Brief Notices

BRIEF NOTICES Der Italienische Humanismus. By EuGENIO GARIN. Berne: A. Francke, 1947. Pp. 295, with index. S. fr. 13.80. The period of thought from the thirteenth century peaks of Scholastic thought to the time of Bacon and Descartes is not always carefully studied by philosophers. The Renaissance which tlus period includes is left largely to students of history, art, and literature; and except for the names of Scotus and 0<'.kham, the transition from medieval to modern philosophy is often viewed as an abrupt break rather than the gradual sequence of ideas wluch it actually embodied. Philosophers of history, it is true, point to the Renaissance as a movement toward subjectivity and toward man's fellow creatures in this world. They signalize the aestheticism of the Renaissance and the effect of a few important people like Leonardo, Galileo, and perhaps Giordano Bruno. But despite the efforts of a few enterprising scholars, the full itinerary from medieval to modern times, at least in its philosophical aspects, remains to be mapped. Der ltalieni.sche Httmanismus is the study of various schools and various thinkers from the end of the fourteenth century .to the beginning of the seventeenth. It is of a statistical character, attempting to draw no philosophical conclusions in the light of the subsequent systems that humanism helped to prompt but aiming more to present the thoughts of the vast number of Italian humanists from Petrarch to Campanella. In view of the surprisingly long parade of philosophers studied here, most of them obscure thinkers and not previously studied by modern scholarship, at least together , this work reflects a patient and arduous degree of research and provokes many more degrees of stimulation. It contains copious footnotes and an annotated bibliography for each ~hapter. There is also an index of names and dates of the men treated in the body. The author has organized his book for the most part chronologically. To a great extent, as if to emphasize a certain logical movement that can be inductively discerned in history, this arrangement enables a broad division according to topics. Thus there are chapters on the origins of humanism; on the social and civil life which the early humanists preached in opposition to celibacy; on Platonism with its doctrines of aesthetic intuition and of voluntarism; on Aristotle and the problem of man's unity; on logic, rhetoric, and poetry which the humanists adopted as their organon; on morality which they adopted to a great extent as their end, even though confm,ing the good with the beautiful; and on experiment which came to be adopted as the means of studying nature naturally. There is a final chapter on the period from Bruno to Campanella which includes a study of the Renaissance and the Reformation. 58!t BRIEF NOTICES 533 Among the more prominent humanists studied are Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. A host of others treated in this book are less well known. In the whole of the work, it is curious to note how much that now seems post-Cartesian and even twentieth-century was said and said explicitly by these Italian humanists. Some of the passages would make parts of Jeans, Dewey, Santayana, James, the existentialists, Einstein, Russell, Morris, Marx, Alexander, and Whitehead seem like plagiarisms. The naturalists would acknowledge the men of the Renaissance as their intellectual ancestors. What could be more Marxian than " man is born in order to be useful to men" (p. 64)? What could be more Jamesian or Blondellian than " agere est intelligere " (p. 6~) ? From its origins, the Renaissance tended to lower men's sights from the search after eternal verities and to fix their attention on the here and now. The emphasis on social and political life, on patriotism, on aesthetic contemplation , on experiment, and on the. logic of discovery-all consort in this humanistic aim, so that Descartes when he turned man inward upon himself plowed up a soil that was already prepared to receive and nurture his ideas. Even earlier and in Italy itself, Galileo with his empiricism in science and his nominalism in philosophy simply swept forward rather than created the idea that nature could only be interpreted by nature itself. Empirical science thus solved a problem that beset the humanists. There was a danger which some of them saw and some of them felt, as its actual victims, that a vicious circle results when nature .is studied in and for itself and that the only solution is a Plotinian mystici~m, quite like the purely aesthetic contemplation which Santayana urges upon men. From, this circle, tmpirical science seemed to rescue the later humananism. By the life-saving role that it thus seemed to play, it came to be regarded as the only approach to the real. The popularity of scientism was thus prepared before Leonardo and Galileo started their experiments. That preparation , philosophically sketched, was accomplished to a great extent by the men studied in this highly commendable book. St. Thornas and the Greek Moralists. By VERNON J. BoURKE. