History of Logic (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 101 with an eye toward present-day Marxist discussions, to which frequent references are made. The main issues dealt with are the epistemological status of the materialist conception of history and its connection with the socialist movement, and the epistemological status of the labor theory of value and its connection with economic reality (primarily the relation between "value" and prices). Racinaro argues that all revisionist critiques fail for various reasons that uhimately reduce to a failure to appreciate the (Hegelian) dialectic and to the tendency to introduce unacceptable dichotomies (e.g., between value and fact, fact and theory, theory and practice). Racinaro's arguments are not always convincing. For example, he criticizes Croce's interpretation that the materialist conception of history is a generally useful but not universally true principle of explanation and that hence the socialist classless society is possible, but merely possible and not inevitable. This is criticized partly by recourse to Gentile's argument that socialism is either impossible or necessary, even though this proposition was for Gentile merely a step toward showing that socialism is impossible since it is not necessary, which it is not because the materialist metaphysics of history is philosophically refutable! Another example is Racinaro's discussion of Croce's interpretation of the labor theory of value as an elliptical comparison between real capitalist society and the abstract part of it consisting of the laboring society. Here Racinaro invents an implicit Crocean charge that Marxian economics is unscientific (pp. 151 , 153), belabors rather irrelevantly that Croce's interpretation removes the labor movement from its central position in society, attempts unconvincingly to connect Croce's distinction between the whole society and the laboring part of it with his "dialectic of distincts," and then criticizes the latter for not being reducible to the Hegelian "dialectic of opposites"! After the heights that the critique of Croce reached with Gramsci, this is quite a let down (even though Racinaro would claim to be in the tradition of Gramsci, whom he frequently quotes approvingly). On the whole, however, the book is serious, informative, well-documented, intelligent, and worth reading. MAURICE A. FINOCCHIARO University of Nevada, Las Vegas Anton Dumitriu. History of Logic. 4 volumes. Tunbridge, Kent: Abacus Press, 1977. Vol. a, pp. xvi + 342; vol. 2, pp. vii + 265; vol. 3, PP. vii + 393; vol. 4, PP. viii + 275. $21.5o each; $79.2o the set. The two histories of logic most widely used today, I. M. Bochefiski's History of Formal Logic (HFL) and William and Martha Kneale's Development of Logic (DL), represent two different approaches to the subject. The former offers selections from the sources organized into several areas; the latter gives a narrative interpretation of most of the same sources with critical reflections on their achievements and shortcomings . Professor Dumitriu's History of Logic attempts to combine both approaches. Expanding on the divisions found in Bochefiski, it seeks to increase the available source materials. Hence, it includes such chapters as "The Logical Structure of Primi- 102 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY tive Mentality," "Logic in Ancient China," "Humanist Logic," "Transcendental Logic," "The Logic of Research," "Psychologism in Logic," "Phenomenology and Pure Logic," and so on. Moreover, it strives to broaden the frame of interpretation by picturing all of these topics and the diverse conceptions of logic they entail as so many "moments" in one, comprehensive "development of logic." With respect to scholarship, the author states his purpose "to present the vast material of logic in a historically authentic form, through the texts" (t:xi). In the thirteen-hundred-odd pages that wend from the Boror6 man who thought he was an Arara parrot to the latest Roumanian mathematicians who know that formal logic is not the whole of logic, the author strays far and wide from his noble aim. In fact, we read in these volumes not alone the unvarnished words of the logicians themselves, but a summary of major contributions to the field understood from the viewpoint that can be characterized only as "Hegelian, Marxist and Leninist." That is not to say that the work is without merit. Surely, a history of logic written from no point of view would be of little...