reason in human life.

Locke’s view of person as a ‘forensic’ concept is also

explored. The following chapter examines Berkeley’s response not only to
the materialism he finds, for instance, in Locke, but also to the distinction
between ideas and things which occurs in Malebranche. The final chapter is
devoted to Hume and focuses on his attempt in the Treatise to produce a
‘science of man’ (a project which, it might have been pointed out, formed
part of the programme of those who, like Hume, belonged to the Scottish
Enlightenment).
A book ofthis kind must obviously ignore some aspects of the philosophers
with whom it is concerned. It is a little surprising, however, to find no
discussion of Hume’s account of personal identity, especially given that
Woolhouse refers to the positions of Descartes, as well as Locke, on this
problem. It is perhaps less surprising that Woolhouse does not pause to
explore issues of interpretation, but the result is that what he says, for
example, about Locke on secondary qualities, Berkeley on arguments from
the relativity of perception, and Hume on the nature of cause and effect, is in
each case open to dispute. In addition, some of the difficulties that these
philosophers are often thought to encounter receive little attention. Does
Locke’s theory of ideas make possible ‘sensitive’ knowledge? Is Berkeley’s
idealism consistent with the possibility of genuine agency? How far does
Hume really succeed in accounting for belief in an external world and in
an enduring self? A further misgiving is that comparatively little is said
about the relation of the ideas of the empiricists to more recent philosophy,
perhaps tending to give the unfortunate impression that these ideas are
primarily of historical interest. But these reservations aside, Woolhouse’s
book may be warmly recommended as providing valuable background
reading to any course in which the empiricists, individually or collectively,
are to be studied.
UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING A E PITSON

Hegel‘s Theory of Mental Activity: A n Introduction to Theoretical Spirit

By WILLEM A. DEVRIES
Cornell University Press, 1988. xxiv + 209 pp. $30.75

What is most commendable about Professor devries’s account ofHegel is not

that it breaks new ground - though it does - nor that it fills a lacuna in Hegel
studies - which it also does - but that it is free ofjargon, refreshingly clear,
and written with an ease of style that Hegel scholars would do well to
emulate.
According to Professor deVries Hegel believes that philosophy and science
provide an adequate account of their subject - the world and man - only as
an integrated system: as a system in which physics is integrated with
chemistry, chemistry with biology, and so on. But how is this to be achieved?
Philosophy alone makes such an integration possible. To do so it is obliged
to regard the different sciences as but extensions of the same ladder: inter-
connected and yet each with its own irreducible sphere of enquiry. This, to

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say the least, is a departure from the twentieth century’s penchant for
reductionist explariation. For Hegel, however, if the whole exists because of its
parts then the parts exist because of the whole. Nothing, as Professor deVries
notes, offends modern sensitivities so much as this second because. Yet,,if, as a
matter of fact, nature has produced more complex entities from less complex
ones, are we not obliged to acknowledge that somehow the simpler is suited
to the more complex? T o do so would seem to revive the talk about hidden
purposes and pre-ordained harmonies that has been so painstakingly
expunged from the vocabulary of modern philosophy.
But the idea of an objective teleology entails, we are assured, no return to
talk about hidden forces or design in nature. Rather, Hegel’s objective
teleology is, says Professor devries, derived from Aristotle. According to
Aristotle, to know something in its true nature is to know it ‘at its best’ as an
ideal type, or as a natural kind. The idea that in knowing the world we do so
in accordance with archetypal ideas, or natural kinds, has made something
ofa comeback in modern philosophy, and it is interesting to see it introduced
into an account of Hegel’s system.
According to Hegel, whether we admit it or not, modern science makes use
ofsuch explanatory tools. When we infer that a natural process has failed we
do so by implicit reference to an archetypal understanding of what should
follow. The acorn will become the oak, and, ifit does not, the search is on for
what has impeded its development.
The idea that we cannot, without explanatory loss, reduce complex
entities to accounts about the nature and activity of simpler components,
and the idea that in knowing the world we make reference to ideal types, are
skillfully used by Professor deVries in his discussion of Hegel’s theory of
mental activity.
Hegel, it would seem, rejects both the empiricist and the rationalist
approach to the philosophy of mind. The empiricist programme cannot be
conscientiously carried out because empiricism is obliged to use ideas that
transcend empirical data in order to explain empirical data. The rational
psychologist, on the other hand, mistakenly treats the mind as a thing, and
reduces it to a set of dissociated faculties. He is then obliged to expend
considerable energy to explain how an integrated consciousness is possible.
While the empiricists reduce the mind to the simplest elements, its ever
changing content, and the rationalists to atomistic powers devoid of intrinsic
connection, Hegel seeks an adequate account of the mind by treating it as a
natural kind, as a whole that is more than the sum of its parts. The return
here is to whole/part theory and to the primacy of the one over the other.
Hegel answers with a characteristic rejection of such either/or thinking. The
whole is nothing more than the integration of its parts, just as the parts are
essential moments in the whole. Both senses of because are required.
Such a view would today lead Hegel, says Professor deVries, to reject both
type and token mind/body identity theories as inherently materialist and
reductionist. Supervenience theory, on the other hand, is closer to Hegel’s
own view, but even it retains residual tendencies towards a weak materialism
and determinism, for it cannot account for how the mind can be both

