La Psychologie: modèle systémique by Yves Saint-Arnaud (review)

504 LEITERS IN CANADA 1981 that postulates Forms is an 'ontological' one, while the model of knowledge that operates in the Theaetetus is more accurately describable as propositional (p 210). The view is an interesting one, and for Lafrance partand parcel of a general conviction of the basic unity of Plato's thought - a view he shares with the traditionalists, both continental and Anglo-American - but it left this reader unconvinced. The Sophist, after all, on Lafrance's own admission, strongly espouses the Theory of Forms, albeit in a highly modified version, and it is by using preCisely such a theory that Plato can solve the problem of false judgment that had posed such difficulties in the Theaetetus. In his interpretation of the Meno Lafrance again backs the analytic tradition (against, inter alios, !hm and Robin) in rejecting any reference to Forms in the famous phrase aitias /ogismoi, and an understanding of 'recollection' as both empirical and conceptual bases itself on a combination of the views of Ross and Gulley. In this Lafrance is surely on the side of the angels. But a book that deals in such detail with Plato's epistemology, and not least with the role in it of the Theory of Forms, cannot, as this one does, almost completely bypass the Timaeus. This is a startling omission, since on either interpretation of its dating, 'middle' or 'late: Lafrance's understanding of Plato's epistemological 'development' seems almost certain to be subject to modification in some significant respect by what the Timaeus purports to say. If it antedates the Theaetetus, Lafrance's contention that the Theory of Forms is inappropriate to deal with the problem of false judgment must surely be called into question, since the Circles of Same and Different pass judgments of Sameness and Difference thanks precisely to the part played by the Forms Sameness and Difference in their composition. If it postdates the Theaetetus and Sophist, Lafrance's general position is more secure, but his account none the less significantly incomplete, in that it fails to deal with the doctrines of episteme, doxa, and the Forms in an area that (as Laws 10 makes clear) Plato considered, in his later years, to be of the utmost significance, i.e., that of cosmo-theology. But such criticisms should not be allowed to detract from Lafrance's achievement in this book, which is significant, and worthy of high praise. A great day will have dawned when the philosophical climate has so changed that such a book might be submitted to, and accepted for publication by, say, the University of Toronto Press. (T.M. ROBINSON) Yves Saint-Arnaud. La Psychologie: modele sysUmique Les Presses de l'Universite de Montreal! Les Editions du CIM. 146. $12.50 Scientific psychology began when Wilhelm Wundt founded his laboratory at Leipzig. Wundt wedded two approaches. One was an approach to HUMANITIES 505 the events of consciousness through physiology, more specifically, a physiology constructed within an atomistic and mechanistic framework deriving from Descartes and having its distant ancestors in Lucretius and Democritus. The other approach was that of associationist psychology deriving from Hume, and worked out in detail by the Scottish school, the Mills and Spencer. Both approaches took consciousness to be the primary subject-matter of psychology, and its primary data to be states of consciousness as revealed by inspection or introspection of mental contents . It thus enforced methodologically upon psychology what Descartes had insisted upon metaphysically, namely, a sharp distinction between mind or consciousness and body. As the research programme extended itself from the sensory processes upon which Wundt concentrated to the higher processes, the experimental results, particularly of Kiilpe and the Wiirzburg psychologists, made it evident that, contrary to the associationist assumptions, many conscious processes cannot be accounted for without referring to factors outside of consciousness, i.e., unconscious factors. Scientific psychology, pursuing its own programme, thus discovered the untenability of its self-imposed assumption of a sharp mind-body distinction in explaining human being. This idea received powerful reinforcement from outside the mainstream of academic psychology through the clinical researches of the psychoanalysts. Meanwhile, in America, through the influence of Darwin's work on evolution, on animal psychology...