Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 111 viduals. As Edward Strong pointed out, the basic problem is always that of deciding on what grounds decisions are to be reached. To this basic problem J. C. H. Wu's paper made a very substantial contribution. At earlier conferences, Northrop had stressed the failure of Eastern legal systems to develop formal concepts of justice and equality-before-the-law, and had blamed Eastern epistemologies for their inadequacies in formulating general standards not only in law but in science and philosophy. At this conference, there was less concern about the causes for the contrasts between Eastern and Western law, and more concern about practical equivalents. In a culture like the Japanese, for example, social obligations have operated not on the basis of determinate concepts but in diffuse, indeterminate terms, which made it possible to adjust obligations to contingent circumstances. The law is not expected to function with the precision of a machine. However, Kawashima and others admitted that rapid industrialization is forcing legal systems to develop concepts of contracts and other obligations analogous to Western law, because the traditional "goodwill" is inadequate. Meanwhile, Hocking's paper admitted that the more formalized law in the West has not always served to protect individual status and rights as it was supposed to do. This fourth conference represented the culmination of a notable career. Charles A. Moore, who died while these Proceedings were in press, devoted much of his life to making his journal, Philosophy East-West, his Department at the University of Hawaii, and these Conferences a coordinated effort to bring Eastern and Western thought and thinkers to a genuine meeting of minds. The periodic meetings begun in 1939, the courses of instruction at the University, the publications and other aspects of this effort were skillfully planned and directed, under high scholarly standards. Thus Moore succeeded in creating an atmosphere of goodwill, and he dispelled many of the cliches, oversimplifications and prejudices that have haunted East-West relations. During the five years in which I corresponded with him on these matters, I was impressed by his energy, skill, and critical persistence in perfecting this whole undertaking. He brought its results not only to the attention of his colleagues in philosophy, but to that of television audiences and other publics. During these last years he also related the historical researches of his own organization to the more contemporary studies in Honolulu, of which he was a spiritual godfather. He has an enduring monument, and he set a high standard for scholars in many countries and cultures. SAM LAMBERT Retired Member of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. By WiIfrid Sellars. (New York: Humanities Press, 1969. Pp. x+246. $5.25) The demands Sellars puts upon his readers in this study are considerable. Not only does he reconstruct some obscure (and obscured) distinctions within Kant's Critique o/ Pure Reason, employing these distinctions to illuminate Sellarsian doctrines in the philosophy of mind. He uses the views of such diverse philosophers as Frege, Ryle, Carnap, Wittgenstein and Peirce as dialectical foils in the development of doctrines of intentionality, picturing and truth. Interspersed are insightful, though often terse and cryptic remarks on Hume, Bergson, Feyerabend, Quine, James and others. One cannot help but feel that SeUars is out to impress. And the book is impressive, though prior 112 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY initiation into Sellar's philosophy may be a prerequisite for its full appreciation. To take an example, without previous acquaintance with Sellars' "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" and the Chisholm correspondence, much of the material on intentionality remains opaque. In this review I shall limit myself primarily to SeIlars' Kant interpretation and the bearing this has on Setlars' own philosophy. It is here, I believe, that the major significance of his book is to be found, viz., SeUars' explicit avowal of a carefully articulated Kantian and, at crucial points, rico-Kantian metaphysic and philosophy of mind. Other than this, with the exception of some material in the fifth chapter which extends Sellars' earlier discussions of the correspondence theory of truth, the views SeUars argues present nothing essentially new to his enterprise. What is new in...