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1947. Pp. 53, with index. $1.50. History of Philosophy and Philosophical Education. By ETIENNE GILSON. Marquette University Press, 1948. Pp. 49. $1.50. Two of the traditionally annual Aquinas lectures were sponsored during 1947 by the Aristotelian Society of Marquette University. These two little books are the respective texts. Professor Bourke makes out a case that St. Thomas, though obviously dominating his matter by his own superior insights, drew upon the ethics of Hellenic thought, especially upon Aristotle and the Stoics. He elucidates 584 BRIEF NOTICES how the genius of Aquinas elaborated on the Aristotelian notion of goodness in the light of man's ultimate end which revelation clarified. He shows further how the Thomistic notion of reason, while admitting in a broad sense the Stoic account of it, broadens the concept in a way that relates good acts to norms speculatively known and ultimately theocentric. Thomistic moral philosophy is divided into three considerations: the inner structure of the moral act, psychologically analyzed into the parts played by intellect and will; the meaning of right reason; and the organization of mo1·al philosophy in terms of the various virtues. Professor Bourke shows that the structure of human acts is analyzed according to a pattern from St. John Damascene who developed his thought from the ethics and psychology of Aristotle. With regard to the meaning of right reason, it is found that the intellectualism of Aristotle and the naturalism of the Stoics come together in the sublimating synthesis of St. Thomas. The pattern of orga11izing moral philosophy according to virtues and their " parts " is suggested in the Nichomachean Ethics, and is followed more or less by Andronicus, Macrobius, Seneca, Cicero, and Plotinus. The material in this book is skillfully organized, and despite its brevity, it exhibits familiarity with a wide variety of sources. There is a section of footnotes at the end. As a matter of detail, it may be wondered whether Plato and the so-called Platonici so often cited by Aquinas did not play at least a mentionable part in his moral philosophy. Aquinas admits their thesis on the primacy of good in the order of intention. Also, and as a matter of even smaller detail, the contention that St. Thomas had no fluency in reading Greek, as Professor Bourke declares, is not universally admitted. Professor Gilson's !ccture is likewise an excellent and thought-provoking contribution. He distinguishes between studying philosophy by way of manuals which have a tende11cy to make the subject a matter of rote and a vital penetration in which one not merely studies philosophy but becomes a philosopher. He develops the Augustinian and Thomistic philosophy of teaching and learning and, in his usually clear way, he make a strong plea for greater emphasis in education on the history of philosophy as a study of living ideas. In these days of educational ferment when so many institutions are revamping their curricula to achieve a broader and better integration, Gilson's discussion of where philosophy actually exists and how it is related to individual philosophers cannot help being a timely contribution to American philosophy. He is apparently not satisfied with the idea that we should study what others have thought to know what to think ourselves. However, he does not state exactly how his principles differ from this opinion. This essay can be read with profit by every philosopher. There is much in it for the teacher not only in directing his own personal thought but in transforming courses in the history of philosophy into a much livelier BRmF NOTICES 535 status than many of them now oc<'upy in the student's mind. The thesis which Gilson advocates does not fully develop the fact that the study of philosophy is a three- rather than two-termed relation, involving not only the present philosopher and past philosophies but the experience which both seek to interpret and to which both must conform. It is true that he adverts to the fact that philosophy lives only in the present. But philosophy , it would seem, evolves from that present as much as it does from the answers given in the past. Indeed, it is from the dynamism of our own experience with the answers that other philosophers would give to it that the personal philosophy which Gilson lauds is developed and enriched. These two lectures are stimulating steps toward the type of philosophizing which Gilson envisions. They are entirely worthy of the high standards which the previous ten Aquinas lectures have set. How Our Minds Work. By C. E. M. JoAD. New York: The Philosophical Library, 1947. Pp. 116, with index. $!2.75. Contemporary psychology, through the influences of Behaviorism and Freudianism, has descended into a cellar that is mostly physiological, evolutionary, and materialist in character. In such a view, mind is simply matter peculiarly combined and pressured ever forward by its inward tensions. Basically mind thus becomes the sport of its material parts which are traced backward to their origins along roads that Watson called reflexes and that Freud termed evolutionary drives. Against this philosophy of mind, Professor Joad takes forceful