PHILOSOPHY RECONSIDERED.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 239, 8 October 1932, Page 2 (Supplement)

PHILOSOPHY RECONSIDERED.

BOOKS ON DESCARTES AND HUME.

Mr. A. B.oyce Gibson, son of the distinguished Melbourne professor and lecturer in- philosophy at Birmingham, is responsible for a new study of Descartes ("The Philosophy of Descartes," published by Methuen), in which a full and very readable account is given of the doctrines of the "Father of Modern Philosophy." Mr. Gibson makes full use of the resources of modern French scholarship on his subject. He has tried to provide, by way of a change, something more in the nature of a study of Descartes as an individual thinker, in place of the customary treatment of the great Frenchman as "the transmitter of various historical tendencies of thought from one school to another. The results are profitable to the student. With the .borderline be-' tween science and philosophy so disturbed as we find it to-day, there is more interest in the specific problems and solutions of Descartes as a combination of philosopher, mathematician and physicist than in his role as the founder of the so-called Cartesian, school in philosophy. The new study of Hume ("Humes Philosophy of Human Value," also published by Methuen), by Professor John Laird, of Aberdeen, is likewise an effort to give an integral interpretation of a figure who has • been one person in philosophy, another in the of historical and! economic authorship, and still another in the domain of religious controversy and theological doubt. Professor Laird's method of exposition, however, seems to embody an interesting experiment in publicism. We have been familiar with the division between works of first-hand scholarship addressed to specialists, and popular expositions which take for granted the results of critical research. Our author evidently feels that the new "man in the street" is not to be interested by the methods of the classic masterpieces in eloquent popularisation. As he works up his carefully documented version of David Hume and his inquiries into the ramifications of human nature in morals, politics, history and economics, Professor Laird seems to be making the reader do his research with him, and letting him see all the works. The result is a clear presentation and assessment of the views of Hume on all the topics of his interests from immortality to the single tax. We are shown incidentally* a man, supreme among the metaphysical sons of a metaphysical race, achieving worldeminence as a philosopher, fame as a historian, leadership as an economist, and all, as it appears, with a purely literary motive —one who saw in the questions whose scientific he so powerfully advanced simply occasions for an exercise in elegant authorship.