David Lamb 183

natural immediacy of the Greek Sittlichkeit after the Socratic endeavour to equip it with a rational content.

There is a tendency among historians of philosophy to con- centrate, perhaps too heavily, on either early or hitherto unpub- lished writings of great philosophers. Presumably one can avoid criticism this way and still lay claim to have said something orig- inal. Unfortunately this concern with the foothills often blinds the scholar from seeing the importance of scaling the mountains. Many of Hegel’s early theological writings should be seen as preliminary to his major works. They were not published because Hegel did not think they were worth publishing. If Lauer had concentrated solely on these earlier writings he would have written a dull book, although his conclusions might be more acceptable. Instead he has produced a more exciting work which spans the entire Hegelian system, throwing in an essay on pantheism and a textual analysis of one of the key sections of the Encyclopedia for good measure. Whilst Lauer does not ignore the early writings it is to his credit that his thesis, which maintains that the meaning of Hegel’s ‘God language’ is the key to the whole enterprise, is developed out of a detailed analysis of Hegel’s major works. For this reason Hegel’s Concept .f God will be a valuable aid to students of The Phenomenology of Spirit, the Encyclopedia and the Science of Logic.

Department of Philosophy The University of Manchester, Manchester MI3 9 P L .

Phenomenology, dialogues and bridges edited by Ronald Bruzina and Bruce Wilshire, State University of N e w York Press: Albany, 1982, pp. viii + 361. No price.

DAVID LAMB, University ofManChester

As the title suggests this collection ot twenty eight essays by leading phenomenologists is intended to build communicative links between ‘recent American philosophy’ and the ‘metaphysical and phenomenological thought which has appeared on the Continent in

184 Philosophical Invrstigatiorir

the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’. The book is divided into eight sections, with two on Martin Heidegger and other sections on Phenomenology and Pragmatism, Merleau-Ponty, Meinong, Sci- ence and Perception, Hermeneutics, and Phenomenology and the Theatre. Among these the only serious attempt to build bridges between contemporary American philosophy and Continental phenomenology are the essays on pragmatism; the rest are clearly situated within the phenomenological tradition, written for the initiated.

The first section opens with presentations given in com- memoration of the death of Martin Heidegger in 1976. William Barrett offers a poetic, and possibly sentimentalised, appeal on behalf of phenomenology which is followed by several scholarly interpretations of Heidegger’s thought. This is by far the most interesting section of the book. The central issues are the problema- tic status of ethics in Heidegger’s philosophy and his ontology. Reiner Schurmann argues that an awareness of Heidegger’s destruction of metaphysics will reveal how ethics has been deprived of its legitimating ground: ‘Heidegger’s destruction of ontology deprives the arts, investigations, actions and pursuits of their telos. ’ (p. 16). O n the other hand, Charles Sherover argues that Heideg- ger’s account of authentic solicitude, resoluteness and capacity for conscience, indicate the possibility of an existentialist ethic, and consequently urges that Being and Time must be read, like Kant’s transcendental philosophy, as an attempt to spell out the primacy of practical reason. Thus Heidegger’s apparent neglect of ethics is really ‘a propaedeutic to ethics, a propaedeutic necessary to the reconstruction of moral philosophy’. (p. 25) Barrett’s contribution to this subject deserves acclaim. He is one of the few writers on Heidegger who is capable of presenting the latter in an intelligible form. For Barrett, the absence of a moral dimension in Heidegger’s account of Being is unacceptable and he is greatly disturbed by the thought that ‘Dasein has no soul’! Since an ethic is desirable, it is necessary to incorporate elements that may be foreign to Heideg- ger’s thought.

Other papers on Heidegger are taken up with the status of his ontology. Otto Poggeler argues that Heidegger’s attempt to found a new ontology in Being and Time is still attached to the Aristotelian concept of the analogy of Being. This is disputed by Karl-Otto Apel, who argues that Heidegger’s account of Being is still epochal

David Lam h 185

since it radicalises the Kantian transcendental investigation of the conditions of possible experience of the world. Towards the end of his paper, Ape1 suggests possible links between Heidegger and C. S. Peirce as a fruitful research project and in the following section, on Pragmatism and Phenomenology, Richard Cobb-Stevens argues that further links can be made between William James’ radical empiricism, with its idea of ‘pure experience’ as a ‘transcendental zone of absolute giveness’, and the early Husserl. Similar links are drawn by other contributors between C. I. Lewis and John Dewey and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty respectively.

Of interest in the remaining sections is Don Ihde’s paper, ‘On Hearing Shapes, Surfaces and Interiors’, where sensory atomism is charged with the error of analytic disembodiment in that it disre- gards the role of the whole body in perception. The possibility of significant links here with some of the more radical work in con- temporary Anglo-American philosophy of medicine seems to have been overlooked since the author remains very much within the phenomenological tradition. The following contribution by Donald McKenna Moss has considerable relevance in both the theory and practice of medicine. In his study of surgically treated obesity a phenomenological method is employed to overcome the distinction between physiology and psychology. According to Moss the problems of property, ownership, and alienation of the body are central to the understanding and treatment of obesity.

The penultimate section is dominated by a discussion between Paul Ricoeur and Hans Georg Gadamer on the conflict of inter- pretations, covering a wide spectrum of hermeneutics which can- not be adequately dealt with here. The final section deals with the phenomenology of the theatre.

There is little disagreement among the contributors to this volume and comments on the papers are very mild. It is a dialogue among the converted rather than a confrontation between different philosophical traditions. And like many collections which aim to build bridges between Anglo-American and Continental philos- ophy it has many assumptions regarding the superiority of the latter. Although this book is less prone to excessive deference towards Continental thought than many of its kind, the editors nevertheless make the alinost obligatory references to the ‘parochialness of recent American philosophy’, (p. ix) and were it not for the essays on William James, C. I. Lewis, and John Dewey

186 Philosophical Investigatiorir

- even these are assessed as aspiring phenomenelogists - the overriding impression is that traffic across the communicative bridges is intended to flow only in one direction, where dialogue would consist of instruction in phenomenological analysis.

Department of Philosophy, University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL.

BOOKS RECEIVED

J. Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality, Cam- bridge, 1983, pp. viii + 177, Price 217.50.

H. L. A. Hart, Essays in Jurisprudence and Philosophy, Clarendon Press, 1983, pp. viii + 396, Price 217.50.

Philip Kitcher, Abusing Science. The Case against Creationism, Open University, 1983, pp . viii + 213, Price f6.95.

John R. Searle, Intentionality, Cambridge, 1983, pp. x + 278, Price 27.50.

Social Philosophy and Policy (journal), Vol. 1, Issue 1, Autumn 1983, Blackwell, pp. 195, Editor Ellen Frankel Paul. Price, single issue $6 c;n