THE IDEA OF PRINCIPLE IN LEIBNITZ AND THE EVOLUTION OF DEDUCTIVE THEORY

by Jose Ortega y Gasset ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 26, 1970

With his racy, brilliantly tactical, searching and sardonic mind, Ortega was the last of the aristocratic philosophers. He hammered out an expository style that was also a life style. Worldliness, a virile and combative appetite for culture and politics, a belief in ""vital reason"" -- these fed his nature and made him a Stendhalian who thinks, flushed with espagnolisme, cunning, and grace, a sort of intellectual dandy who carries a whole civilization in his head. Surely it is fitting that this vibrantly good European died in 1955: set amid the populist squalor of today he would certainly have been lost. His unfinished, posthumously published magnum opus, with its rather grotesque title (no doubt, merely a working title), is one of his more superior undertakings, an adventurous, free-flying study of Descartes and Leibnitz (""Modern philosophy no longer begins with Being but with Thought""), as well as an astonishing half-vitriolic, half-playful polemic against Aristotle. ""Faith in the senses is a traditional dogma, a public institution established by the irresponsible and anonymous opinion of the People, the collectivity,"" a dogma Ortega traces to the ""demagogic"" Aristotle. ""Against the doxa of belief in the senses, philosophy is, constitutionally and not accidentally, paradox."" Plato is Ortega's Prospero, Aristotle his Caliban misreading the master's Idealism, while Descartes and Leibnitz become Ortega's avenging angels, presenting principles which, like mathematics, are ""pure exact fantasy,"" rather than the ""brute reality"" of Aristotelianism. It is a heady, involved argument, belaboring existentialists along the way -- fragmentary, yes, but completely compelling.

Pub Date: Jan. 26, 1970

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1970

Categories: NONFICTION