RATIONALISTS WEARING SQUARE HATS'

...With, references to the American scene Cohen offers an historical sketch culminating in the opinions of men who, like Woodbridge and Dewey, hope to direct philosophic discussion to problems that are in principle decidable, i. e., to make philosophy "scientific...

...Therefore, Dewey's remarks on the philosophy of nature are not to be construed, as Cohen evidently construes them, as pertaining to the scientific investigation of nature...

...His literary structure is perhaps overpowering, considering the simplicity (however imaginatively daring in its implications) of his thesis, and the resounding, enraptured rhetoric he commands on its behalf often seems to carry all before it to a realm beyond graspable meaning, and even, perhaps, reasonable interest, but one can never doubt his high moral seriousness, nor his singular power over a kind of floating methaphysical imagery...

...Even in the more specifically philosophical analyses one has the disquieting impression that, after discussing the difficulties of vertain positions, Cohen never makes it quite clear where he himself stands...

...Think, in square rooms...

...One can agree with all of these statements and still not be entirely clear as to what else Cohen is trying to assert...

...I'm quite convinced that Morris Cohen detested sombreros...

...The attribution to Dewey of such logical naivetly is explained by Cohen's vehement and unconditional rejection of the Hegelian insight that aspects of a given culture are related in differing degrees or, as Spengler put it, that a culture has a 'style...

...It turns soon enough into something anguished, dark, full of terrifying intimations, a vision in which the present opens up into an eternity stretching forward and back, and in which rational sequence of events have no validity...

...what wretch so poor that all time and place would not yield a vicar for his distress, beyond time and place the pure vicariate of salvation...

...Pellegrini & Cudahy, New York, 1949...

...The kind of intellectual hide-and-seek one occasionally finds oneself playing with Cohen is exemplified in the essay "The Conception of Philosophy in Recent Discussions...

...and two, that Gomorrah (or Hell)) is self-made by "those...

...In quoting Dewey's opinion that the belief in a single ultimate and final good was an intellectual product of feudal organization, Cohen implies that Dewey regards the disappearance of feudal organization as evidence against the validity of the belief...

...Zion, the state of joy...

...In an age which he considered perversely addicted to irrationalisms of tragic dimensions...

...Morris Cohen took conscious pride in proclaiming himself a deep-dyed rationalist...

...Williams begins his book engagingly enough with a deft, completely relaxed and civilized satirical description of this group...

...Looking at the floor...

...The predominantly "crtical" tone of the rest of the essays is only in part explained by the fact that approximately one third of them are book reviews...

...MOST ESSAYS IN THIS POSTHUMOUS collection of Morris Cohen's writings appeared between 1910 and 1940 in various professional and non-professional journals...

...Is he suggesting that there are genuine philosophical issues that are not in principle capable of a solution, or simply that there may be more than one adequate solution...

...A SIMILAR INCONCLUSIVENESS attends Cohen's analysis of "The Distinction Between the Mental and the Physical...

...It would perhaps be overhasty, in the light of his explicit denial, to interpret his conception of the physical as a closed system as implying a dualistic view of mind and body, but Cohen's own position is nowhere stated with sufficient specificity to enable one to decide whether or not such is the case...

...It is this view of the simultaneity of existence which is ~at the bottom of Mr...

...on the other hand, is for those who act in love—"the sublime honor.of substituted love...

...Just as positively, however, it is simply a literary power of a range rather dazzling in the confines of a single work...

...This conception is criticized by Cohen on the grounds that "life is wider than knowledge," that temperamental bias cannot be eliminated from philosophical reflection, and that of two philosophical systems, it need not be the case that one of them is false...

...One is left, therefore, in some doubt as to the precise sense, in which Cohen wishes to distinguish his conception of philosophy from that of those who, holding that philosophy and science are not identical, nevertheless propose to employ the general methods and canons of scientific inquiry in philosophic investigations...

...What operates in these exchanges are a sustaining faith and an exalted sense of the true, the good, and the beautiful...

...They will also find evidence of Cohen's pluralism, his anti-nominalism, his rejection of "wholesale" conclusions, his insistence upon distinction, analysis, method, his passionate defense of free inquiry, and his keen awareness of human tragedy, man-made or otherwise...

...r 1 Jenne Wacker has taught philosophy at New York University...

...Dewey's entire "Reconstruction in Philosophy," from which most of Cohen's quotes are taken, might be regarded as an attempt to illustrate how these "styles" have been manifested in the history of philosophy...

...The SETTING for Charles Williams' novel, is a place in which many had come to their ends violently...

...In a later essay Cohen is vigorous in defense of the view that they are...

...Williams...

...war, martyrdom, hate, despair, had, over the centuries, filled its ground with dead...

...4.50...

...His criticisms fall into two general groups: (1) that Dewey's use of "experience" as a.central concept in his philosophy prevents him from formulating an adequate view of the non-human aspects of nature: and (2) that Dewey's belief that philosophic reflection should be related to the actual problems which face men and societies subordinates free inquiry to the demands of a moral committment...

