Critique of Dialectical Reason (review)

246 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY view is related to and may have been the origin of the peculiar conception of the logical square under consideration. The traditional notion of the categorical sentences is not exactly our Fregean notion. The sentences A and I are for the tradition much closer to an atomic affirmative sentence "Socrates is well" than they are to our Fregean eyes, and the same can be said of E and O as compared with "Socrates is not well." Authors may have thought that "All men are rational" should be false in case there are no men, just as "Socrates is well" is false in case Socrates does not exist, and that "No men are rational" should be true in case there are no men, just as "Socrates is not well" is true in case Socrates does not exist. This, however, can be accepted at most as a benevolent explanation of how some traditional logicians were misled by an insufficient analysis of the categorical sentences. While one can make sense of classifying "Socrates is well" as false and "Socrates is not well" as true when Socrates does not exist, there seems to be no reason to extend the same criterion to A, I as opposed to E, O. Neither Prior nor the editors help the reader in this problem. Prior being a logician and a philosopher, one would expect a greater engagement on his part in each of the main issues raised in this volume. Historically, the book is a useful reminder of facts in the history of logic of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well as of Aristotelian doctrines. The medieval period is poorly represented; for example, there seem to be no references to the "complexe significabile" theories in Prior's discussions on the meaning of sentences. Typographically the volume does not help the reader in distinguishing quotations from Prior's own text. It is often hard to see where the limits are between both. IGNACIO ANGELELLI University of Texas, Austin Jean-Paul Sartre. Critique of Dialectical Reason. Edited by Jonathan R6e. Translated by Alan Sheridan-Smith. London: NLB; Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1976. Pp. 836. $30.00. It has taken far too long for this book to be published in English translation. The French original appeared in 1960. The author's preeminence as a philosopher and writer was unquestioned , both in French- and in English-speaking countries. The book was originally written under the pressure of events now long past, in particular the French war against Algeria. During the late 1950s, Sartre shared in the general despair felt by sensitive French people at the conduct of that war, and, as Simone de Beauvoir puts it, he protected himself by working furiously at his Critique de la Raison Dialectique. It was not a case of writing as he ordinarily did, pausing to think and make corrections, tearing up a page, starting again; for hours at a stretch he raced across sheet after sheet without rereading them, as though absorbed by ideas that his pen, even at that speed, couldn't keep up with.... t While Algeria cannot be said to be a dominant topic in the Crituque, the bulk of which is not, in any case, written at the journalistic level of current events, the book does bear many scars from its hasty and pressured authorship. Moreover, while the Critique is not, in my estimation, particularly redolent of the 1950s, many perceptive critics have rightly noted its prescient anticipations of events and of a general atmosphere that were to permeate the 1960s, the decade following its publication. For instance, Wilfrid Desan's book-length study The Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre, 2 which consists primarily of arm'si Force of Circumstance, trans. Richard Howard (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1964) p. 385. Garden City: Doubleday, 1965. BOOK REVIEWS 247 length reportage, displays creativity when its author uses episodes from the development of the American Civil Rights Movement of the early '60s in order to explicate Sartre's relatively abstract analyses of social changes. That Desan is successful in this approach is significant; equally significant is the ease with which so many of the events...