Explanation and Understanding (review)

138 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY I outlined my broad view of civ!lization in its relation to progress forty years ago in a chapter on q'he Despair of Civilization,' in a book entitled The Nature of Evil. While my conviction of the essential validity of my basic idea has been confirmed by the turn of events during the past generation, I have felt increasingly bound to reexamine in greater detail the evidence on which my interpretation was intended to rest. And while thus undertaking this inquiry for my own enlightenment I have come to believe that it is timely and likely to be of interest to others who are also seeking their way through the troubled paths of contemporary reflection. 9 . . The tragedy of our time is that in its political and economic development modern life has become increasingly global, but we have not attained a global outlook on life and on international morality. (pp. 15-16) The book's Epilogue is devoted to the theme that ever since mankind's be~nnings the "fire-bringers" have been both feared and honored, and this suggests to the author that the present spread of both fear and honor toward radical fire-bringers may be a sign that the general concern for progress rather than for production is making headway in civilization. Perhaps there is still hope for a moral science of progress. I-Imu3m~T W. Scm~BmEx Claremont, California Explanation and Understanding. By George Henrik von Wright. Ithaca~ Cornell University Press, 1971. Pp. xvii+230 pages) Professor yon Wright, who will be honored as the next living philosopher in Schilpp's series, has written an elegant review and classification of recent debates on explanation. It is not as clear that he has offered anything new to that debate. Part of the trouble is to be found in yon Wright's conception of philosophy. The interests of the logician prevail, and the problem of explanation is, in consequence, regarded as solved if a confused picture is made straight and a vague picture precise. In this book, as in similar essays by Nagel or Hempel or for that matter Aristotle, explanation is treated as a brand of argument. How one explains, converts into a question about entailment--finding the premises that will entail an explicans. What it is to explain is answered by discovering how explanatory arguments differ from others. Thus teleological explanation and causal explanation are declared compatible, in effect, by showing how the different explicans conclude arguments having different premises. The end result is a reason/cause distinction much like that offered in the Blue Book, and a compatibility thesis similar to that advanced, among others, by Melden in Free Action. Now that thesis in itself may be worth another defense, but if so, it should take into account some of the perplexities to which it gives rise. For example, if reasons and causes don't conflict, inasmuch as they are conclusions of different modes of argument, why do I employ one strategy on one occasion and another on another? It won't do to say only that intentionalistic descriptions provide premises for purposive explanations. To say that A kills B is intentionalistic, but leaves open what sort of account of the killing we give, including the possibility that we might ascribe it to a tumor in the brain, an accidental firing of a gun, a calculated act and so on. Von Wright's strategy, by which explanation types are classified according to logical form, disguises the difficulties that arise once we ask what makes a given explanation apply. Logic and semantics, within which Professor von Wright wants to operate, do not promise much in the way of answering this further question, though they do a good job in diverting our attention from it. This falling short of or veering away from difficulties characterizes yon Wright's book BOOKS RECEIVED 139 as a whole. Nevertheless, it can be read with profit as a sane, temperate and balanced account, from a logician's point of view, of the concepts of explanation, cause and purpose. A. R. LoucH Claremont Graduate School BOOKs RECEIVED First Editions Agassi, Joseph. Faraday as a Natural Philosopher...