Concepts of Space by Max Jammer (review)

554 BOOK REVIEWS The author's principal aim in the book, to return to this for emphasis, is " to elucidate the aims which the critics themselves profess." Professor Osborne does not believe that it lies within the province of criticism to justify these aims and assumptions, although this belief does not prevent his making a certain number of critical evaluations about various features of the different assumptions. I should like to repeat that within the limits the author lays down, he admirably succeeds, by and large. There is a wealth of information and comment in the book and a rich acquaintance with what artists and critics have said and held. Presumably the author thinks that the more definitive and positive evaluation of assumptions in criticism belongs to aesthetics rather than to criticism, a separation that he may press too absolutely. Nevertheless, the author makes it clear that the task of aesthetics and philosophy of art is important and needs to be done. What he has well done here is to show how criticism is significant and intelligent when it proceeds consistently from original assumptions. Since relatively few critics are successful in this respect, Mr. Osborne's book is valuable and useful for aiding critics to write intelligibly. The larger and more basic issue of aesthetics itself can then be faced more successfully. University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana. JOHN A. OESTERLE Concepts of Space. By MAX JAMMER. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954. Pp. 212 with index. $3.75. One of the major problems occupying the attention of modern Philosophy, particularly that of American Philosophy, is that of integrating the results of modem empiriological disciplines with a knowledge of the underlying natures of things. This problem is especially difficult in the area of experimental Physics. The other phenomenal sciences retain a solid anchor in the natural principles of human knowledge, but experimental Physics is a strange discipline in which proficiency depends on an ascetic renunciation of the normal tendencies of the mind. It is possible, of course, to overstate the problem, and to insist that natural philosophy be so altered that it is deduced from experimental Physics, or at least that it assimilate the physicists' conclusions without change. An analysis or the principles and IDf '.1ods reveals experimental Physics as more of a conceptual substitute k ~ality than a.'l immaterial assimilation, more art than science. But Physics is such a successful art that it set ns absurd to suppose that this conceptual framework is a purely arbitrary construction. If we can BOOK REVIEWS 555 manage qualitative data by treating them as though they were essentially species of quantity, we must suspect, at least, that the two are so closely related that their interdependence is not adequately expressed by the usual insistence on locomotion as the basic type of motion and on quantity as the first material accident, the foundation of the sensible qualities. A discerning comparison of the philosophic notion of place and the physicist. conception of space certainly seems one approach to the problem in consideration of the basic part these two ideas play in the different accounts given of local motion. Yet oddly enough there are few enough works that undertake such a task on more than a textbook level. Max Jammer's book, Concepts of Space, may not unravel the enigma of the relation between the philosophical and the empiriological views on these issues, but at least it is a step in the right direction. Dr. Jammer lectures on Physics and on the history of science at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. On the evidence of this book, he seems much more sensitive to man's achievement in the realms of theology and philosophy than is usually the case with most historians of science. This book, Concepts of Space, Dr. Jammer wrote while Visiting Lecturer at Harvard University. The contents of the book are well described by the subtitle, " The History of Theories of Space in Physics." The story begins with the concepts of place and space in ancient Greek Philosophy, with the major emphasis on Aristotle and his influence. Some reference is made to the presence within Greek culture of a method of studying reality...