The Philosopher's  MILLENNIUM BOOK REVIEWS
	Introduced by Zenon Stavrinides   Part I PHILOSOPHERS ON PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD From time to time philosophers are given to reflecting on the method or methods they, and other fellow thinkers, employ in pursuing their investigations. Such reflections may be occasioned by a sense that one must get clear about the scope and limits of legitimate philosophical reasoning before one can engage effectively in a substantive philosophical problem. Two new books deal with important aspects of the methods which were used or may be used in philosophical work    Wittgenstein's Art of Investigation    By Beth Savickey  London: Routledge, 1999  ix + 266pp. £50.00 (Hb) ISBN 0-415-18038-4  In this book Beth Savickey provides in easily readable style an account of the philosophical 'method' used by Wittgenstein. Moreover, because she sees the method and the philosophical arguments as inextricably connected, we also learn more about his philosophical 'results'. Savickey identifies antecedents to Wittgenstein's methods in Karl Kraus's satirical writings, written in Vienna during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Kraus's experiences as a schoolteacher at the time of the Austrian School Reform Movement are also explored.  I found some interest in these pages, but they seem to me to be of more interest to historical scholars than those wanting insight into Wittgenstein's philosophy. Her close analyses of examples of Kraus's 'grammatical' style of commentary are somewhat tedious and even unconvincing. Wittgenstein's method is presented as not merely his personal style of writing, but as consciously adopted and adapted as necessary to his way of doing philosophy as, indeed, the revelation to him of the only way philosophical problems can successfully be tackled.  For Wittgenstein, philosophical problems express grammatical confusions that are to be allayed by grammatical investigations, making perspicuous how our language actually works in the particular cases causing confusions. A 'method' is, in fact, what Wittgenstein was trying to teach  The method is not a monolithic system but a practice, an art, a blend of the creative, the imaginative, the natural and even the playful, including ordinary language, questions, language-games, particular cases and analogies (each of the latter are chapter headings in the book). The 'results' are not philosophical theories or explanations of problems, but demonstrations of the uses of the method to dissolve philosophical confusions. One needs to be trained in applying the methods for oneself to one's own philosophical confusions. I would think the book is not for newcomers to Wittgenstein.  One needs some acquaintance with his philosophy and with what commentators have made of it in order to get the point. This is especially because even 'expert' philosophers have radically misunderstood what Wittgenstein was doing, proceeding as if he was contributing to philosophy in the usual way, and continuing themselves in such a way that Wittgenstein believed could only continue to compound philosophical problems. But the only way with the 'craving for a general comprehensive picture of the universe' is the application of his method, whence it 'will not be satisfied but will cease to exist' (p. 240). There is much of value here, but the cost is somewhat prohibitive.  Reviewed by David Yates     Sketches of Landscapes: Philosophy by Example    Academic philosophers are often accused of neglecting a wider public. From this perspective Stroll's book might appear as a welcome exception. However, in a very readable and accessible style he announces in the Preface a more important role projected for the book.  A new method -- doing 'philosophy by example' -- is supposed to overcome the shortcomings of the academic philosophy. It is not only the method, Stroll instructs us, that matters, but also the solutions to the seven problems analysed in the book: scepticism (I), Putnam's theory of meaning (II), Putnam's theory of reference (III), rules governing the usage of examples in philosophical prose (IV), direct reference theories and fictitious objects (V), Russellian theory of descriptions and meaning holism (VI), direct vs indirect realism (VII). Apart from sections II, III and V, the book seems to be a loose collection of unrelated papers; it is the seeming burden of the section IV to give a theoretical support for its neighbour sections.  It is not only that there is no rule to explain the composition of the book; moreover -- contrary to the author's projections -- I was not able to identify across the sections anything like a method common to all sample problems. Section IV is supposed to provide the rules governing the usage of examples. At the outset the rules for synonyms grouped in clusters, chains, and rings are stated. A cluster is 'a set of words that fall into a natural grouping within a natural language' (p. 106) and it is formed by comprehensive query in your home dictionary.  A chain is a subset of a cluster where more close meaning relationships obtain. A ring is a subset of a cluster, which contains only interdefinable words. If there is a group of words, then there is a heartland, i.e. 