issue, combining his gifts for apt examples with his remarkable insights as a thinker and controversialist. The result is a h1ghly effective statement of some of modern psychology's ignored and unsolved questions. There is, however, a great deal of mystery wrapped about Professor Joad's own solution to the problem of mind. This inadequacy is indicated on the opening page where mind is pictured as an hypothesis, and psychology as a system of theories rather than, like biology, physics, and chemistry, a statement of given and predictable facts. But the larger view of this work must advert to the wholesomeness of its attack on materialism and the wealth of exampleE which it provides for all those who accept the immanent view of life and the spiritual nature of man. It is difficult to decide exactly how Dr. Joad solves the mind-body problem. He discusses it largely in Cartesian rather than hylomorphic strains, but near the end of his work he takes a much more holistic view than the Cartesian tradition would approve. In this climactic section of his work, faculty psychology is rejected in the interest of saving the psychophysical unity, and "reason" and "instinct" are related as a curving mirror which, on one side, looks convex and, on the other, concave. This is neither Descartes nor Leihniz speaking, but neither is it hylo- 586 BRIEF NOTICES morphism which insists that actions are through the faculties but of the supposa. In the opening chapter, mind is portrayed as apparently an immaterial interpreter presiding over the chain of neurological reflexes in the body. Against the background of Darwinism, the typical modern view of mind is expounded-an epiphenomenon created by the material forces of a purely phenomenal universe. In the third chapter, the obvious difficulties of sensism and various forms of behaviorism are effectively lined up to bear their powerful testimony in favor of the immaterial in man. •· .Mind so conceived is an active, dynamic, synthesizing force; it goes out beyond the sensations provided by external stimuli and arranges them into patterns, and it seems to be capable on occasion of acting without the provocation of bodily stimuli to set it in motion." (p. 74.) With this evidence f~r his self-styled " hypothesis " that mind exists, Professor Joad sets out to picture mind more as an activity than as a thing. He rejects McDougalls' view of man in terms of instincts and emotions, citing and defending .Aristotle's thesis that desire has to do with the ends of action but that reason maps out the way to the willed destinations. Mustering his forces against what Allers calls elementarism in psychology, Professor Joad makes his case for an apparently holistic rather than hylomorphic solution to his problem. He holds " that there are no purely cognitive, affective, or conative experiences." (p. 104.) Certainly an Aristotelian could retain his faculty psychology and agree with this analysis. Man is a unity, and all of his actions resonate throughout that unity. Yet there must be a difference somewhere between the cognitive, affective, and conative aspects of an experience, or the consciousness of their distinction would remain unexplained. So conceived, man is a unit operating through powers. The object is also a illiit. seen according to its various aspects by the powers which the aspects specify. There is a brief concluding chapter in criticism of the theory of the unconscious, the argument being that the distinction between the unconscious and the conscious is not in accordance with the unity of the human mind. Repressions, Professor Joad adds, can be better described in terms of neural patterns acquired through experience and poised for immediate action whenever the proper stimulus sets them off. Strangely enough, Professor Joad's main difficulty seems to be not so much mind as body. Though insisting on the unity of mind, he constantly refers to the body as though it were the locus of separate neural phenomena that somehow interact with mind and follow it like the ship of the Platonic pilot. The real problem is not mind-body but soul and prime matter. In the final analysis, Professor Joad has stressed, he thinks, the unity of mind. But he does not account for mind's union, not as efficient but as formal cause, with the corporal part of man. The human BRIEF NOTICES 537 body is not a human body until it is suffused with an informing soul. As long as this fact is not taken into account, psychology will continue its mad and convulsive shifting from one theory to another without expiaining the real compenetration of soul and matter as vegetative, animal, and even intellectual operations, in their origins, bring it forcefully to light. Elements of Symbolic Logic. By HANS REICHENBACH. New York: Macmillan , 1947. Pp. 444, with index. $5.00. Dr. Reichenbach, now professor of philosophy at the University of California at Los Angeles, presents this book on symbolic logic as the fruit of years of reflection on the subject, together with wide experience of teaching it in various countries and thus to various linguistic groups. He acknowledges his debt to Russell, Hilbert, and Carnap, reaffirming his allegiance