Jeremy Bentham: Ten Critical Essays (review)

120 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY mind produces from itself that affords certainty about space's metric." He cannot be sure of the truth of his propositions. Well, Bertrand Russell said that mathematicians are people who do not know what they are talking about and whether what they say is true. And to Poincar6 the axioms of geometry were mere conventions. Moreover, there is Einstein's thesis of the existence of two geometries, the one pure, the other empirical. The first one draws conclusions from certain axioms without inquiring whether or not they are true. It appears that the truth of mathematics is a problem that philosophers alone cannot solve. In "The Myth of Double Affection" Moltke Gram shows with great penetration that the doctrine of double affection, which certain commentators ascribe to Kant, is a "myth" in the double sense that it cannot be ascribed to Kant and that it does not solve any problem of his epistemology. Lewis White Beck's article "Analytic and Synthetic Judgments Before Kant" is a very valuable contribution to the history of this problem and to the clarification of its systematic significance. Beck examines the opposition between analytic and synthetic judgments as it appears--mostly under different names--in the works of Hume, Locke, Leibniz, Wolff, and Crusius. He also analyzes the interesting controversies between Kant and Eberhard, who pretended that Kant's basic problem, "how are synthetic judgments a priori possible?", had already been answered by Wolff. To this accusation Kant replied, "Maybe so! But the reason why the importance of this distinction has not been recognized seems to be that all a priori judgments were regarded [by Wolff] as analytic . . . so the whole point of the distinction disappeared." At the end of this enlightening essay the reader is convinced of the justification of Kant's distinction. ALFRED STERN University of Puerto Rico Jeremy Bentham: Ten CriticalEssays. Edited by Bhikku Parekh. (London: Frank Cass, 1974. Pp. xxvii + 204. $18.50) The editor has collected in this volume several nineteenth- and twentieth-century contributions to the study of the philosophy and the significance of Jeremy Bentham. Students of Bentham will appreciate the existence of a single book containing both H. L. A. Hart's justly renowned forensic of 1962 and its equally renowned predecessor, Mill's essay on Bentham. (Parekh sensibly uses the final, Dissertations and Discussions version, although he indicates at appropriate places many of the important revisions of the earlier, London and Westminister Review, version.) "Bentham's speculations . . . began with law; and in that department he accomplished his greatest triumphs. He found the philosophy of law a chaos, he left it a science: he found the practice of the law an Augean stable, he turned the river into it which is mining and sweeping away mound after mound of its rubbish" (p. 23). Mill's famous metaphor contains the right emphases: in general terms, Bentham's philosophy of law is the most lasting element of his system. Did his erstwhile disciple, however, fully grasp the scope of Bentham's accomplishments in the field of legal theory? Consider an earlier passage from the same essay: "It was not his opinions.., but his method, that constituted the novelty and the value of what he did; a value beyond all price, even though we should reject the whole, as we unquestionably must a large part, of the opinions themselves" (p. 7). Mill describes this method as "the method of detail; of treating wholes by separating them into their parts.., and breaking every question into pieces before attempting to solve it" (p. 7). Quite reasonably, Hart attacks such a misleading distinction between Bentham's "opinions" and his "method" (p. 75). The 1838 "Bentham" was an important aid to the Victorian awareness of its subject; indeed, it is a useful indicator today of some of the early interpretations that Bentham's thought was made to bear. It is the 1962 "Bentham," however, to BOOK REVIEWS 121 which we should turn if we desire a pithy account--and Hart's is almost dazzling in its conciseness --of the place and importance of Bentham's thought. It is especially a pleasure to read again his acute analysis of Bentham on...