Search

The positions of George Santayana and Paul Tillich disclose remarkable strands of congruent concern and approach. In spite of obvious differences in temperament and philosophical heritage, both thinkers see their philosophies as the culmination of traditional perspectives in Western thought and also as modern criticisms of them. Neither thinker is interested in a radical originality of thought severed from its roots in the past. Both rather want to formulate a general philosophy of culture that is eclectic in the best sense of that abused word.Working independently of each other, both finally focus their attention on a similar concern that they see operating in the tradition and which is considered by them to have a continuing importance in the present. This is the problem of power and the appropriate human response to its manifestations. The intriguing features of agreement and disagreement in this common exploration are examined in the present essay.

Aestheticization surely there is important trend of modern culture techniques of forming of bodies including, personalities and manners of visions and reasoning of cultural-socially reality. Full endures existing between art distribution life daily earlier aestheticization but daily life. Mass media, consumption, promote new pattern (sample) advertising homo aestheticus. Homo aestheticus, it certain kind matrix, which (who) defines modern unit impermanence characterizing, imperfection, improvisation, as well as have to create. Esthetic experience includes various areas of our lives be determinant getting (reach) conversion and more and more matrix of modern culture significant.

To Avoid misunderstanding, I should note at once that my point of view is here not that of the mere logic of ideas and doctrines, but that of the concrete logic of the events of history.From the first point of view, that of the mere logic of ideas and doctrines, it is evident that there are many possible positions other than the “pure” positions which I shall examine. One might ask theoretically and in the abstract, what value these various positions have. That is not what I plan to do. In a word, my point of view is that of the philosophy of culture, and not that of metaphysics.

Speculum Mentis was sent to the publisher in August, 1923. With it, Collingwood reached the culmination of his early philosophy of culture. It is a work remarkable for fluency and vividness, as well as scope and boldness. Whatever its merits, Collingwood’s attitude toward it altered as the years went by. He remarks in An Autobiography that at the time he was disappointed at how reviewers were misinterpreting his meaning. He adds in a footnote, written in 1938, the following characteristic piece of self-portraiture: Since writing that sentence [“Speculum Mentis … is a bad book in many ways”] I have read Speculum Mentis for the first time since it was published, and find it much better than I remembered. It is a record, not so very obscure in expression, of a good deal of genuine thinking. If much of it now fails to satisfy me, that is because I have gone on thinking since I wrote it, and therefore much of it needs to be supplemented and qualified. There is not a great deal that needs to be retracted.1

In an essay published in 1921,1 Collingwood criticizes Croce for doing exactly what Collingwood himself had done in Religion and Philosophy, namely identifying history and philosophy.2 The article is ostensibly a review of Croce’s Teoria e Storia delta Storiografia,3 but it contains acute discussion of what was already one of Collingwood’s favorite subjects, the relationship between history and philosophy. As such, it is a major document in the development of Collingwood’s philosophy of culture.

THIS study of plato's philosophy is on novel and interesting lines. Prof. John Wild maintains that most modern commentators have approached Plato in the wrong way. “An almost exclusive emphasis was laid upon his epistemology, but his thoroughgoing and elaborate attempt to lay bare the hierarchical structure of human culture, including are life and thought, and his impassioned attack upon that primary cultural disease of sophistry, by which this hierarchy is inverted, to which so many dialogues are primarily devoted, were either disregarded or dismissed as the petulant defense of an archaic class society. No one dreamed that the progress-phenomenon of the nineteenth century, vast proliferation of the subordinate techniques together with sophistic decay of the higher arts, had an analogue in the great fifth century of ancient Greece, and that Plato's pointed and profound diagnosis of this as the primary cause of barbarism and tyranny might have a modern as well as an ancient factual verification” (p. 4). Plato's Theory of Man An Introduction to the Realistic Philosophy of Culture. By John Wild. Pp. x + 320. (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press ; London : Oxford University Press, 1946.) 28s. net.