'a set or sets of rules for determining membership in a group' (p. 109), which also constitutes the linguistic analogue of Plato's 'essences'. The procedure of determining groups and setting up heartlands espouses a particular sentiment of Stroll for his home dictionary: 'to use dictionary as if it were a native informant, only one with a much better memory bank than most of us have and with a much keener ear for the distinctions that the language embodies' (p. 112). I do not share Stroll's sentiment for his (or mine?) dictionary as 'the ideal native speaker'; dictionaries, after all, are human artefacts and go outdated  Stroll is rather vague on what kind of dictionary we shall keep using, how precisely to form the groups of synonyms, and how to analyse them out to get heartlands. Besides the linguistic competence and intuitions, there is also the problem of interlinguistic settlements, which is far beyond Stroll's notice; he seems to take too much comfort with his own Webster's Dictionary! It is astonishing how consequent Stroll is in disobeying his own pronouncements. It is not only that his terminology of clusters etc. is absent from other sections in the book. He in other sections tends to identify the core of the method just in providing counter-instances, what leads to rejection or relativisation of a thesis under scrutiny  Besides the difference between the latter procedure and the one described in section IV, it apparently violates the so much emphasized by Stroll descriptive character of the method.  The book in most parts consists of Stroll's counter-arguments or arguments, and it is hardly conceivable how this procedure could be identified as descriptive. How to 'undo scepticism'? By example of a decorator who decides that the particular shade of blue is more appropriate for a couch just by 'seeing that' it is more appropriate. Analogously, there are - contrary to scepticism - instances of knowledge without there being criteria thereof. Stroll thus repudiates 'spurious distinctions', which underlie scepticism. It would be hard to discuss Stroll's claims not only because of their vagueness, but also because his view of scepticism is invariably ambiguous: on the one hand, his view on scepticism is highly informed by R H. Popkin's historical analysis of 16th and 17th century version thereof, while on the other, Stroll's theses have the ambition to repudiate all scepticisms.  However, even in attacking the historical forms of scepticism he evades its most serious theses. Similar shortcomings are in his attack on Putnam's, Kripke's, Strawson's and Russell's positions. Too often the reader is informed that the book is in a draft form: 'I disagree, but obviously I cannot argue the point in the detail it deserves', 'Let me just flatly assert...', or 'too difficult to be explored in detail here'. What thus is apparently highly recommended to the reader is 'sketches of landscapes' instead of 'philosophy by example'.  Reviewed by Pawel Kawalec      Rethinking Identity and Metaphysics    By Claire Ortiz Hill  New Haven and London: Yale University Press,  1997 xviii + 180pp., £15,95 (hb) ISBN 0-300-06837-9    In this well-written treatise on the plight of twentieth century analytical thought I found some comfort in the author's treatment of certain perennial anomalies, such as the distinction between 'sign' and 'symbol'  Hill's careful clarifications of concepts are models of clarity. For instance, she writes: 'To say of organ X that it has all the properties in common with organ Y essential for a successful transplant is to make a weaker claim than to claim they are identical' (p. 52). Russell and Frege loom large in these philosophical ruminations, and one can sense the painstaking trouble these thinkers went to in the process of formulating their systems, and how even the greatest minds can succumb to the allure of mathematical precision at the expense of complex truth. An entertaining and informative book.  Reviewed by Anthony Appleton
	Part II CONSCIOUSNESS EXPLORED  The popularity of various forms of behaviourism among philosophers and psychologists during the greater part of the twentieth century led to some neglect of the problem of what it is to be conscious of something  Recent decades, however, have seen a resurgence of philosophical interest in the character of conscious experience. The following books attempt, in their different ways, to come to grips with various aspects of the subject      The Significance of Consciousness   By Charles P Siewert Princeton,  NJ: Princeton University Press,  1997 x + 374pp. £27.50 (Hb) ISBN 0-691-02724-2  In his defence of the first person approach to self knowledge, Siewert rightly acknowledges the monumental task he has set himself, considering the wide range of influential thinkers that are arraigned against the arguments laid out in this book. Still, it is hard to disagree with Siewert when he says: 'Our conscious experience is something fascinating and valuable in its own right or so it seems to me. To ignore it would be a shame' (p. 65); or 'Certain authors have lost track of the occurrence of nonverbal imagery and unverbalised sense-experience; and so have lost touch with the notion of phenomenal consciousness' (p. 70).  