Books received: Volume 15, Issue 2

Works of William Godwin: Series II, Political and Philosophical Writings. General editor: Mark Philp. Volume editors: Pamela Clemit, Martin Fitzpatrick, Mark Philp. Researcher: Austin Gee. Consulting editor: William St Clair. Seven volumes. William Pickering. London, 1993. £395. ISBN: 1–85196–026–0 set.     

On Categories and A Posteriori Necessity: A Phenomenological Echo

This article argues for two related theses. First, it defends a general thesis: any kind of necessity, including metaphysical necessity, can only be known a priori. Second, however, it also argues that the sort of a priori involved in modal metaphysical knowledge is not related to imagination or any sort of so‐called epistemic possibility. Imagination is neither a proof of possibility nor a limit to necessity. Rather, modal metaphysical knowledge is built on intuition of philosophical categories and the structures they form.     

Blind Intuitions: Modernism's Critique of Idealism

Adorno contends that something of what we think of knowing and rational agency operate in ways that obscure and deform unique, singular presentations by relegating them to survival-driven interests and needs; hence, in accordance with the presumptions of transcendental idealism, we have come to mistake what are, in effect, historically contingent, species-subjective ways of viewing the world for an objective understanding of the world. And further, this interested understanding of the world is deforming in a more radical way than just obscuring what is there for the sake of interested needs and purposes; these instrumental ways of knowing and acting, are broadly self-interested, in the interest of survival, without effective concern for the well-being and worth of others; by becoming generalized and exclusive, hegemonic, by driving out modes of encountering things and persons that support their differences and independence, their needs and interests, these instrumental practices are the deepest cause of the ills of our time. As heightened forms of rational self-interest, self-interest being the drive of reason, transcendental interests suppress the interests of others. Adorno argues that modernist artistic practices perform a critique of the set of assumptions governing idealism by demonstrating how there is a suppressed rational form of human comportment directed towards the making and comprehension of unique sensuous particulars. Art, according to Adorno's ‘Aesthetic Theory’, is a broken off and isolated fragment of human knowing; in its hibernates the rational forms of acting and knowing that have been suppressed in the coming to be of Enlightened modernity.     

Books Received: Volume 13, Issue 2

Celia Wolf‐Devine: Descartes on Seeing: Epistemology and Visual Perception. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993 (Journal of the History of Philosophy Monograph Series), pp. viii + 121. ISBN 0–8093–1838–5.

Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan with selected variants front the Latin edition of 1668. Edited, with Introduction and Notes by Edwin Curley. Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., Indianapolis/Cambridge 1994, pp. lxxx‐584. ISBN 0–87220–178–3 (cloth), £27.95, 0–87220–177–5 (pbk), £6.95.

Allison Coudert: Leibniz and the Kabbalah. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995, pp. 218. £68.00. ISBN 0–7923–3114–1.

Richard Price: The Correspondence. [Edited by D. O. Thomas and W. Bernard Peach]. Vol. III. February 1786‐February 1791. Edited by W. Bernard Peach. (Duke U, Durham N.C. and University of Wales Press Cardiff 1994). ISBN 0–8223–1327–8.

Henry Allison: Idealism and Freedom: Essays on Kant's Theoretical and Practical Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 1996. xxi + 217 pp. £30 (hbk), £10.95 (pbk). ISBN 0–521–48295‐X (hbk), 0–521–48337–9 (pbk).

Terry Pinkard: Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason. Cambridge University Press, 1994. 4451 pp. £40.00 hb. ISBN 0–521–45300–3.

Mary Anne Perkins: Coleridge's Philosophy, The Logos as Unifying Principle. (Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1994) pp. 310. £30.00. ISBN 0–19–824075–9.

Elzbieta Ettinger: Hannah Arendt ‐ Martin Heidegger (London, Yale University Press, 1995) £10.95 ISBN 0–300–06407–1

Dana R. Villa: Arendt and Heidegger ‐ The Fate of the Political (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996) ISBN 0–691–04400–7