to the so-called logical empiricist school which more or less accepts Russell's verdict that philosophy is logic and logic alone. Dr. Reichenbach begins his treatment of the subject with the calculus of propositions and comes to the calculus of classes only after a treatment of propositional functions. This is more or less the order of Russell, but its validity is not universally admitted. Traditional logic, it is well known, begins with the term or class and studies the judgment or proposition in the second of its three sections. The reasoning behind this order is that classification must precede the combination of classes, just as matter has a natural (though not a temporal) priority over form. In their ordering of the subject, the mathematical logicians like Reichenbach and Russell are thus not faithful to their analytic method. In this respect, Lewis and Langford are more logical. Aiming to solve the problem, Russell is impelled to his theory of types in order to achieve a consistent presentation of his subject in terms of the priority of the propositional function. But the validity of this type theory, which is really earlier than Russell and is suggested by Frege, is now seriously questioned, and Professor Reichenbach, as will be seen below, does not deal with or even mention its principal adversary. Logic in this ;book becomes the " analysis of language," and the instrument employed is the metalanguage. Analytically, this resort to n-metalanguages and even an infinity of them is satisfactory for the purposes of symbolic logic and in the domain of production rather than speculation where it truly and fruitfully applies. But mathematical logicians have the habit of avoiding the Knotenpunkt where the object language and the metalanguage come together as closely as matter and form. In speaking of the continuum, Aristotle said that it was infinitely divisible but never infinitely divided. A similar statement could be made of the continuum in logical dassification. It is infinitely formalizable but never infinitely formaJized. A decision between the ordinary two-valued logic and the three9 538 BRIEF NOTICES valued logic of Lucasiewicz and Tarski cannot be fully handled by either. One may well surmise that an n-valued or infinity-valued logic could also be hypothecated depending on ratios of probability. Mathematical logic is a tool for thinking through problems of an empirical and productive character where the hylomorphic union must necessarily be ignored, given the so-called scientific method. But there is no such thing thing as pure logic any more than there is pure art. The mathematical logicians are in general.not sufficiently aware of what classification realistically entails and of the dialectical rather than demonstrative instruments which defend its conclusions and communicate them. No treatment of correct thinking, and this book purports to be of such a type, can be adequate and fully useful unless it emphasises thinking as well as correctness . It must therefore include a discussion of abstraction as the basis of all human thought and the types of necessity which abstraction discloses to exist among things and among thoughts. The original contributions of this book are chiefly in the analysis of conversational language. (Chapter VII.) Symbolic logic is highly useful for the understanding and improvement of grammar, though it is again limited by the fact that grammar is an art and not infinitely formalizable. On the score of completion, mention should also have been made, in this work, of rhetoric. The book is intended as a text, and if its readers are to be realistically educated by it, they should be aware of its limitations as well as of its value. They should be apprized as fully as possible of the way in which it fits in with the other activities of thought, speech, and communication . Intuitionism, as advocated for example by Brouwer, gives a different version of mathematical thinking from that of the formalists like Hilbert and the logicists like Russell and Carnap. Russell, in the second edition (1938) of his Principles of Mathematics acknowledges without refutation that the intuitionists are a redoubtable opponent of his type theory. Intuitionism would challenge the validity of the structure such as Reichenbach has worked out, and for that reason, its arguments and method might well have been discussed and evaluated in a book like this. This book is probably not suited for use on an elementary classroom level since it does not explain and develop the manipulation of symbolisms with sufficient example to enable the student to proceed on his own. For more advanced readers, it is a clear presentation of the subject, especially of the general directions behind it, and it is certainly recommended reading for scientists, grammarians, educators, psychologists, and all others interested in gaining empirical control over their subject matter. For a more philosophical viewpoint, however, recommendation must be tempered by the consideration that in all thinking the subject and the object have something from within that scholastics call natures and that abstraction alone can apprehend. ...