Robert Sokolowski

The title of this book speaks of the "entanglements" in Wittgenstein's thought. The author claims that most of Wittgenstein's later philosophical criticisms are really criticisms not of philosophical discourse as such but only of his own earlier conception of philosophy as expressed in the Tractatus. In particular she claims that the classical Kantian transcendental philosophy escapes Wittgensteinian criticism; indeed Wittgenstein's own early philosophy, far from being a kind of transcendental philosophy, as Stenius and others have argued, would fall into what Kant would consider a precritical and dogmatic kind of thinking. Wittgenstein's early thought does not, she claims, question the possibility of our thoughts' being related truly to the objective world. It merely accepts a relationship between logic and being.

Albrecht Dihle is professor of classics at Heidelberg. This book is a development of the Sather Classical Lectures given at Berkeley in 1974. It is an important and informative work, rich in detail, clear in argument, and filled with erudition. Dihle begins by contrasting the Hellenistic philosophical understanding of nature with the Jewish religious understanding of the cosmos. The pagan philosophers saw nature and the world as an ordered whole and sought to conform their minds and their lives to this rational pattern. Galen and other writers after him, however, note that the Jewish scriptures consider the world and nature not as something ultimate but as issuing, in their being and structure, from the arbitrary intention of the creator. After Galen, Celsus wrote to refute the Jewish and also the Christian cosmology. The pagans considered reason as ultimate in the cosmos, while the biblical tradition, it is said, considered will or choice as the origin of the cosmos. According to the pagan understanding, man could become conformed to nature through an intellectual activity, while according to the biblical tradition he could be saved by responding to a divine promise and command, by an act of obedience. In both the pagan and the biblical traditions, cosmology, anthropology and ethics were interrelated. The initial form of the concept of the will arose in the biblical tradition.

This volume of fifteen essays plus an introduction and preface is the outcome of a conference organized by Dominik Perler at Basel in June 1999. The topic is obviously interesting and important. Intentionality has been the hallmark issue of phenomenology for over a century, and it is common knowledge that the name and concept were introduced by Franz Brentano, who said he was reviving a medieval idea that had deeper roots in antiquity. The topic has also entered into analytic philosophy through the problem of representationalism, and at least some thinkers in that tradition, such as Searle and Chisholm, have formulated this problem as one of intentionality. It becomes incumbent on scholars to inquire how the modern issues of intentionality and representationalism are both similar to and different from their formulations in antiquity and the middle ages. The conference and the book have brought together some prominent authorities who can respond to these questions.