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BOOK REVIEWS 337 does he exclude history as a field for philosophic reflection and interpretation ? Wilhelmsen thinks that he must. But does the fact that mathematics deals with the necessary prevent it from being that which provides the illumination of the contingent situations in which engineers find themselves ? Is a physician's knowledge of biology an obstacle to his discovering the medical significance of his patient's condition? As a matter of fact, if we want a good example of how a grasp of necessary metaphysical truths can serve us very well in an attempt to understand the meaning of the historical situation in which we find ourselves, we need look no further than this book. It has a lucid discussion of the contemporary experience of nothingness as deriving from the rationalistic focus on essence to the exclusion of existence. And Wilhelmsen criticizes thinkers such as Teilhard and Cox deftly, showing how the immanentization of human destiny reduces the person to a servant of temporal progress and how contemporary secularism has nihilism as its consequence. He describes such post-Hegelian gnosticisms as " reactionary futurisms," (p. 123) reactionary because deterministic and therefore implying that the future has already been settled by what is past. This book definitely gives the lie to those who dogmatically assume that philosophers whose tradition is that of classical realistic metaphysics must not be addressing today's problems. But as I said at the beginning, Wilhelmsen's many valid insights suffer from the articulation (i. e., conceptualization ) imposed on them by his denial of the concept as an instrument for knowledge these insights. JoHN C. CAHALAN Merrimac College North Andover, Mass. Discovery in the Physical Sciences. By RICHARD J. BLACKWELL. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Press, 1969. Pp. 255. $8.50. Where is science? Since "science " has at least two widely different meanings, it may be found in at least two locations: libraries and laboratories . The former contain the completed and polished publications which are the product of science; the latter contain the efforts, usually unproductive but sometimes brilliantly successful, which are the process of science. One of the most profound achievements of twentieth-century philosophy has been in working out an understanding of the logical structure of science as product. But until the beginning of the last decade few philosophers ventured forth to analyze science as process. This was not unintentional, for scrutiny of the process of science soon raises 338 BOOK REVIEWS the question of the nature of discovery. And what Kepler and Kekule said covertly in the accounts they gave of their greatest discoveries was said overtly by Sir Karl Popper in his Logic of Scientific Discovery (!): "The initial stage, the act of conceiving or inventing a theory, seems to me neither to call for logical analysis nor to be susceptible to it." Perhaps the late N. R. Hanson's 1958 volume entitled Patterns of Discovery marked a turning point, for since that time many authors have turned to the difficult question as to whether anything philosophical can be said about that seemingly mysterious event, scientific discovery. Thomas Kuhn, Michael Polanyi, and Stephen Toulmin, to name a few, have in the past decade attempted this task and philosophers have returned to previously neglected writings of Whewell, Peirce, and others to find new insights. Recently Richard J. Blackwell of Saint Louis University has joined these workers with his Discovery in the Physical Sciences. As he points out repeatedly, much is at stake here for, if a philosophical analysis of scientific discovery were produced, it would greatly expand and enrich, not to say alter, the philosophy of science. But many are the problems, for the maximum thesis-that there exists a mechanical or automatic process for getting from data to hypotheses-is rejected by nearly all contemporary philosophers, whereas the minimal thesis-that history, psychology, and sociology can bring a measure of rationality to the act of discovery-leaves nothing to the philosopher. In the first of his seven chapters Blackwell introduces the problem and sketches the major positions as well as building a prima facie case for the existence of a theory of discovery. Chapter II which distinguishes between various types of discoveries, especially...

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