Peter Caws

Jean-Paul Sartre is the writer who gave the most trenchant formulation of existentialism and tried to do the same for a version of Marxism, and as a philosopher of history who got it wrong about history and then, in his last "philosophical manifesto" - volume III of the Idiot - got it brilliantly right. But Sartre did not write the second volume of the Critique. Or, more exactly, he wrote it but he did not publish it. The Critique, as Sartre himself admitted, grew like a hernia on the body of the book on Flaubert, so that it had to be surgically removed and given a life of its own; but a sort of symbiosis persisted, and when it came to the continuation of the argument, Sartre seems to have sensed that volume II was a dead end, and that the route to the alternative would prove to lie after all in the Flaubert project itself. In order to understand Sartre's position, the author analyzes his conception of history, especially of the intelligibility of history by mean of the dialectical reason as a movement of totalization of practical seriality, and shows its actuality.

Peter Caws provides a fresh and often iconoclastic treatment of some of the most vexing problems in the philosophy of science: explanation, induction, causality, evolution, discovery, artificial intelligence, and the social implications of technological rationality. Caws's work has been shaped equally by the insights of Continental philosophy and a concern with scientific practice. In these twenty-eight essays spanning more than a quarter of a century, he ranges from discussions of the work of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, to relations between science and surrealism, to the concept of intentionality, to the limits of quantitative description. A lively mix of history, theory, speculation, and analysis, _Yorick's World_ presents a vision of science that includes human history and social life. It will interest professional philosophers and scientists, and at the same time its directness will make it readily accessible to nontechnical readers.

Definition is viewed in this paper as a cohesive element of theory, providing links between scientific constructs. The problem is approached first in terms of three orders--the historical, the logical, and the heuristic--in which the structure of science may be put together; a study of these is necessary if difficulties about priority of definition are to be resolved. The main part of the paper is devoted to an exercise in theory-construction which illustrates the five principal functions of definition--the grounding of constructs in observation, their descriptive interrelation, the development of logico-mathematical calculi, the interpretation of these calculi, and the provision of precise, quasi-mathematical relations between the constructs themselves. Reference is made throughout to the many names for the defining process found in earlier works, and problems of contextual definition, reduction, stipulative and lexical definition, etc., are dealt with briefly. The theory thus constructed is represented diagrammatically. It is shown that the analysis may be simplified, in general terms, by the use of two new categories, "internal" and "external" definition; and that this innovation may prove helpful in clarifying some traditional obscurities, and in preserving a necessary balance between a purely logical and a purely empirical approach to the philosophy of science.

Systematic philosophy has for a long time now been disavowed as an objective or even as an interest by many professional philosophers whose view of their subject regards it as an activity of analysis rather than of construction. That this disclaimer should have become so common at a time when, in other disciplines, the idea of system was coming more and more into prominence suggests that philosophers and other scholars may somehow have been talking at cross-purposes. The opposition of analytic and constructive modes comes out clearly in the pejorative use of expressions like “system-builders,” and a glance at the history of the analytic movement makes it clear that the kind of system it sets itself against is typified by the Hegelian system, the System before which Kierkegaard was on the point of kneeling down, flourishing his handkerchief so as not to get his trousers dirty, only to discover that its completion had been put off until the next Sunday.