartes." Chapter III (pp. 97-185) wisely explores the domain of artful historical questioning; it includes detailed treatments of problems of "text, translation, and biography" as well as of "genesis, system, and conspectus" of the great thinkers. In...