William Whewell: Philosopher of Science, and: William Whewell: A Composite Portrait (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 621 each of the four Paralogisms of Pure Reason, is that the modal status of the logical subject and its analytic attributes (substantiality, simplicity, identity, and existence) is that of a necessity de dicto: a necessity that reflects our human ways of thinking rather than the way things are independent of our conditions of thought (56f., 78ff.). The proton pseudos of the psychological paralogisms is, according to Powell, the illicit hypostatization of the necessary ways of representing the logical subject into claims about what the subject is (apperceptiosubstantiata, 8o). Powell then extends this critique of any substantialist conception of the self to Kant's own notion of the subject of consciousness , arguing that the latter is merely "a necessary illusion" (231). This move is prepared by Powell's earlier shift from the statement that we are "experiencing as a single consciousness" to the assertion that our experience is "as /f it were had by such a subject" (57)- Powell's reduction of predicative characterizations of the epistemic self to fictional ones seems at odds with his own insistence on the actuality of the "I" (8, 57f.), and it obliterates Kant's distinction between the transcendental unity of apperception as the principal condition of true appearances and the transcendental ideas as the basis for the representation of illusory transcendent objects. Kitcher's and Powell's works are important contributions to the field and mandatory reading for scholars of Kant's theoretical philosophy. GUENTER ZOELLER UniversityofIowa Menachem Fisch. William Whewell: Philosopher of Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. xiv + a2o. Cloth, $59.oo. Menachem Fisch and Simon Schaffer, eds. William Whewell: A CompositePortrait. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. xiv + 4o3 . Cloth, $98.oo. These volumes come at a time when the work of the nineteenth-century polymath William Whewell, largely neglected for many years, has begun to receive the attention it deserves. Whewell was a man of many missions: scientist, philosopher, historian of science, man of letters, university educator, celebrated Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. The essays in A Composite Portrait give ample testimony to how much Whewell contributed to the fulfillment of his many missions. Fisch's book applies a historiography he calls "erotetic contextualism." The method attempts an objective appraisal of the philosophical worth of some work, based on study of the author's problem situation (Popper), and an empathic reenactment by the historian of the problem situation a thinker faced (Collingwood). A problem is characterized as "the failure of a system to achieve a goal or goals it is intended to achieve. A system can be any goal-directed structure: abstract (as geometry or Marxism) or concrete (as a biological organism or the Royal Mail)" (9-1o). Philosophers at work attempt to solve philosophical problems. We are told little more about this methodology; the thin results achieved suggest that there is not much more to say. The book is supposed to sustain one important conclusion. After the usual castigation of a list of authors who have (according to Fisch) misunderstood Whewell, he 622 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~O:4 OCTOBER 1992 concludes: "No one seems to have seriously considered the possibility that Whewell's importance as a philosopher may have lain in the process bywhich his v~as tookshape more than in the views he eventually adopted" (8). The historiography seems trivial: of course philosophers work at solving problems. But classical intellectual historians have also studied much richer contexts: the languages of the day, the social and political forces at work, the temperament and character of the philosopher studied, the main movements of contemporary philosophical ideas. What are we to make of the claim that Wheweli's work is to be valued, not for its results, but for the way in which those results were reached? We value the work of Frege because the way in which he achieved his results introduced a new and more powerful logic. Similarly, the process involved in Descartes's study of problems of the mind resulted in a new psychology; and the one involved in Mach's study of certain philosophical problems resulted in contributions to relativity theory. If a philosopher's way of addressing...