...If his idea pure poet-hero often sounds absurdly like one of Henry James' more attenuated and oblique characters, it suddenly, in all the great cloudy rush of this prose-poem one feels it to be a pity that all these gifts of language and dramatic imagination and moral perspicacity have not been freed to create a work of more actual moment and profundity...

...Somehow the density of 'death here had made this quiet suburb of London a battleground of another sort...

...This is the more curious in the light of his oft-repeated opinion that, in general, philosophers are happier in what the assert than what they deny...

...Gertrude Buckman has written for Partisan Review, Nation and other magazines...

...Readers familiar with Cohen's other books will recognize recurrent themes, such as the insistence that objectivity in science does not mean absence of presuppositions and the consequent criticism of the prevalent belief that Francis Bacon is the originator of modern scientific methods...

...ACTUALLY, THE READER is quite likely to close this book with the feeling of having been firmly chastized tor promiscuous relations with the philosophic underworld...

...Perhaps Cohen's apparent misunderstanding of Dewey's intent is due to his own unclear conception of the distinguishing features of philosophic investigation...

...All is shift and shade, the contractions and expansions of an accordion, a kaleidoscopic configuration involving life, death, and that vast forever...

...Looking at the ceiling...

...The longest, most passionate and, I think, most significant of the essays is concerned with the difficulties of what Cohen regards as Dewey's "anthropocentric" naturalism...

...Williams moves from the doings and the relationships of everyday during the-few weeks of rehearsal and performance of the pageant into regions of psychic meanderings and horrors accounts in part for the novel's peculiarly eerie effectiveness...

...Although I cannot imagine wanting to read another novel quite like this again, I come from it with a lively curiosity about all the different kinds of books written by this versatile intelligence...

...Will/ams' major themes...

...In a reply to Cohen published in "Problems of Men" Dewey points out that his conception of philosophy as an attempt to ascertain the implications of our knowledge about the world for our values and purposes distinguishes it sharply from scientific investigation into the actual nature of the world...

...Granted that life is wider than knowledge, does this permit us to infer that philosophical lassertions about "life" are not meant to be examples of knowledge...

...he extends it so that it becomes supernatural, mystical, and actual, all at once, In the union of the centuries which he sees, the past dead are contemporaneous with the living...

...even if, at times the whole business, despite its always exquisite sensitivity, becomes exasperating and even tedious, his interests and powers are so-far above those of the really tedious and flat popular novelists of the day, that one can only regard this posthumous book by a scholar and critic as a fantastic and disturbing oasis...

...one, that "the central _ mystery of Christendom, the terrible fundamental substitution .. showed not as a miraculous exception, but as the root of a universal rule...

...At any rate, his selfportrait brings to mind Wallace Stevens' witty lines: Rationalists, wearing square hats...

...who had lost humanity in their extreme love of themselves...

...He prefers a perspective "sub specie etermitas" and consequently finds similarities between philosophers of different ages and cultures far more Compelling and significant than the similarities which may bind together various figures of a given culture...

...The ease with which Mr...

...Many of these characteristics are packed schematically into what seems to me to be almost the only consistently constructive essay in the book, "The Faith of a Logician...

...Those dead who walk about and with whom the living contend and commune are as real here as the group of rather arty townspeople who are engaged in performing a pageant by the local poeticgenius...

...Their subject matter is consequently quite diverse, but an Ariadne's thread—of barbed wire—draws them together around the author's pet preoccupations...

...Zion is made possible by the assumption of another's fear, grief, or pain, as in the book the poet Stanhope assumes the girl Pauline's terror of her doppeloanper, or as later Pauline achieves her own beatitude by assuming the anguish and terror of her martyred ancestor...

...If they tried rhoatboids, Conesi waving lines, ellipses— As, for example, the ellipse of the , half-moon— Rationalists would wear sombreros...

...One cannot help but feel that his description was, perhaps unfortunately, accurate, but essentially ambiguous of his insistence that he was a naturalist, toe...

...f Simultaneity of Existence Reviewed by GERTRUDE BUCKMAN DESCENT INTO HELL...

...Cohen's own philosophical orientation (how illuminating is his statement that Russell's "Principles of Mathematics" opened for him the door to philosophy) would tend to make this kind of undertaking irrelevant to genuine philosophy...

...By Chares Williams...

...Marlowe's "Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it" is more than a poetic image to Mr...

...BATTLE HILL...

...But so long as Dewey does not confuse his insights into the cultural conditions and social bases of a philosophy with the evidence for its truth, one can only regard Cohen's objections to this kind of investigation as a reflection of his own narrower view of philosophical inquiry...

...They confine themselves To right-angled triangles...

...If he had been a better "rationalist" he would have been a clearer and better philosopher...

...2.75...

...THE SECOND GROUP OF CRITICISMS similarly throws much light ifpon Cohen's own phlosophic orientation as it does upon Dewey, and, in fact, points up a fundamental difference of approach...