Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 101 philology and that on the art of criticism (the latter is properly conceived as Vico's effort to formulate the idea and the procedures of an historical hermeneutic, always in close relation to the procedures he is actually carrying out, beginning with the De Antiquissima, and even perhaps before, through the variations in the form of the New Science). These chapters, in the view of the present writer, are the best in the author's work. He has an ample conception of the important identity philosophy-philology, though he is not clear on its basis in the classical view of the close relation between rhetoric and philosophy, a perspective necessary, we would suggest for its adequate clarification. Especially effective, we would hold, is his marshalling of the controlling pairs which preside over this method as Vico depicts and employs it; the pairs: factidea , reason-authority, truth-certainty, consciousness and knowledge. In this ordering process, the author shows genuine insight into Vico's procedure. His efforts to bring these elements together in the form of the "Art of Criticism" also exhibit a like perspicuity. In conclusion, it might be said with justice that the author's approach to Vico is guided by a genuine instinct for what is central and vital in that author; and his effort to evaluate this central element in terms of continuing relevance not only for philosophy, but for the whole range of the humanistic disciplines and for the creative life of art and society as well is impressive. This effort, from the point of view of the validity of his interpretation of Vico, suffers severe handicaps from the limited recourse he has to the scholarship and interpretation which has grown up about Vico's work. One senses that his interest in Vico is not that of the Vichian scholar; and his own viewpoint, that of the contribution of Vico to a better understanding of the creative life in its individual and its social dimensions, is both understandable and admirable. It is difficult to escape the conclusion, however, that even in the service of this interest a wider recourse to the resources of Vichian scholarship would have been helpful to him. The fact that his bibliography is limited to works in English or works translated into English, and not to all or even to the most authoritative of these; his too great reliance on Flint, for example, upon whom he seems to be dependent even for his acquaintance with the original text in many instances, especially those touching the De Antiquissima, all militate against the adequate development of what may certainly be recognized as a genuine sensitivity to the central values of Vico's thought. A. ROBERT CAPONIGRI University of Notre Dame Early German Philosophy: Kant and His Predecessors. By Lewis White Beck. (Cambridge : The Belknap Press, 1969. $15.00) Professor Beck has given us a lucid, informative, and often exciting account of German philosophy from the time of St. Ambrose (born at Trier in 340) through Kant and, in the cases of Jacobi, Hamann, and Herder, beyond. The undertaking must have been extremely taxing--Beck points out that the last such attempt was Eduard Zeller's Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie seit Leibniz in 1873. At first the story of German philosophy is only that of scattered individuals associated in one way or another with 102 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Germany and with philosophical problems. Then, from the time of Albert the Great on, when one first gets a succession of German philosophical and quasi-philosophicaI thinkers, the history is largely one of derivative thought, stemming first from Paris and later from Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, and England. Professor Beck has managed to show how, and from whom, his subjects were derivative while avoiding accounts of the non-German thinkers drawn upon. At the same time he captures the essentials of the Germans' positions. The two towering philosophers strictu sensu of the period are, of course, Leibniz and Kant, and between them they account for over one-fifth of the volume. Professor Beck's eminence as a Kantian scholar is undisputed. His Leibniz is equally scholarly. Both accounts, in keeping with the nature of the...