Language and Belief by Jean Ladrière (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 805 dialogues. And this conflicts with the traditional view that the dialogue is one of the latest. The author is not eager to accept G. E. L. Owen's thesis that the Timaeus belongs to the period close to the Republic, although it would be consistent with his own view of the development of the theory of forms. And he is not willing to accept that the dialogue belongs to the late period and " exemplifies a reversion, on the part of Plato, to an earlier view; the dialogue is a symptom of a relapse, so to speak." (p. f.!OO) Weingartner then offers an interesting suggestion which is consistent with placing the Timaeus in the late period but does not fall back to claiming a relapse on Plato's part. Rather, he claims that the different conceptions of Forms were arrived at by Plato in order to solve at least two types of problems: logical and metaphysical. And that in the Parmenides Plato does not really abandon either of these conceptions but rather separates them or sorts them out. Plato, then, never made a final choice between these conceptions but utilized the one which was appropriate to the problems that concerned him at the moment: One conception of forms is subsequently utilized in the late " analytic " dialogues as the object of a dialectic that is understood to be collection and division, while forms as exemplars are utilized in the cosmology of the Timaeus. ...Without impatience, he [Plato] refrains from a final commitment and eschews converting reflections into doctrines. (p. 201) GEORGIOS ANAGNOSTOPOULOS University of California San Diego, California Language and Belief. By JEAN LADRIERE. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 197f.l. Pp. f.l04. $10.95. Collected essays written at unrelated occasions are by their nature likely to be slightly disparate, occasionally repetitious, and generally sketchy in their argumentation. In view of those inherent defects one is all the more struck by the unifying power of Ladriere's collection. The author, professor in the philosophy of science at the University of Louvain, skillfully controls a number of fields and manages to create synthetic unity out of an impressive diversity of subjects. Specialist in formal logic and the philosophy of science, he handles philosophy of religion, ethical theory, structuralist theory with equal competence. One of the few important linguistic analysts outside the Anglo-American world Ladriere refuses to copulate analysis to the empiricist assumptions which it adopted from the cultural tradition of its country of origin. In fact, he constantly connects it with such leading trends in continental philosophy as hermeneutics and phenomenology, disciplines which the average analyst here has relegated to the antipodes. Thus Ladriere throws solid bridges between the formal 806 BOOK REVIEWS systems of the natural sciences, the hermeneutic methods of the human sciences and metaphysics the science of the totality of real as such. The first part of his essay on " Science, Philosophy and Faith " is a classic that deserves to be anthologized in every collection on the scope and method of philosophy. Yet, beyond this "novum organum" of human knowledge, Ladriere still feels the need for a further horizon which places the sciences themselves in a new perspective-the dimension of faith. His discussion of revelation, religious language and, especially, of the nature and function of myth reveals an intimate acquaintance with the problems of faith and its theological articulation. Personally I feel some reservations about treating faith and revelation exclusively from a Christian and, indeed, Barthian perspective, without placing it in the totality of the religious experience as such. The scientia universalis becomes somewhat abruptly connected with a particular theological interpretation of God's "word." Aside from the selftranscendence suggested in modern science by the principle of indeterminacy and an allusion about philosophy as circumscribing the locus of revelation, Lang'!Wge and Belief contains little of what used to be "natural theology" and what has at least partly been revived and rejuvenated in contemporary studies on the universal nature of the religious experience. The author feels no need to establish the existence of a religious " universal, " a " natural " connection with God independent of the particular nature of the revelation, even though...