Knowledge and Existence: An Introduction to Philosophical Problems by Joseph Margolis (review)

684 BOOK REVIEWS More could be said about Fr. Blanchette's book and more will be said about the issues he discusses, since these are pressing both for a more .realistic appraisal and more concrete action. St. Albert's College Oakland, California JANKO ZAGAR, 0. P. Knowledge and Existence: An Introduction to Philosophical Problems. By Joseph Margolis. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Pp. 301. $6.95. This book has for its central thesis that "men-human persons-are cultural emergents, physically embodied but exhibiting attributes that cannot be characterized exclusively in material terms." Although he pays tribute to the impact of Descartes (the only author mentioned by name) in evoking the puzzles of his book, Margolis conducts his arguments against the background of the mind-body debates current among contemporary English-language philosophers. His case stands against a variety of reductionist theories about the nature of persons and about the relationship between mind and body which have had prominence in these debates. He argues cogently against any theory which would simply identify mind with body or eliminate language about mental states; and he argues somewhat less convincingly for his own " compositional materialism ," which would admit of persons as totally composed of matter, yet as emerging within the material order with the development of human culture. Theories which allow for a non-material element (say, for a spiritual soul) get no real play here: the supposition is that only a form of materialism can fit into a satisfactory account of men and the world at the present juncture in intellectual history. Margolis begins and ends with summary reflections on the mind-body question, but only one of the chapters (the penultimate one on "Mind and Body ") develops this question at any length. The preceding seven chapters focus on the grand issues of epistemology and metaphysics-knowledge and belief, sensation and perception, doubt and certainty, existence and reality, identity and individuation, actions and events, language and truth. In the final chapter the author turns to the connection between fact and value. Throughout these discussions he tries to highlight the intersection of problems in such a way that it will lend support to his basic thesis. What proves critical to the whole enterprise is the informality with which the concepts are applied and the import of particular cultural settings for the application. Thus, for example, perception and knowledge prove to be BOOK REVIEWS 685 normative notions with rules set roughly within this or that society. Mind and person, in their turn, qualify not only as notions which have a type of normative informality in their application but also as notions which are geared especially to single out a segment of reality emerging culturally and nonetheless composed of matter. A suggested analogy is with works of arts-works made up entirely of material elements without being reducible to them. The sub-title of Knowledge and Existence is An Introduction to Philosophical Problems, but it is in no sense a text for beginners. Margolis's book is rather a tightly reasoned, fairly technical work which can be considered " an introduction to philosophical problems " inasmuch as it handles problems basic to almost any philosophical endeavor. As this species of introduction it provides invaluable clarification on all the issues investigated; and it could well rank as prolegomenon to any reflection or debate involving these issues. Many a meandering or confusing analysis of knowledge anJ belief, sensation and perception . . . might be set straight or simplified by attention to the careful and hard-headed treatment of them in Knowledge and Existence. Praise for Margolis's rigorous and illuminating approach to fundamental problems does not, of course, mean total satisfaction with all of his solutions or with all of his arguments. The present reviewer has special difficulty with the account of existence as the relational property of " accessibility to preferred criteria " and with the insistence on the ultimately non-cognitive role of taste in fixing ontologies and values as well as with the neat bond between the correspondence notion of truth and realist epistemologies. One might fear indeed that the manner of handling the status of ontologies in general and the concept of existence in particular would undercut the...