Bargain Philosophy

AN armful of philosophical paperbacks prompts first the same question as other serious paper-

backs—or, at least, those of them that have

another life in hard covers: how can two pieces of board, some cloth and some glue, cost ten, fifteen or twenty-five shillings? Common sense, or friends in the book trade, then assure one that they don't—it is just that many more people buy paperbacks, which enables them to be cheaper. But then a harder question remains —why should so many more people be ready

to buy a book on some stern subject, when its covers are paper, than would dream of opening it when its covers are hard? In the cheapest, supermarket, range, the explanations are simple: the book is very cheap, and the sternness of the works often disguised, as in an American edition that I once saw of St. Augustine's Confessions, the cover of which suggested the saint to have been less concerned with repentance than with reminiscence.

In the 'serious' trade, it is harder to see what makes all the difference. There is no attempt to make these respectable items look more rakish than they are; the worst departure from complete frankness is an occasional secretive- ness about their real age. Ann Arbor Paper- backs (`reissues of works of enduring merit') par- ticularly offend in this. Their useful reprint of Sir Leslie Stephen's Hobbes (University of Michigan, 12s. 6d.) offers us only the ambiguous declaration, 'First Edition as an Ann Arbor Paperback 1961.' Earlier dates of publication should always be given; even though the buyer is not likely to think that this work is hot from the author's pen, the antiquity of the type-face being likely to strike him, if not the quotation on the back describing Stephen as an admiring ac- quaintance of Tennyson.

The same firm keeps similarly dark about an essay by Kant on Education (8s. 6d.), neither the original date nor that of the translation being revealed. This is, anyway, a splendid and fascinating little work, revealing Kant as standing with Rousseau among the first advocates of en- lightened and liberal educational ideas, and doing a good bit to destroy that reputation for coldness and inhumanity. 'Children ought to be openhearted and cheerful in their looks as the sun. . . . A religion that makes people gloomy is a false religion . . .'; Kant is almost the most misunderstood of philosophers.

In matters of date, a title may mislead : Susan Stebbings's Modern Elementary Logic (Methuen, 7s. 6d.) is not modern, and was only moderately so when first issued (as the book properly reveals inside) in 1943. Elementary, if this implies 'clearly written,' it never was, and I doubt whether this unsatisfactory book should have been empapered. This is meant to lie in the student area, presumably: here the paperback price may make all the difference between library reading (or hurried attempts at this) and possession.

Some variously standard works have recently joined the shelf. G. E. Moore's Philosophical Studies (Routledge, Kegan Paul, 10s. 6d.) con- tains one or two classic papers, such as that on Internal Relations, as well as some lengths of his life-long crocheting around the motif of visual sense-data. Professor Ayer's Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (Macmillan, 9s. 6d.) retains its original splendid date-line from Cater- ham Barracks, 1940, on its appearance in the Macmillan series eerily called 'Papermacs.' Pro- fessor Ryle's' Dilemmas (C.U.P., 7s. 6d.) con- tains eight pieces, each on a separate philo-

sophical problem: throughout, metaphors and analogy gleam, crackle and explode—sometimes, it must be said, giving covering fire while the argument moves to dubiously prepared positions. This is one for general interest as well.

Not so Werner Jaeger's famous Aristotle (O.U.P., 7s. 6d.), which is not a general ex- position of that philosopher, nor indeed a work of philosophy, but an important work of scholarship on the historical problems of Aristotle's development. Also from the O.U.P., and of wider interest, is Bradley's remarkable Ethical Studies (7s. 6d.), with a brief new intro- duction by Richard Wollheim: such introduc- tions are useful for older works going out to meet, one assumes, a wider public.

The formula of philosophical classic with new introduction and a few notes is being most ad- mirably carried out by Collins in their Fontana Library series, to judge from the first two to arrive: Book One Of Hume's Treatise (7s. 6d.), edited by D. G. C. Macnabb, and—an excellent collection—J. S. Mill's Utilitarianism, On Liberty and Essay on Bentham (7s. 6d.), to- gether with brief selections from Bentham him- self and from Austin on jurisprudence, all edited by Mary Warnock. Any reprint of Mill's ad- mirable and still undervalued political writings is to be saluted; and you get more for your money than with the Everyman edition.

Another political selection, less classical in content, is an interesting series of essays put to- gether by F. A. Olafson under the title Justice and Social Policy (Spectrum, 16s.). This starts oil with two extracts from Sidgwick's Methods of Ethics, and continues with reprints of several modern papers on the notions of justice and fairness and their relations to utilitarian ideals4 This small assemblage is less wide-ranging than the title and the blurb suggest, but it is stimu- lating and well worth having.

Of all works about philosophy, the ones most likely to surge ahead in paperback are

those of the General Guide or Historical Survey type. One of these around at the moment, coming from America, is 1. M. Bochenski's Contemporary European Philosophy, a transla-

tion, first published 1956, of the second, revised edition of a work first published in German in 1947 (University of California, 14s. 6d.) This is an attractive-looking book, with a useful biblio- graphy and a sensible preface, well designed to lure the reader into believing what it says. This, for certain areas of it at least, he would be well advised not to do. The author fixes his philo- sophers with a set of labels, themselves highly misleading, which he applies in a startlingly squint-eyed manner. Thus virtually all modern British philosophers, notably Russell, Moore and Ryle, are blandly classified along with the Marxists, as being 'philosophers of matter'; Russell, in his later period, is said to hold a 'realism . . . akin to Hume's'--whatever that may be; empiricism seems to be regarded as a species of irrationalism, and so forth. Some of the judgments are eccentric in a rather mar- vellous way: 'psychoanalysis and sociology,' it is firmly said on p. 26, `have a great popular following, but are merely the last flickers from the nineteenth-century world of thought.'

One answer often given to the original ques- tion, why people are so much more willing to buy paperbacks, is that they feel fewer inhibi- tions about throwing them away. Looking at certain passages of Father Bochenski's work, one can barely restrain a hope that this is correct.

BERNARD WILLIAMS