Le Langage à l'âge classique (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 203 all the laws of the Law of Moses to be "rational." The contradiction vanishes when it is realized that in attributing to Maimonides the apparently incongruous view that all the Jewish laws are "rational," Twersky is merely reiterating that according to Maimonides they all have intelligible reasons, that is, instrumental or teleological explanations. However, Maimonides (in Guide, 2, 33, and elsewhere; and so Saadiah Gaon, Beliefs and Opinions, 3, 1-3) had used the term in the stronger sense of "knowable to all men by reason alone." In any case, Maimonides's position is unequivocal: moral laws (like ceremonial ones) are not "rational" but should be reasonable. As regards the overtly philosophical Book of Knowledge, Twersky emphasizes its importance as a summary of Maimonides's philosophic position (pp. 26o, 361,372; but cf. p. 5o5), but does not explicate this summary in any systematic way. This omission is particularly unfortunate for students of the Guide of the Perplexed, since the simplistic but lucid presentation in The Book of Knowledge may offer valuable keys to solving the esoteric puzzles of the Guide. For example, Twersky notes in passing that in The Book of Knowledge "Maimonides rather boldly operates with the eternity of the world as a basis for his proofs of the existence of God" (p. 448, n. 224). However, Twersky gives no hint to what might be the implications of this. Is the eternal preexistence of the world a fundamental of Maimonides's theology? Does Maimonides 's "bold" espousal of the theory of eternity in The Book of Knowledge help to clarify his abstruse discussion of cosmogony in the Guide? All in all, however, Twersky's Introduction to the Code of Maimonides is a grand work, distinguished by masterful scholarship, bristling with sharp insights, and animated throughout by an intimate and sympathetic understanding of the spirit of Maimonideanism. Readers interested in Maimonides's philosophy (and especially his philosophy of law) may be frustrated by what Twersky does not say, but they will find in what he does say a broad, deep, and sturdy foundation for their own researches. WARREN ZEV HARVEY Hebrew University ofJerusalem Andr6 Robinet. Le Langage g~l'~ge classique. Paris: Editions Klincksieck, 1978. Pp. 294. FR74.oo. Does or can the thinking mind encounter and understand eternal, general, true ideas through direct intuition without the intervention or mediation of sensations, words, speech, or language? Or does the mind first have particular sensations primitively indicated by gestures and words that provide the material for a process of abstractive thinking that results in arbitrary general ideas? Are ideas innate or are they derived from sensible experience? Do ideas come first before words and speech and language as specified by the Augustino-Cartesian rationalist tradition, or are words and speech and language required before ideas can be generated as specified by the Lockean empiricist tradition? Is human reason universal, the same for all human beings, or is it conventional, really different for different groups of people according to time and circumstance? Does language follow the order of human thought, or is the order of 204 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY thought directed by the (perhaps circumstantial) order of language? Is there a universal grammar underlying all human language? Can or does mind and thinking develop independently of sensing, or is the development of the mind and thought dependent on sensible experience? Can or does the mind exist as an independent mental substance, or is it dependent on body, or is it even possibly merely a material substance itself?. These questions are crucial in the development of modern philosophy through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Andr6 Robinet has now provided a superb and meticulous study in which he examines critically the opinions, arguments, and polemics about language of several dozen seminal thinkers from Descartes through Rousseau. His text contains a myriad of well-selected quotations showing thoroughly each thinker's position, and his summaries and connecting comments are as succinct as are his criticisms terse and to the point. The amount of material Robinet has packed into this short book is staggering but by no means overwhelming. And for this we can be grateful, for anyone interested in understanding modern...