Kant's Dialectic (review)

236 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY relation to minds; (3) speaks sympathetically of innate idea doctrines; (4) rejects abstractionist theories of concept formation; (5) holds that the mind always thinks; (6) takes his Principles to establish the natural immortality of the soul. I suspect that these Cartesian themes get discounted for reasons, as indicated above, which are rooted in larger cultural considerations. In any case, Berkeley's commitments to (a) the irredicible and ultimate duality of human experience, and (b) the impossibility of characterizing spirits in terms of ideas, are both Cartesian. The latter is not merely a phenomenological point. I take it to reflect Berkeley's version of the Cartesian doctrine (Discourse, Pt. V) that minds display activities which cannot be analyzed in mechanical (corporeal) terms. Something akin to dualism is once again becoming respectable in biology because of the failure of strict empiricist methodologies to explain mental phenomena, in particular human language. However, that is only relevant to Berkeley insofar as it frees us from the presuppositions of several generations of philosophical commentators and allows us a fresh look at Berkeleian material. In this connection one might keep in mind that Scottish philosophers (holding in abeyance the complex case of Hume) were among the first to give Berkeley a hearing. This sympathetic interest survived for a century. Moreover, the Scots, while perhaps not Cartesian dualists, remained dualists long after empiricist considerations had become dominant in English philosophy. In brief, I am suggesting that in terms of the Berkeleian texts, the material to which Berkeley had access, and his reception among the Scots, it is perfectly plausible to read Berkeley as articulating what is essentially a Cartesian position. The main objection to this reading is that the weight of philosophical opinion over the past half-century has been against mind as an entity, against mind/body dualism. This "empiricist" bias appears in Berkeley criticism by the selective use of Lockean principles as the foundation for understanding Berkeley (and Hume). It might seem that my most basic charge against Tipton is that since the critics have generally presented empiricist features of Berkeley, and since this study seeks to unravel Berkeley's arguments while taking account of the critics, Tipton is accordingly "infected" by the biases of others. At bottom, however, his own position is what troubles me. I think he is wrong about the extent of Berkeley's debt to Locke; in particular, so far as mind is concerned. I must grant, however , that Tipton's ultimate commitment to a Lockean reading is often reasonably argued and not without textual support. Nevertheless, the difficulty with his reading is that it becomes incredibly difficult to see what Berkeley could have been about. Thus it is paradoxical that one of the consequences of reading this careful and important book is to make one recognize that Berkeley should no longer be read in empiricist terms. McGill University HARRYM. BRACKEN Kant's Dialectic. By Jonathan Bennett. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Pp. xi + 291. ,$15.50) Kant's Dialectic is a series of discussions of various topics Kant handles in the Dialectic section of the Critique, combined with a defense of such a way of commenting on the Dialectic. It is argued that the Dialectic is not a consistent working out of a unified philosophical position, but rather the thoughts of a great philosopher on a series of problems that exercised the minds of his predecessors and that still ought to exercise ours. The purported unity of the Dialectic is dismissed by Bennett as "theory-of-reason stuff" (p. 4) and he concentrates instead on the details of Kant's discussions. Bennett directs his considerable analytic ability to areas not usually in the forefront of analytic BOOK REVIEWS 237 concerns. He handles the topics with due seriousness and respect. Along the way Bennett has novel points to make on various elements in the philosophies of Descartes, Leibniz, Locke, and Hume. These luminaries, as well as Kant himself, become in Bennett's hands both living and vulnerable. To those who objected to Bennett's commentary on the Analytic, that it substituted what Kant should have said for what he did say, the reply might be that there...