The author describes numerous experiments in selective blind-sight in defence of his theories, and suppositions. When William James was asked about the break in consciousness (the example was during a thunderstorm) in his classic The Principles of Psychology, he replied: 'It is not so much a break; rather a bend in a bamboo stem.' This is a huge stumbling block for Siewert to overcome. Fortunately for the careful reader it has been accomplished in this splendidly reasoned book.      In the Theatre of Consciousness: The Workspace of the Mind By Bernard J. Baars  Oxford: Oxford University Press,  1997 xiv + 193pp. £18.50 (Hb) ISBN 0-19-510265-7    In this volume, William James remains firmly centre stage in what can only be an introduction to a novel and long needed approach to the question of consciousness. The juxtaposing of brain and psychological science is most enlightening in its novel approach to past metaphors such as Plato's Cave and the numerous Asian philosophical models. A well written and researched book, its insights are as useful as the lucid account of the structure of the human brain. The latter quickly dispels many commonly held misconceptions about the hierarchical structure of the brain's mental and physical construction. One of the most salient points raised by Baars is his observation that 'most knowledge is tacit knowledge; most learning is implicit' (p 60).  Well worth reading, with useful illustrative diagrams.    and some Collective Consciousness... New Frontiers of Philosophy for Alternative Model of Society,  or The Human Manifesto Andhra Pradesh, India:  By S S Sadhu 1998 No ISBN (Available for Rs. 300  from Sadhu Publications, Kakinada 533 005, Andhra Pradesh, India)  From the foreword onwards, the influence of Marxism on the author is evident. Though praiseworthy in its aspiration for global reforms in the name of common sense, the book does not escape from being far too idealistic in what is practically an unreasoning world. Numerous demographics, diagrams and mathematical formulae, far from clarifying his arguments, only obscure them; especially if one is a little hesitant to accept the criteria for certain elements in his equations. More interesting are the author's observations on the historical shifts of power throughout India, and the consequences of technical innovations on social and religious life that are still being felt throughout India and Asia today.  Utopian marriage of materialism and mysticism.    All three books reviewed by Anthony Appleton
	Part III EDUCATIONAL IDEALS AND THE PRIVATISATION OF LEARNING The 'idea of a university' became the subject of intense debate among British intellectuals since the middle of the 19th century, occasioned by reforms in higher education. A hundred years later, since the end of World War II, the debate revived and increased in intensity  The increasing economic prosperity and optimism of the 1950s encouraged the view that post-secondary education should expand its number by recruiting from the 'lower' classes and at the same time it should expand into new fields, including those of the applied social sciences and technology. The older ideas of social mobility and the eventual eradication of social divisions and inequalities were integrated into a conception of industrial participatory democracy, which, moreover, had to compete in the arena of international trade with other major industrial democracies.  Since the 1960s the British Higher Education system has been in a state of continuous change. The establishment of new universities and Colleges of Advanced Technology or (as they were subsequently re-named) polytechnics, the creation of degree-awarding Colleges of Higher Education in the '70s, the inroads made by the new polytechnics into the social sciences, business studies and the humanities once considered the preserve of the universities, and eventually the re-designation of polytechnics as universities in the '90s were accompanied by a continuous debate on the role of higher education in relation to the social, economic and political aspirations and plans of the country.  The state retains the right to determine the character and standards of institutions of learning - but how is it going to fund their operation? The ideas of market economics have entered the conceptual scheme in terms of which the educational debate is conducted. A new collection of papers tries to take stock of the debate    The University in a Liberal State By Bob Brecher, Otakar Fleischmann, and Jo Halliday (Eds).  Aldershot: Ashgate (Avebury Series in Philosophy) 1996.  x + 152pp. £32.50 (Hb) ISBN 1 85628 987 7.    