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dependent on nature and, at the same time, influence nature to its own ends.
Even supervenience theory it appears is, at heart, a bottom up view.
An adequate account of the mind and mental activity depend, Hegel
believes, on our ability to integrate three levels of understanding. T o develop
an empirical theory of the mind, to enunciate a metatheory explanatory of
empirical principles and to develop a maximally coherent view. I n all this
there must be no epistemological break between the empirical and the
categorical. An adequate philosophy of mind cannot be achieved by a
posteriori systematising of empirical phenomena, nor by a priori elabora-
tions of abstract concepts of the soul.
Rather, what is required is an integration of the empirical with the
rational, an integration that can only be achieved by uncovering the
universal, necessary and inherent structures present in empirical evidence
itself. Such is Hegel’s task.
Though the langiiage of Hegel, and his way ofdoing philosophy, appear
strange, Professor deVries cogently demonstrates that Hegel still retains a
capacity to challenge twentieth-century philosophy and that he remains the
source of a radically different view on old and well-worn problems. I might
also add that in doing so Professor deVries has produced a book worthy ofhis
subject - informative, stimulating in its insights, and, above all, crystal clear
in its exposition.
VICTORIA UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER MICHAEL GEORGE

Continental Philosophy since 1750: the Rise and Fall of the Self
By ROBERT C . SOLOMON
Oxford University Press, 1988. viii + 214 pp. E15.00 cloth, E4.95 paper

Oxford University Press is planning a ‘History of Western Philosophy’ in

eight short, cheap, accessible volumes. The series aims to give “a compre-
hensive and up-to-date survey of the history of philosophical ideas from the
earliest times”, setting them “in their immediate cultural context” and
focussing on “their value and relevance to twentieth-century thinking”.
Unlike the continuing Cambridge collection of bulky, multi-authored
Histories of Philosophy, this is not meant as a contribution to primary
scholarship; still less is it diverted by any of the worries about the very idea of
the history of philosophy which have been voiced by several historians and
philosophers in the past twenty five years. Instead, Oxford’s new project is
dedicated to the worthy and time-honoured task of trying to lure the
uninitiated into philosophical culture by arranging the celebrated authors,
terms and arguments in chronological order and shaping them into a
compact and edifying story.
One of the first two titles - R. S. Woolhouse’s The Empiricists - has a
familiar selection of authors to deal with; so too does John Cottingham’s
forthcoming volume on The Rationalists. Robert Solomon, however, has been
assigned the relatively uncharted territory of Continental Philosophy since
1750, which takes in the whole of German Idealism, hermeneutics,

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