L'archéologie du savoir (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 495 to me that structuralism must lead to the restoration of a vulgar materialism." History is dead, man is dead, some of the structuralists like to assert. But God is not altogether dead, although atheistic soteriology has repeatedly tried to work out man's salvation without God and, like Lucretius but unlike Saint Paul, without fear or trembling. Morot-Sir's final chapter, touching on Gabriel Marcel, Paul Ricoeur, Simone Weil, Teilhard de Chardin, presents a lucid account of the religious thinkers who, in France, have recently hoped to discard, or to transcend, theology. "French thought," he concludes, "is an active dialogue between atheism and faith." Philosophy in France is very much alive: but idealism and positivism both appear to lie dead and a new philosophical language is emerging, "the language of utopia," conveying the tensions between existence and structure. It took no mean skill and restraint to encompass a rich philosophical flowering within one hundred and thirty pages. It took even more prolonged meditation on those systems, trends and conflicting movements, and a catholic and objective sympathy. The latter, however, does not preclude a strong personal position and the courage to discriminate , and to eliminate spurious values. The stylistic felicitousness of the author may render his concise and rich volume hard to render into English. Yet such an important book, of practical as well as of lasting value, should be made accessible to philosophical students of countries other than France. HENRI PEYRE CUNY, The Graduate Center The Measurement o[ Sensation: A Critique of Perceptual Psychophysics. By C. Wade Savage. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1970. Pp. 578. $153 Psychophysics, from Fechner to S. S. Stevens, is subjected to destructive criticism. The measurement of sensations, it turns out, is the measurement of physical, not psychological, magnitudes. Psychophysicists have failed to see this because they have taken perception to be a process in a mental world where they should have looked at it as a collection of perceptual abilities. There is no problem about measuring abilities, hence the psychophysicist's problem dissolves. The form of argument is of a piece with much recent philosophical criticism of psychology. What distinguishes Savage's book is the elaborate care taken to state the theories he proposes to demolish. After 500 pages one is rather inclined to take his word for it, and wishes that he had used more space to develop some very interesting notions about the relation of psychophysics to epistemology. The statement (p. 16) that perhaps epistemology is possible "only if reconstructed as the study, not of limits and reliability, but of the relations between the knowledge possessed by one group of knowers and the knowledge possessed by other knowers" is a suggestion with revolutionary implications for epistemology. A. R. LOUCH Claremont Graduate School L'archdologie du savoir. By Michel Foucault. (Gallimard, 1969. Pp. 275) Qu'est-ce qu'un dnoncd?--La morale terminologique exige, selon Peirce, qu'un terme donn6 n'ait qu'une seule signification dans un univers du discours donnt. C'est cette signification unique que semble rechercher Michel Foucault dans L'arch~ologie 496 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY du savoir. C'est ~t examiner cette signification que je voudrais m'attacher. Mais auparavant il me semble utile de dtgager de la litttrature logique courante la signification de certains autres termes que Foucault essaie d'appliquer au mot "~nonct." De la terrninologie logique anglo-saxonne.--"Florence Nightingale, 6crivaient Cohen et Nagel (An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method), transforma la pratique hospitali~re moderne en lui donnant pour devise: Quoi que fassent les htpitaux, ils ne doivent pas r6pandre la maladie; de mSme la logique ne doit-elle pas rtpandre l'erreur et la confusion" (p. ix). Or la logique est un foyer d'infection, comme l'a fort bien montr6 Arthur Bentley, qui cite Cohen et Nagel, dans un ouvrage &tit en collaboration avee John Dewey, Knowing and the Known. Je ne vais pas reprendre son argumentation. J'essaierai d'abord de dEgager la signification des mots proposition, assertion, sentence, statement et expression, de l'usage que les logiciens anglo-saxons font de ces termes. Je me garderai donc de donner d~s maintenant leur "~quivalent...