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BOOK REVIEWS 297 exasperated. In fact one is puzzled to know to whom the book is addressed. For not even the bibliographies are complete. For instance, the great Chain of Being is mentioned in connection , oddly enough, with Joseph de Maistre, but Lovejoy's masterpiece on the history of that idea is not listed in the bibliography. This was not because the French original came out before Lovejoy's book, for the bibliographies include items published as late as 1961. The book might serve to introduce American undergraduates to the names of philosophers they would not hear about otherwise. I doubt that Vauvenargues, interesting as he is, gets into many undergraduate courses in the history of philosophy. If any of them read this book, they will come across the names, if not the ideas, of Hemsterhius, Iselin, Volney, and even Restif de la Bretonne. And that, as Commencement orators say, will enlarge their horizons. They may also discover that Voltaire, who had "no philosophical doctrine in the technical sense of the word" (p. 144), is discussed at much greater length than La Mettrie or d'ttolbach or Thomas Reid or Condorcet. What then is one to conclude? A possible conclusion is that Br~hier had no definite plan in mind, that he had a well-stocked fichier, and drew upon it as fancy struck him. When he was interested in a man, as he was in Kant, he produced a readable and accurate account of his leading ideas. But most of the time he wrote as if he were fulfilling a painful duty, as if he were bored and yearning to put down his pen and call it a day. The Eighteenth Century deserved better. GEOaGEBOAS Johns Hopkins University Baltimore Studies in the Philosophy o] Kant. By Lewis White Beck. (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965. Pp. vi + 242. $6.50) This volume contains twelve essays by Lewis White Beck which have appeared in various journals from 1949-1960. An additional essay, "Lewis' Kantianism," is based upon three papers, two of which are included in the collection. Arne Unhjem's translation of Kant's letter of February 21, 1772, to Marcus Herz is made an appendix and the subject of the second essay . The first essay, "Kant's Theoretical and Practical Philosophy," first appeared as an introduction to Kant's Critique of Practical Reason and Other Writings in Moral Philosophy, a volume of translations published in 1949. That this serves as an introduction to the present work bears testimony to the fact that, while minor shifts of interest and emphasis may be detected, a relatively high degree of consistency in the interpretation is exhibited throughout the collection. Essays III through VII deal with the problems of the synthetic a priori; VI through X are Auseinandersetzungen with leading contemporary critics of Kant; and X through XIII concern Kant's moral philosophy. Essays XII and XIII, "The Fact of Reason: An Essay on Justification in Ethics" and "Kant's Two Concepts of the Will and Their Political Context," appear here in English for the first time. The closing statement in the introductory essay contains a leitmotiv of the author's interpretation of Kant: ... Attempts to label Kant's philosophy as a whole should perhaps follow Richard Kroner, who considers Kant a radical voluntarist, not simply because he made the will basic (as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche were to do) but because he made the rational will the true organ of philosophy itself. While other voluntarists have their philosophies into theoretical appreciations of the will, Kant places the will beyond all theory. In its limited function as theoretical reason it judges nature and attempts to judge itself; as practical reason it leaves this kind of understanding behind. In its true nature it acts but it cannot be known, for all -knowledge is theoretical limitation [pp. 52f.]. Also running through the essays is the persuasion that "though Kant's ethics claims universal validity, the fact that there is no universal agreement on ethical principles con- 298 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY stitutes no objection to his theory. Ethical universality does not entail anthropological uniformity " (p. 24). Central to the author's discriminating case for Kant is his treatment...

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