This volume grew out of an international conference held in the Czech Republic in July 1995. Against the background of the mixed experience of Eastern European economic and political 'liberalisation' its focus was to examine both the place of the university in the liberal state and the idea of a liberal education. In following these themes the papers printed here bring up to date a set of debates which are familiar to students of, and participants in, the universities in Britain over at least 150 years. They also demonstrate a concern with a perceived international trend in university systems towards marketisation, managerialism, and a narrowing vocationalism, and away from JS Mill's ideal of the autonomous pursuit of liberal learning. Indeed, there may be a paradox that, in a world which many see as converging on a globalised political economy characterised by liberal democracy and free market capitalism, we find, as Brecher and Holiday suggest in their introduction, an 'erosion of just those elements of the content and organisation of education which mark Mill's conception of liberal education'.  What the contributors to this volume see, both in the former eastern bloc and in western states like the UK, is a privatisation of the resourcing of higher education, together with a marketisation of teaching, learning and research, which reflect a heavily economistic interpretation of the role of the universities. Market capitalism predominates over liberal democracy. It becomes increasingly hard to justify the resourcing of any activity in higher education in other than economic terms: that is in terms of the calculus of value within market capitalism. This volume can be divided into three sets of three papers.  The authors of the first three cast doubts on the liberal ideal itself, in turn using the case of the Holocaust to demonstrate the impossibility of moral neutrality in education, arguing the need for an 'intellectual culture' in the universities as against the prevailing specialist professional culture, and pointing to the limitations of the liberal neutral/rational conception of knowledge in the context of a feminist perspective. Three further papers attempt to show how the liberal tradition might defend itself against the 'managerialist' model, against the attempts to impose a spurious 'vocationalism' on the humanities, and, through an 'associational socialist' approach, against the consumerist alliance of neo-liberalism and the postmodern left.  The final three papers address in different ways the paradox referred to above in which liberalism appears to lead to an undermining of the liberal ideal in higher education. They include case studies of the George Soros funded Central European University, and of academic research policy in the Canadian universities, together with the advocacy of a social entitlement approach to higher education. In an epilogue which focuses on the Czech situation Fleischman and Kolinska describe the constraints on the university in these terms: state support comes only on the basis of its perceived economic role, while its students are coming to regard it in the same way; academics are increasingly feeling that they exist only on this joint sufferance, and this cannot but impose constraints on the free exercise of thought and opinion which Mill advocated.  Diverse as the disciplinary backgrounds of the authors, and the immediate subject matter and styles of their papers, are, the volume does retain a reasonable degree of coherence around its central themes. It shows that, even for those who would not count themselves as liberals, the debate surrounding the idea of a liberal education remains a productive one. Anyone interested in the implications of the ill thought out drift towards 'mass higher education' in Britain for the future of universities, and their possible contribution towards a good society, will find stimulation in this collection.    Reviewed by Alan Hutton
	Part IV PSYCHOANALYTICAL CONCERNS Midwifery of the Soul: Collected Papers  By Margaret Arden London: Free Association Books, 1998 126pp. £16.95 (Pb)  ISBN 1-85343-391-8  The Elusive Human Subject: A Psychoanalytic Theory of Subject Relations  By Roger Kennedy London: Free Association Books, 1998  226pp. £16.95 (Pb) ISBN 1-85343-396-9    These two books present contemporary perspectives on psychoanalysis. Margaret Arden's book is a collection of eight papers written with the aim of making Freud relevant to current therapeutic concerns. This is no mean feat. Freud and the training structures that promulgate his thought are relatively immune to criticism from within. Jeffrey Mason had a good go and found himself on the outside pretty quick. Margaret Arden will probably not uproot any vested interests or belief systems in this set of papers but she undoubtedly brings a degree of openness to the debates surrounding the purpose of psychoanalysis in the modern age  The thesis Arden presents is relatively simple: Freud was more than just a scientist and it is for this reason that we should be open to the holistic perspective in psychoanalysis. Roger Kennedy, on the other hand, restricts himself very much to the arena of human, particularly therapeutic, interaction and explores the philosophical backdrop for a theory of subject relations. Kennedy's examination of the question of consciousness is particularly worthwhile and his discussion of the work of Ryle, Rorty and Dennett exceptionally clear. Kennedy does not, however, restrict himself to philosophical texts, utilising findings from the social sciences to articulate the problematic of the self-other relationship. Although both books in their own way retain a privileged space for the analyst, they raise different concerns in so doing  While Arden presents a thesis calling for the incorporation of contemporary knowledge into the Freudian past, Kennedy grapples with the very possibility of psychoanalytic practice itself.  Reviewed by Robert Hill
