Book Notes

108 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY nificance, but once they did, most of them realized that it raised a bar against ethical theorizing considerably more effective than that of the positivists. Once more, meta-ethics seems to offer an honorable way out. It is not my purpose here either to praise or condemn the shift from normative ethics to meta-ethics, but only to point it out as being, in my opinion, the most significant thing that has happened to ethics in the twentieth century. I might add, however, that it could be both interesting and worthwhile to try to determine the relationship between the development of ordinary language ethics and this more basic change that has taken place in contemporary ethical theory. OLIVER A. JO~NSON University of California, Riverside BOOK NOTES Archie J. Bahm, The World's Living Religions. New York, Dell Publishing Co., 1964. Pp. 384. 75c. This paper-cover book presents the religions of India, China, Japan, and the West. As Dr. Bahm covers an immense field, he is bound to be inaccurate at times: e.g., he attributes to the Jesus of history later ideas of the author of the fourth gospel (p. 356); his presentation of Calvin (pp. 295-297) is rather old fashioned. As today we no longer live in a nation or a civilization but in a world, the author has the merit of encouraging a comparative study of all existing religions. He also seeks what is common to them all. This is said to be man. What man is, the author well says, continues to be a problem, and yet this problem could be the beginning of a mutual understanding among men. --P.T.F. La Vdrit~. Aetes Du XIP Congras des Soei~t~s de Philosophie de Langue Fran~aise, BruxellesLouvain . 420 FB. This volume, which brings together papers from no less than seventy authors, is especially noteworthy for its first section (Vdritg et Ontologie) and its last section (La Notion De Vdritd duns L'histoire de la Philosophie). Demitizzazione e Morale: Atti del Convegno indetto dal Centro internazionale di Studi umanistici e dall'Istituto di Studi filosofici. Rome, 7-12 Gennaio 1965. A cura di Enrico Castelli. Roma, Istituto di Studi filosofici, 1965. Pp. 439. This large volume consists of the Proceedings of a convention in which a score of European philosophers participated. Some of the results we may summarize as follows. "Myth" is defined as the narration of something and "demythisation" as offering another narrative more faithful t~) historical reality (p. 35). As myths are elements of spiritual life, they ought not to be destroyed but reinterpreted. Hence we have today an existential interpretation of myths (p. 325). Ethics ought to be reduced neither to a formal absolute nor to an historical situation. True ethics is both a repetition of an absolute and a becoming. In other words, ethics is history (p. 189). Ancient ethical myths have been eroded by time and by new situations, but ethics itself, moral demands, and the conscience of man still stand (pp. 281-282). --P.T.F. Boo~ REc~IwD Abel, Reuben, ed., Humanistic Pragmatism: the Philosophy o] F. C. S. Schiller. With an Introduction. New York, The Free Press [1966].347 pp. $6.95. Alexander, S., Space, Time, and Deity. The Gifford Lectures at Glasgow, 1916-1918. With a New Foreword by Dorothy Emmet. New York, Dover Publications [1966]. 2 vols., front. (This edition is an unabridged and unaltered republication of the second [1927] impression of the work originally published in 1920by Macmillan and Co.) Paper $2.50 each. Alexander, W. M., Johann Georg Hamann: Philosophy and Faith. The Hague, M. Niihoff, 1966. xii + 212 pp. Gld. 28.25. Allison, Henry E., Lessing and the Enlightenment. (His Philosophy of Religion and its Relation to 18th-Century Thought.) Ann Arbor, The University of Michigan Press, 1966. ix + 216 pp. $7.50. Anderson, Robert Fendel, Hume's First Principles. Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press [1965].xv + 189 pp. $6.00. ...