Proceedings of the Third International Kant Congress, and: The Origins of Kant's Arguments in the Antinomies (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 561 Proceedings el the Third International Kant Congress. Edited by Lewis White Beck. (New York: The Humanities Press, 1972. Pp. xi + 718. $50) The Origins o! Kant's Arguments in the Antinomies. By Sadik J. AI-Azm. (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1972. Pp. 156. $9.50) The Beck-edited Proceedings contain all the papers read at the Kant Congress held at the University of Rochester, March 30-April 4, 1970, and brief abstracts of papers read at concurrent sessions as well. An Index of names and of subject matter completes the whole. The papers cover a variety of subiects, ranging, for example, from a "Kant-Bibliographic " of almost 500 titles of books and articles published during the five-year period 1965-1969, to "B 132 Revisited" which deals with the problem of Kant's statement that "it must be possible for the 'I think' to accompany all my presentations"; from "Kant and Anglo-Saxon Criticism" to "The Meaning of 'Space' in Kant"; from "Nietzsches Kantkritik" to "Kant and Hobbes Concerning the Foundations of Political Philosophy"; from "Statement and Argument in Kant's Language" to " 'Intuition' in the Pre-Critical Writings of Kant"; from "Noumenal Causality" to "'The Copernican Revolution in Hume and Kant"; from "La 'Position' Structurale d'Existence" to "Non-Pure Synthetic A Priori Judgments in the 'Critique of Pure Reason'." It is, of course, impossible to give here the titles of all 75 papers. The few given at random suffice, I am sure, to convey at least some idea of the great variety of topics covered. As is inevitable, the papers presented at the Congress vary in quality and/or in general interest. However, Kant scholars will find here suggestive new approaches to old problems as well as stimulating new perspectives on the whole of Kant's thinking. A1-Azm's slender volume serves well as a corrective to some of Norman Kemp Smith's frequently misleading views concerning crucial aspects of Kant's first Critique. The author shows convincingly that all four antinomies reflect Kant's response to the arguments and positions taken by Leibniz and Clarke in their famous exchange of letters relative to the meaning and the justification of Newtonian mechanics. Seen in this perspective, the antinomies--and especially the first two---constitute a bridge that leads from Kant's essay of 1768: "On the First Ground of the Distinction of Regions in Space" (in which the Sage of K~Snigsberg completely accepted Newtonian atomism) to Chapter II of Kant's Metaphysical Foundations o/ Natural Science of 1786 (in which Kant abandons atomism and gives a radically non-Newtonian interpretation of what it means to occupy space). Although A1-Azm does not make this point, his clear and convincing interpretation of the Kantian antinomies implicitly establishes it. W. H. WERK~EISTER Florida State University Three Christian Transcendentalists: James Marsh, Caleb Sprague Henry, Frederic Henry Hedge. By Ronald Vale Wells. (New York: Octagon Books, 1972. Pp. xxxiv + 290. $13.50) An extension of a volume first published by the Columbia University Press in 1943. This volume is much more than a new edition of a 1943 publication. It embodies a substantial amount of new, unpublished material on Marsh and C. S. Henry. It now explains dearly the philosophical and religious differences between the "Boston" transcendentalism of Hedge (and the romantic Unitarians around Emerson) and the "Vermont " spiritualism of Marsh. Marsh emerges in this history by Ronald Wells as a leader of the philosophical ...