	Part V EXPLORING THE NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE The question 'What is knowledge?' was investigated by Plato in the Theaetetus, the Republic and other great dialogues, and for all the work that successive generations of philosophers have produced on the nature of knowledge, the subject remains 25 centuries later a source of fascination, perplexity and controversy among philosophers    Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge Robert Audi London and New York:  Routledge, 1998 xii + 324pp. £12.99 (Pb)  ISBN 0-415-13043-3  Robert Audi's latest book offers students with some previous philosophical exposure a rigorous but accessible transition to graduate-level study of epistemology. Two features - its structure and its readability - make it an especially attractive introduction to the huge territory over which epistemology today lays claim. Rather than offer an introduction to the literature of epistemology, Audi presents a hierarchy of core essentials, an introduction to the central concepts and arguments of the field. He begins by familiarising students with the basic issues involving the sources of justification we find in perception, memory, introspection, and reflection. With a grasp of these, we are then led through more detailed discussions in the book's middle chapters about the structure and growth of justification and knowledge  These discussions in turn pave the way for a final section on the nature and scope of justification and knowledge. This approach sometimes requires reversing the order of presentation we find in other introductory texts  For example, a full-blown discussion of perceptual justification begins on page one, while Gettier counterexamples do not appear until page 215. The ideas link together neatly, however, as each chapter builds upon those before it whilst laying a foundation for those that follow. Throughout, Audi candidly identifies his own preferences while presenting competing positions fairly and accurately. Happily, he succeeds at organising a landscape that is too often seen by students as a hopeless maze. This terrain is also often steep. For this reason, any introduction should also try to make things accessible to the reader without oversimplifying or omitting difficult material.  This is perhaps Audi's strongest point. If he cannot make complex issues simple, he recognises that he can at least avoid making them unnecessarily difficult. Thus, he emphasises clarity of expression and, where necessary, repetition of key ideas, offering plenty of concrete examples to illustrate tricky points. Chapter One, for instance, begins with 'As I look at the green field before me,' a picture that Audi reintroduces periodically, right through to the book's conclusion. With help from Audi's grassy field (and other examples like it), we have, by journey's end, traversed all the major hills and valleys, bogs and streams of contemporary epistemology. Overall, it is an excellent work, a touchstone of clarity, providing well-structured access to a difficult subject and therefore likely to be widely used.  Reviewed by Curtis Garner
	.. plus a few PHILOSOPHICAL FRAGMENTS Porcupines By Graham Higgins  London: Penguin, 1999  £8.99 hardback, 229pp.  ISBN 0-7139-9311-1 Now this is a very interesting book. Graham Higgins (Cambridge and Yale) wears his learning a little heavily, perhaps, but it is an impressive selection of impressively short readings. In these days of 'dumbed-down' philosophy courses, might not Porcupines be all that would-be philosophers need read? Certainly there is enough material here to satisfy most of those in search of a convenient slimmed-down philosophic library.  There is Aristotle helpfully explaining in his Metaphysics, that when Protagoras says: 'Man is the measure of all things', he means that '.. that which seems to exist for each man assuredly does so.. it follows that the same thing both is and is not, and is both bad and good, and that all other opposite statements are true, because often some particular thing appears beautiful to some and ugly to others, and that which appears to each man is the measure.' There is Bishop Berkeley's Philonous explaining to Hylas that even Hylas's brain, 'being only a sensible thing,' as Hylas would have it, 'exists only in the mind.' There is Francois, Duc de la Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) pre-dating Nietzsche somewhat in writing that 'Nobody deserves to be praised for goodness unless he is strong enough to be bad, for any other goodness is usually merely inertia or lack of will'. And there is Epicurus's (341-270 BC) call to philosophers to help to overcome suffering in the world, for the words of a philosopher who offers 'no therapy for human suffering' are 'empty and vain'.  