In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 183 Moore goes on to provide an analysis, all of which goes to support the contentions (1) that, except in philosophy, there is no puzzle ("In the first place: Are you puzzled?...I am in a way, in spite of all the Critical Phil. I've done. But I'm not sure my puzzlement is all of the sort B. means: it seems such a queer question to ask: Why (...) should you ask it?"); (2) if there is a problem it exists within a philosophical theory, as in Russell's Analysis o] Matter, and that what "Critical Phil. really can do is to explain why R. is wrong when he says this"; and (3) "If you don't find that question interesting, I think you'd better not do Crit. Phil." (p. 170). Curious stuff for Part I Moral Science Tripes takers; one wonders how many of them decided they weren't that interested in the question as to whether the theories of Broad or Ru~ell were true or false, or just plain silly. Perhaps this suffices to show that the characteristic mood of Moore's public writings is to be found in the lectures as well. Somehow or other, students were exposed to this cold bath of scepticism as to the significance of the whole endeavor, and yet went on to caxry out, in his own sytle, those rather more dogmatic exercises in analysis for which he is famous. This curious combination of dogmatic claim and lingering doubt suffuses Moore's work, of course. Perhaps it is seen best here in his ready acceptance of a method in which problems will be resolved by showing what is entailed by what we say, yet admitting that in most cases how you decide that p entails q is not terribly clear. All in all this is a valuable extension of a portrait of a major figure in twentieth century philosophy; and Mr. Lewy is to be congratulated for his skillful editing, conveying the arguments while preserving the quality of Moore's mind. At the same time there is something a bit depressing about it all, something a little too arrogant about the insistence that the stuff he is doing has no significance apart from what other moral science lecturers are saying to other crowds of undergraduates and writing for other lecturers in moral science. A. R. LoucH Ctar~faont Graduate School ~ant et le Kantisme. By Jean Lacroix. (Paris: Presses Universitairesde France, 1966.Pp. 127. -~ "Que Sais-je?", 1213.) Lacroix' Kant et ~e Kantisme is a concise, well argued defense of two theses: 1) The main import of Kant's work is metaphysical. 2) Kant's Critical programme derived its impetus from the desire to insure human freedom, morality, and religion against the fatalism or scepticism to which Kant felt Leibniz' and Wolff's dogmatic metaphysics or Hume's naturalism condemned them. The approach is not altogether new, particularly in Europe, but it has been largely overlooked in the United States and Britain. There are exceptions, such as Lewis White Beck, but generally English speaking philosophers have contended that Kant's motives were mainly epistemological. Lacroix argues that the three Critiques are parts of a single philosophical conception of man's place in the universe. Although his book is short, directed at the general (French) reader, and therefore necessarily concerned with the broad flow of Kant's thought, he does an admirable job of marshalling evidence from all the main works in the Kantian corpus, including the Opus Postumum. In the last, according to Lacroix, "... Kant a voulu ]ui-m~me synthdtiser les diverses Critiques et donner une rue d'ensemble de sa pens~e" (p. 9). The reader will, however, feel frustrated with Lacroix' documentation, for all the citations are to French translations, making them difficult to follow up. Inasmuch as Lacroix has a penchant for citing particularly pregnant passages and has written a book worthy of consideration by serious students of Kant, correlate citations to the Akademie Ausgabe are warranted. The weight of Lacroix' thesis that Kant's intentions were primarily metaphysical rests on his contention that "... le noum~ne a aussi un rble positif" (p... (shrink)

Allison's interpretation and defense of Kant's idealism turn on his claim that a clear distinction between two senses of the appearance/reality distinction is crucial to and pervades Kant's thought. These are the empirical and transcendental senses, which distinguish respectively between the ordinary senses of subjective and objective, i.e., that which in my experience I believe belongs solely to my private awareness of things and that which I believe must pertain to everyone's awareness of things because it is an aspect of (...) their being, and the philosophical, or critically reflective, senses of those terms, i.e., that which we want to say about them as a function of the way in which we all experience them and that which sub specie aeternitatis we want to say belongs to things as they are in themselves. The fundamental thrust of Allison's argument is that for Kant the notion of objectivity in the ordinary sense does not imply or entail transcendental objectivity, which had been a supposition common to most of Kant's predecessors. Moreover, Allison's basic criticism of the dominant tradition of interpretation, beginning with Kant's rough contemporaries and extending into the present in the persons of Pritchard, Strawson and Walker, is that their reconstructions of Kantian doctrine and their criticisms of it turn on their inability to see or refusal to acknowledge the presence of this central distinction of Kant's thought. The deep irony pointed out by this study, then, is that just the set of distinctions on which Kant based his solutions to the metaphysical and epistemological problems which he inherited from the Cartesian tradition have been missed by most of his critics, who in turn criticized him for succumbing to all the illusions he thought he had exposed to the light. I believe Allison is correct in this claim, and his strategy of interpretation and defense is both right-minded and fruitful. The key to maintaining the distinction between the two senses of the appearance/reality distinction for Allison is the notion of an epistemic condition, which he defines as "one that is necessary for the representation of an object or an objective state of affairs", and which is to be distinguished from both psychological conditions of knowing and ontological conditions of being. The crux of Allison's argument, then, is to show that and how the notion of an epistemic condition underlies a proper understanding of idealism in the Kantian sense such that it avoids Cartesian metaphysical commitments. This is a formidable task, but one that Allison completes with much more than normal success. (shrink)