New York: Appleton—Century—Crofts, Inc. 523 pp. $5.50.
This is a careful survey of the ideas of the famous philosophers from the sixth century B.C. to John Dewey.
No doubt Professor Lamprecht has built up his book over many years of study in connection with his Amherst College course on the history of philosophy. The book is in some respects the best available textbook for such a course. It is equally good for anyone who would like to have on hand an account of the conclusions of those who have thought most deeply on our intellectual problems.
Lamprecht’s book is, in effect, a succession of intellectual biographies. A varying number of pages is devoted to expounding the thought of every renowned thinker, and the less renowned are given their paragraphs. Where a group of philosophers belonging to the same era held important ideas in common, they are arranged in “schools.”
A gratifying feature of this account of our philosophical tradition is its lucidity. Throughout, there is a painstaking effort to tell the reader in clear language what the great philosophers have taught, based upon his firsthand acquaintance with their writings and supported by well-chosen quotations.
Criticisms of a work of this sort may take the form of noting omissions, of detecting errors, or of questioning the distribution of attention. In dealing with the Roman Stoics, for instance, there is no mention of their doctrine that the enactments of legislative assemblies must express the universal natural law-a doctrine which became in America the theoretical basis for a new birth of freedom.
Then in dealing with Hobbes (1588-1678), this thinker is said to have taught that men by being members of civil society implicitly relinquish all their natural rights, whereas my own recollection is that Hobbes, arch-materialist and totalitarian that he was, believed that no subject could ever surrender his natural right to self-preservation.
Finally, Karl Marx (1818-1883), whose influence has been enormous, is given merely two and a quarter pages at the end of the section on Hegel under the heading, “Marx’s Rejoinder to Hegel.” Perhaps some day some philosopher may merit a page in an objective history of philosophy for making a rejoinder to Marx!
Rowland Gray-Smith
