James Findlay

Professor Findlay in this book, originally published in 1961, set out to justify, and to some extent carry out, a ‘material value-ethic’, ie. A systematic setting forth of the ends of rational action. The book is in the tradition of Moore, Rashfall, Ross, Scheler and Hartmann though it avoids altogether dogmatic intuitive methods. It argues that an organised framework of ends of action follows from the attitude underlying our moral pronouncements, and that this framework, while allowing personal elaboration, is not a matter for individual decision. The relations connecting our fundamental value-judgements with one another, and the frames of mind behind them, are not rigorously deductive but are sufficiently compelling to be called logical. Something of a ‘transcendental deduction’ of a well-ordered family for our basic heads of valuation is both possible and necessary. The work is further critical of the notion of obligation which has been extended far beyond legal contracts and understandings. The book also contains a chapter on religion

This chapter discusses the following: (i) The Kantian concept of the Transcendental Object, and of its relation to that of the Noumenon and the Thing-in-itself; (ii) Kant's theory of knowledge cannot be positivistically interpreted, but requires underlying unities that hold appearances together, and which, by their identity, give the latter constancy of character; (iii) Kant's theory of knowledge cannot be idealistically interpreted, since it accepts the reality of a Transcendental Subject and of transcendental acts that exist beyond experience and knowledge, and are constitutive of it. It also accepts the reality of many Transcendental Objects that affect our subjectivity and which have characters and relations not given to the latter, at best corresponding to phenomenal characters and relations; (iv) Kant's phenomenalism is more radical than other phenomenalisms in that it accepts space and time only as ordering forms for phenomena. But it advances important arguments, based mainly on ontological criteria, for restricting them to what is thus phenomenal; (v) The regular connection among the appearances of objects is the necessary empirical surrogate for the unity of the objects from which they spring. Kant therefore makes use of his metempirical presuppositions to illuminate phenomenal data.

This is a much-needed reissue of the standard English translation of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature, originally published in 1970. The Philosophy of Nature is the second part of Hegel's Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, all of which is now available in English from OUP. Hegel's aim in this work is to interpret the varied phenomena of Nature from the standpoint of a dialectical logic. Those who still think of Hegel as a merely a priori philosopher will here find abundant evidence that he was keenly interested in and very well informed about empirical science. The Philosophy of Nature is integral to his philosophical system and deserves the most serious attention. Students and scholars of Hegel and the history of European philosophy will welcome the availability of this important text, which also includes a translation of Hegel's Zusatze or lecture notes.

This is a very valuable study of the relations, as regards affinity and mutual influence, of two major philosophers who are now more and more being assessed at what we may hold to be their immense true worth. Both were philosophers who brought a form of Platonic realism, quite out of fashion at the time, into their interpretation of logical and mathematical concepts and principles, and who moved away from the psychologistic approaches which see such concepts and principles merely as a set of forms and rules which govern our actual human thinking and its linguistic expression, and whose normative or standard-fixing aspects have their roots in the mere way in which our minds work and the mere ways in which the actual world fits in with their workings. But both thinkers, at a higher level, moved on to a view in which something like a transcendental Kantian Reason served as the ultimate foundation both of the forms and guiding principles of referential thought and of the factual empirical world whose structure this thought tries to encompass and to articulate. Both philosophers further seek in the mediating concept of Sinn or sense, as closely connected with the uses of language as with the objective matters with which language deals, the link between thought and other subjective orientations, on the one hand, and the various objective matters with which thought and language are concerned. Both thinkers, however, display great obscurities at certain points in the working out of their thoughts, by which obscurities their relation to one another is also at certain points rendered obscure.

It was in my view a very important thing that took place when, at the beginning of the Third Century A.D., Ammonius Saccas began his exegeses of Plato, basing himself on the important assumption, much more true than false, of a profound homodoxy or agreement of opinion between Plato and Aristotle. This work involved an attempt to see Plato as something more than a brilliant virtuoso of inconclusive, often fallacious argument—a role only admirable in Socrates on account of his existentially revealed conviction of the impossibility of defining the virtues in a clear-cut manner, or apart from one another, or from the critical activity which redefines them unendingly—and which also sees Plato as something more than an ancestor of the Pythagorean mystagogues who dispensed a way of life to those doomed to live it under the Caesars, or of philosophical littérateurs of Ciceronian and similar types. It represented an attempt to make serious philosophical sense of Plato as a thinker desirous of determining what primarily is, and what only is in some secondary or derivative sense, and how the various grades and senses of being may be accommodated to one another and to the human soul with its profound need to understand and love. And it necessarily sought support in such texts as the Phaedo, the Phaedrus, the Symposium, the Republic, the Timaeus, and the Letters, as well as in a suitably interpreted Sophist and Parmenides, and hardly at all in such brilliant recrudescences of Socratic inconclusiveness as the latter half of the Theaetetus. And it incorporated strands from the pre-Socratics and from Aristotle because these were seen as either leading up to, or continuing, the serious Platonic effort. I am myself disposed to ascribe this new wave of Platonic deepening to Ammonius rather than Plotinus, since there is singularly little development of doctrine in the smoothly written Enneads, and since Plotinus only began to publish his doctrine when his two fellow pupils, Erennius and Origen, had started to divulge what their Master had taught them.