Méthodes et concepts de la logique formelle by Y. Gauthier, and: Mobiles du discours philosophique by R. Hébert (review)

474 LETTERS IN CANADA 1978 value: By the latter phrase the author means that 'entities are characterized by value in various ways: six that he identifies. Value may be present (1) intrinsically, (2) as means, 0) because of some characteristics, (4) because of some consequences, (5) as possible, and (6) as potential. 'There are not six different sorts, or types, of value. Rather, one and the same entity, i.e., value, can be present in six different ways - that is to say: "modes of presence'" (p 4)· Between the Introduction and the Epilogue there are nine chapters full of 'reports' and rough definitions. For example: 'The entity family, in some of its particular occurrences, is a means (condition) for the production of living human organisms ... However, it is here reported that some particular occ'iITences of family are superior to all other social institutions as means for the satisfaction of some desires and needs and in general for the achievement of some values' (pp 177-9). Love, sympathy, justice, co-operation, knowledge, honesty, tolerance, and many other important things are treated this way. Sometimes the treatment is believable and sometimes not. That is to be expected in a philosophic treatise. But nearly always in this treatise the treatment is unsatisfying. Even when one agrees with the author one has the uncomfortable feeling that the past forty years of philosophic analysis have been passed over without so much as a 'by your leave: (ALEX c. MICHALOS) Y. Gauthier. Methodes et concepts de Ia logique forrn el1e Les Presses de l'Universite de Montreal. 240. $11.75 R. Hebert. Mobiles du discours philosophique Hurtubise HMH. viii, 193 The concept of reflection or of reflective thought has a long history in philosophy, going back as far at least as Aristotle and Plotinus. In the Metaphysics Aristotle argued (1074b) that divine thought is thought thinking on thought, and (1075a) that since thought is not material it must be simple. The act of thinking is identified with its object and together they form a simple unity: this account of divine consciousness came to serve as the paradigm of self-consciousness, of reflective thought. In the Enneads Plotinus argued (IV.7.3) that the body could not out of its complexity produce the unity of the soul; he further argued (IV.7.6), against the Epicurean account of the soul, that if the latter was correct different sense impressions would belong to different consciousnesses , but as the latter is absurd consciousness must be an immaterial unity; and from this simplicity he inferred (Iv.7.12) that the soul is immortal. As thought reflects upon itself, as thought becomes selfconscious , it becomes aware of itself as a substantial unity. This anti- HUMANITIES 475 Epicurean, anti-materialist doctrine was vigorously defended and developed in seventeenth-century England, in particular by such Cambridge Platonists as John Smith and Ralph Cudworth. It was given its first really serious critical examination by Locke and Hume in their discussions of personal identity. What they established, fairly conclusively , was that, if one left aside theological requirements, then none of the empirical facts of self-consciousness, personal identity, or the unity of self through the diversity of which it is conscious - none of the empirical facts in these areas requires us to construe self-consciousness as somehow involving ontologically a substantial unity. This result was, of course, just one part of the full empiricist critique of such traditional notions as those of substance and of cause. Thinking now came to be construed as a process, and such unity as there was became merely teleological, in terms of the goals we hope to achieve through these processes. Reflective thinking - thinking about thought - divided into two at least two quite different disciplines: psychology, the empirical science about how thought actually proceeds, and methodology, the discipline about how thought ought to proceed if it is to attain, so far as it can, (empirical) truth. How to get persons, oneself included, to conform better to the methodological norms would be a branch of applied empirical psychology. Within the empiricist tradition there remained little place for a single concept of reflection or of reflective thought. One cannot say, however...