As Philolaus of Croton (c. 470-390 BC) gloomily suggests in the Miscellanies, the reality of a soul which has after all been yoked to the body as a punishment and it is 'imprisoned within it as though in a tomb'. Higgins selects his favourite bits, as it were, hacked like fossils from the rocky face of the Philosophical mountain. Some of the quotes are intriguing, some (rather less) are fun. Quite a few are inconsequential and too many from the latter section of the collection are proof only of the poverty of later philosophy. (Even if we accept Wittgenstein's explanation, offered her that sometimes 'a sentence can be understood only if read at the right tempo. My sentences are all supposed to be read slowly.') There are four from Plato, two each from Aristotle, Hume, Kierkegaard, and Friedrich von Schlegel who gives the book its title ('a fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated form the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a porcupine') three from Nietzsche - the God-hating misogynist hailed here as the master of poetic form, and given, curiously, a whole page in headline type to rant. And, last but not least, Wittgenstein, the aphorist's aphorist.  So does the book make sense, or is it just a glorified philosophical phrase book, or worse still, populist calendar of 'thoughts for the day'? In a rather sonorous introduction, Higgins talks of the reader taking their first untrained and 'first hesitant steps' towards learning the (apparently) marvellous subtleties of the philosophic dance - 'the chaste pleasures of philosophical mastery'. But this collection excludes non Europeans and indeed all women from the dance, for reasons that are increasingly hard to justify. Higgins hopes that the aphorisms are 'shafts of wisdom'. Or 'signposts'. He includes Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715? - 1780) telling the story of someone waking form a deep sleep and finding themselves in a labyrinth together with some other people who are busy arguing over general principles for finding the way out. What, Etienne exclaims, could appear more ridiculous! Yet that, he says is what the philosophers are doing  'It is more important to find ourselves merely where we were at first than to believe prematurely that we are out of the labyrinth', he concludes. John Dewey, the American philosopher of education, wrote that 'meaning is wider in scope as well as more precious in value than truth, and philosophy is occupied with meaning rather than truth', but it is hard to see any real pattern (other than the chronological structure) or greater meaning in Porcupines. It remains, as it was when it set out, a collection of fragments. But they are, indeed, beautiful fragments.  Reviewed by Martin Cohen
	and a CRITIQUE OF THE CRITIQUE   Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: Critical Essays  Patricia Kitcher, ed.,  Lanham, MD and London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998  xx + 300pp. £13.95 (Pb) ISBN 0-8476-8917-4  This is a collection of essays on different themes to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason. The latter has a reputation for being opaque and difficult. Some of the essays in this collection are correspondingly demanding but this flows from the nature of the subject matter. In the essay 'Kant's Cognitive Self', Patricia Kitcher examines Kant's claims for the existence of a unified 'Self' which accompanies all experience. It is proposed that these are a response to David Hume's scepticism concerning the actual existence of a self as the continuous mainstay of personal identity. The synthesis of empirical experiences and transcendental concepts are a necessary prerequisite to having knowledge. If such experiences were not synthesised they would remain isolated, fragmented, never unified.  The existence of a continuous cognitive self - the 'I think' that accompanies experience - is made possible by the very synthesis of such experiences. In the essay 'Kant's Compatibilism', Allen Woods argues that the interaction of the noumenal and phenomenal (the two realms of reality according to Kant) can be understood through a compatibilist outlook. That is, a combination of Free Will and Causality that emanates from a 'Timeless Agency'. The latter term is not elaborated upon which I felt was unfortunate as the whole thrust of the essay rested upon it.  Other essays address whether Space and Time are innate structures, analyse Kant's claims for A-Priori knowledge, and examine the Second Analogy. There are extracts from P.F. Strawson's Bounds of Sense (critical of Kant's Critique) and Henry Allinson's Kant's Transcendental Idealism (sympathetic). This book will be of use to serious students of Kant who wish to obtain informative and critical accounts of the Critique of Pure Reason Reviewed by Martin Jenkins    In Parts VI to X, we look at language, religon and the human spirit.     These pages prepared and edited by Zenon Stavrinides, Michael Keaney and Martin Cohen. Any comments? Email: thephilosophicalsociety@yahoo.co.uk