La Filosofia Pragmatica di Charles S. Peirce (review)

110 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY sortantes de l"'imagination," et partant subordonn&s toutes les deux ~ la sp&ulation rationnelle. Une autre &ude sur l'&hique de Miskawaih nous montre ce philosophe du X si&le parvenu ~ des positions harmonistiques entre la foi et la pens& rationnelle, qui se rapprochent de celles d'al-Kindi, et se d&achent de celles d'al-Farabi, Avicenne et Averro~s. Une lecture enfin sur Platonism in Islamic Philosophy nous montre chez ce m~me al-Farabi et d'autres penseurs musulmans la survivance et l'adaptation de la pens~e platonique dans ce qui a trait aux quatre vertus fondamentales, ~ l'Rtat idfial, ~ la valeur du proph&isme, et ~ la pri~re philosophique. I1 suffit de cette simple table des mati6res pour faire ressortir la vari&~ et l'importance des th~mes abord~s par l'auteur darts la vaste domaine de la philosophie gr&o-islamique, &helonn& ici dans une succession chronologique et id~ale. M. Walzer connak en maitre la technique philologique dans les deux champs, classique et arabe; mais il salt s'~lever de la philologie fi des probl~mes fondamentaux d'histoire de la pens& et de la culture. I1 r~ussit ~ d~gager tr~s adroitement la pens& des auteurs arabes de leur forme souvent obscure et compliqu&, ~ reconnaltre ce qui est essentiel dans la foule des d&ails, ~ caract~riser la physionomie intellectuelle des individus et ~ la replacer en mSme temps dans le tissu de la tradition. En un mot, il est non pas un put philologue, mais un historien qui se fonde sur la philologie : et le fait fondamental qu'il nous &laire historiquement ici c'est la Auseinandersetzung honn&e et passionn& de la pens& musulmane avec l'h6ritage philosophique et scientifique de l'Antiquit6, son effort de le comprendre et de l'accorder avec sa propre tradition religieuse: un effort qui peut nous parakre parfois vain et st6rile, mais qui ne rut pas tel, comme le prouve tr~s finement ce beau volume d'essais. FRANCESCO GABRIELI Rome, Italy La Filosofia Pragmatica di Charles S. Peirce. By Nynfa Bosco. (Torino: Edizioni Di "Filosofia," 1962. Pp. vii + 303. Lire 3,000.) Here is a very searching analysis of Peirce's philosophy; the most interesting account of this difficult subject to appear in any language. Nynfa Bosco undertakes not only an exposition of the basic ideas but also an historical orientation. She distinguishes (p. 19) the urgency with which Peirce appeals to pragmatistic method ('Texigenza pragmatica") from the mere epistemological polemic ("pragmatismo gnoseologico") and believes that Peirce is commonly misrepresented and misunderstood because the wider and more significant context of Peirce's emphasis on the pragmatic classification of concepts is ignored. According to her, Peirce, far from being a typically American pragmatist, has made a very important contribution to the history BOOK REVIEWS 111 of philosophy in general. She presents him as struggling with the classic Platonic tradition in which Platonic idealism and Platonic realism are identified , and she analyzes the development of his philosophy as an heroic and, on the whole, successful attempt to free an ontological realism from the embarrassments of idealistic epistemology. Thus she assigns him his r61e as the greatest of the American realists and the most modern representative of Platonism. To tell this story effectively the author attempts to show how by his pragmatistic empiricism Peirce was led into his ontological "phaneroscopy," how his theory of scientific method led him to give more than a methodological context to his three categories, so that his metaphysics or ontology emerges as a pragmatist reconstruction of Platonic realism. To give a dramatic touch to Peirce's career, she makes a somewhat exaggerated contrast between Charles Peirce as a philosopher of "classic" proportions (p. 22) and William James as a more provincial and individualistic moralist, who betrayed the scientific seriousness of Peirce's pragmaticism by exploiting it in behalf of a kind of romanticism. And she conceives Peirce as a lonely, rejected, impoverished martyr buried under the popular triumph of a more superficial pragmatism. James, she writes, thus reduced the pragmatic maxim from a logical instrument for the clarification of ideas to an empirical norm for practical wisdom: accept as true, in every case, the opinion which pays highest, which shows how best to function .... A second blow was his affirmation that whenever our...