Imagination by Mary Warnock (review)

35~ BOOK REVIEWS and depth of human person is significantly related to the concept of the self. The ability to make weak moral evaluations, in which only the functional or utilitarian consequences of actions are evaluated, does not capture the uniqueness of the person. Neither does the Sartrean notion of radical choice in which an agent inexplicably moves to one or another moral alternative without the ability to articulate the causes of the choice capture the unique characteristics of the self. What determines the uniqueness of the self and manifestly exhibits the distinctness of the responsible self is the ability of the person to plumb the depths of moral choices and struggle from abstruseness to articulation and clarity in this process. In her concluding article, Amelie Rorty quickly distinguishes characters, figures, persons, individuals, presences, and selves to show how the conventional concept of the person as the locus of unity of choice is justifiable. Maintaining distinctions between these entities would help to eliminate much confusion in the study of the person. The distinctions among these entities are very clearly and artfully drawn, and Rorty's point about the need to distinguish the concept of the person from these other literary and dramatic figures is well made. This work must be read with a great deal of attention. But it is one that should be read by all who must deal with the issue of the identification, definition, and limitation of the concept of the person. The quality of scholarship in the assembled articles is excellent. The concepts dealt with are most difficult and often resist clarification and simplification. The sheer obscurity of the subject matter makes for extreme difficulties in composition , style, and language. But all of the writers have dealt with these masterfully. The work has succeeded in showing the richness and elusiveness of the concept of the person, a point upon which almost all of the authors agree. The book could have been improved somewhat by providing brief summaries just before the articles. I feel that this would have given a greater unity to the book and facilitated its reading. But it is nonetheless a book of enduring value, not only for the first-rate articles that it has joined under one cover but also for the excellent bibliography. Providence College, Providence, R. I. ROBERT L. BARRY, 0.P. Imagination. By MARY WARNOCK. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976. Pp. fll3. Index. $13.95. Mrs. Warnock, who has previously published books on ethics, on existentialism , and on the philosophy of Sartre, here offers a study of the nature and epistemological role of imagination as conceived by various modern thinkers. She begins with the problematic that the British empiricists BOOK REVIEWS 353 inherited from Descartes (what we are aware of is the content of our consciousness, i.e., mental objects or ideas) and then traces the theme of imagination as interpreted in this context through the analyses of Hume, Kant, and Schelling, and then through the combined philosophical and literary-critical reflections of Coleridge and Wordsworth on their own experience of creative imagination. These thinkers lead her to the conclusion that imagination plays a necessary role in interpretation even of what is before our eyes, but she also makes clear that they give no adequate account of what is actually meant by an image. She therefore turns to some more recent thinkers for aid in exploring that question-in particular, Brentano, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Jaspers, Ryle, Wittgenstein and Sartre. The result is her conclusion that: " Imagination is our means of interpreting the world, and it is also our means of forming images in the mind. The images themselves are not separate from our interpretations of the world; they are our way of thinking of the objects in the world." Her inquiry itself is genuinely philosophical. It is far more than just the history of an idea; rather she is interested in discovering the truth of the matter, and she seeks it through a process of asking searching questions of each of her authors. This leads her in what is basically the direction of a critical realism in which imagination plays a pivotal role in the movement...