A selection of the best from recent issues of the Philosopher

   ìBy a theory of existence,î explains Sprigge , ì I understand a general view about the nature of reality and in particular about the nature of a human individual and his place in reality as a wholeî. Sprigge does not claim in this book to give a complete exposition of the theories he writes about. Rather he concentrates on those aspects of them that he finds meaningful today and that make them ìstill living options so far as some intelligent people of the present time are concernedî.  The theories and the aspects of them he has chosen are, he writes, ìlikely to colour the individualís approach to his or her own personal living of their life.î

   The philosophers, whose theories Sprigge considers, run in chapter, but not chronological, order, from Descartes, through ëanalytical materialistsí, Marx and Engels, Berkeley, Kant, and Bradley, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and finally to Spinoza. The subjects dealt with accordingly range over Cartesian and Christian Dualism (both mind, of which God is the supreme example, and matter exist), Materialism (only matter exists), Idealism (only mind exists); the Will to Live and the Will to Power (the basic existents for human beings); the Nature of Existence or Being; Existentialism (human minds are the basic existents and human beings themselves are each constantly shaping themselves); and finally Pantheism (one fundamental thing only exists, called alternately God or Nature, Deus sive Natura, of which other things, including human beings, their minds and their bodies, are mere facets).

   The book is a readable introduction to the central, and today perhaps the more interesting, parts of the works of the selected philosophers. Some readers will be pleased to find that Sprigge deliberately chooses not to penetrate too deeply into the ideas and arguments he expounds, making the subject matter quite accessible to the layperson or philosophical beginner. For example, having established the main point that Descartes considered the essence of matter to be that it is extended in space, he writes: ìI shall avoid getting bogged down in a precise discussion of just how Descartes conceived the physicalî. 

   At times Sprigge is ostensibly self-effacing: ìI do not want to step forward here as one whose views should especially influence the reader in assessingî the theory. At others he leaves you in no doubt where he stands and expects his readers to stand as, for example, on Materialism: ìFor my part I must say I think it misses the real force of the Cartesian argument . . . I can see little hope for standard materialism except in the sense that something about the spirit of our time encourages people to swallow it.î

   There are times when I would have liked Sprigge to have dealt more precisely with, and explored further, certain arguments. Take for instance the section where Sprigge outlines one of the dualistsí arguments for the possibility of the existence of a disembodied mind. The argument is that it is conceivable that a disembodied or unembodied mind should exist. He is thinking in part of putative phenomena such as, for example, what are called ëout-of-bodyí experiences. He writes: 

ì. . . sense experience pertains to the essence of the mind as truly as the capacity for abstract thought . . . It does seem to me conceivable that one should have an experience in which one has visual and other modalities sense experience which reveals this or some other physical world, but without finding any body, observable by oneself or others, which determines oneís point of view of things.î

   For a disembodied mind, with no eye located at a point in the physical world, there would be no way of telling whether the putative visual experience it was having was veridical, revealing, as Sprigge thinks, an actual house, say, in the physical world, or illusory. For, only with an eye located in the physical world could you determine, for example, whether the apparent sight of the back of a house 20 yards away was veridical or illusory, depending on whether, say, the only visible house in the locality of the looking eye was in fact 20 yards away with its back to the eye, or 200 yards away, with its front facing the eye. So, what seemed conceivable to Sprigge does not on closer examination appear to be conceivable. 

   The same is true mutatis mutandis of any putative auditory sense experience of an earless, disembodied mind. And any putative tactile sense experience of a disembodied mind must surely be illusory. Incidentally, the foregoing seems to suggest that so-called ëout-of-bodyí experiences have all and only the characteristics of dreaming.

   It is at a poignant moment such as this that one feels the great loss and sadness that never again can such points be put to the embodied mind of Timothy Sprigge for his calm and measured response, and the discussion continued, and the matter explored further and elucidated by his keen intellect and fertile imagination.
 

 
Reviewed by Fred Holman