We partner with a secure submission system to handle manuscript submissions.
Please note:
You will need an account for the submission system, which is separate to your Cambridge Core account. For login and submission support, please visit the
submission and support pages.
Please review this journal's author instructions, particularly the
preparing your materials
page, before submitting your manuscript.
Click Proceed to submission system to continue to our partner's website.
To save this undefined to your undefined account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your undefined account.
Find out more about saving content to .
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle.
Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
The old guard still dominates the German scene. Jaspers leads with three publications, the monumental new volume of P. A. Schilpp's Library of Living Philosophers which appears first in German as Karl Jaspers (W. Kohl-hammer, Stuttgart); the third edition of his Philosophie in three volumes with an important “Postscript 1956” (Springer, Berlin); and the second edition of his Existenzphilosophie also with a new postscript explaining the situation in which these lectures arose (De Gruyter, Berlin). These volumes offer an opportunity for re-examining his philosophy, and are indeed used by himself for this purpose and therefore indispensable to any serious student of his thought. The Schilpp volume naturally offers the greatest amount of new material with its twenty-four contributors who have more or less succeeded in discussing a philosophy of pure reflexion without specific doctrines. They allow Jaspers to clarify his thought, especially concerning the problems of existential communication (in reply to Fritz Kaufmann's elaborate and penetrating defence of a more general theory), of psychology, history and politics.
Professor Ayer's new book1 is of very great interest. All the discussion is skilful, much of it is ingenious; the arguments ramify, but never get out of control; the prose is pleasant, the presentation polished and civilized. Once before, Professor Ayer investigated the foundations of empirical knowledge; and the central topics of his new book are, to a large extent, the same as those of his earlier one. These are topics which have been much discussed since 1940. Ayer takes account of many of these discussions, and his views, in consequence, have changed. They have not changed quite so radically as one might have expected. Ayer thinks that the old-style sceptic ought still to be given a run on the old course against the old competitors. If I am not mistaken, it is important to keep this guiding thought in mind in trying to understand his book. For it is easy to glide comfortably over the smooth surface of this prose without noticing transitions and modulations which, in a less expertly composed treatise, might have given one a jolt.
Vladimir JankéLéVitch, who teaches philosophy at the Sorbonne, is one of the most highly individual philosophical writers in France today. He has been publishing books for some quarter of a century on both philosophy and music, of which the most recent, entitled La Rhapsodie: Verve et improvisation musicale, unites his two specialities. It is with his philosophical work that I want to deal here.
