Wittgenstein and his Times (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 419 and English editions of the Critique, for example, more useful in this respect than the French original. As Sartre proceeded to write increasingly longer works, this need grew more urgent. Now at last we have the first of a projected three-volume index to Sartre's longest philosophical works, viz., Being and Nothingness, the Critique of Dialectical Reason, and volumes one and two of The Family Idiot. We are even promised further indices to The Transcendence of the Ego, the two studies of the imagination, the essay on the emotions, Saint Genet, and volume three of The Family Idiot. The present volume covers only Being and Nothingness and the Critique. In his twenty-eight page introduction, J. G. Adloff does more than note the difficulties of constructing an index to these works. He proposes his volumes as means for pursuing the career of Sartre's response to the basic question, "What is human being (l'~tre humain) in all its manifestations?" which, he believes, grounds all of Sartre's philosophical research (t2). This constitutes the unifying thread in Sartre's thought. Adloff briefly traces the stages of Sartre's response to the question of human being through Being and Nothingness, the Critique, and The Family Idiot. His analysis of the practico-inert as the social being of man is particularly acute. He points out that we must see "practico-inert" as a relational term between the human and his environment . He also notes that the problem of the real and the imaginary remains central not only to The Family Idiot but to Sartre's philosophy in general. Based as they are on a rather thorough lexical analysis of Sartre's major works, Adloff's observations carry special weight. As for the index itself, its one hundred fifty pages are divided between Being and Nothingness (38 pages) and the Critique and Question of Method (lO6 pages). There are omissions: inevitably, some of one's favorites will not be included as, for example, "quasi-sujet" and "quasi-objet" are missing from the index to Being and Nothingness, and "spontanOitg' and its cognates are absent from both indices. But the range of references is broad and a spot-check of several against my own working index showed them to be quite complete. If Adloff's subsequent volumes are as satisfactory as the present one, they will indeed succeed in fulfilling their author's intent of providing scholars in Sartre studies with a useful and reliable tool for further research. As it is, the present work joins the bibliographical work of Wilcocks, Rybalka and Contat, the Lapointes and others in lifting Sartre scholarship to a high level. THOMAS R. FLYNN Emory University Brian McGuinness, Editor. Wittgenstein and his Times. Chicago: University of Chicago Press; Oxford: Basil Blackweli, 1982. Pp. vi + t22, $15.oo. I have criticized Robert Fogelin ~ for telling us everything about Wittgenstein's arguments except why they were Wittgenstein's arguments. In a trenchant analysis of Witt1 Janik, Allan. Review of Wittgenstein, by Robert J. Fogelin,Journal of the Historyof Philosophy , XVII (January 198o) Number 1, lo8-11o. 420 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY genstein's conceptual tactics, Fogelin failed to ask what philosophical strategies they served. Yet, it is not altogether curious that Fogelin should have taken this approach. For one thing, analyzing the spirit in which Wittgenstein wrote has hardly been a serious preoccupation among analytic philosophers or among the Wittgenstein Establishment , but was left to outsiders like K. T. Fann, who could be conveniently ignored . For another, Wittgenstein's concept of philosophy could only be fully discussed by referring to works other than the Tractatns and Investigations, several of which remain unpublished. The publication of Wittgenstein and his Times marks a watershed in Wittgenstein scholarship inasmuch as the question of the spirit which imbues his works, i.e. his Weltanschauung, is posed as central by four figures from within the Wittgenstein Establishment, Anthony Kenny, B. F. McGuinness, Rush Rhees and G. H. yon Wright, in addition to the brilliant Hungarian historian of ideas, J. C. Nyiri. All these authors rely heavily upon familiarity with Wittgenstein's unpublished papers. Kenny writes on Wittgenstein's two-fold conception of philosophy...