THE WAY OF PHILOSOPHY.
By PhilipWheelwright '39h. New York: OdysseyPress, 1954. 617 pp. $4.50.
If you desired to study philosophy, but had no previous exposure to the subject, how would you begin? By reading some introductory survey, or by struggling directly with selections from the great philosophers? If you were to select either alternative to the exclusion of the other, your philosophical education would probably languish. Or, if you wished to do both together, what philosophical writing would you select as worthy of close study and how could you hope to integrate it with the textbook of your choice? Professor Wheelwright has felt this dilemma acutely, and has proposed to solve it by interweaving within the confines of one volume both a text of his own and a set of selections from the great philosophical writing of Western civilization. The result is a significantly original introductory book to philosophy.
The strategy of the text leads the reader to weigh the relative merits of three contrasting world-views (Materialism, Supernaturalism, Humanism) as each engages specific problems posed in four major areas of philosophical inquiry: the nature of philosophy, the nature of the world and man's place in it, and, finally, the nature of values. By using thirty-five selections from Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Mill, James, Russell, Buber, and many others to deepen and extend his own discussion, the author has done a skillful job of introducing the reader to the persistent philosophical problems and to the range of answers they have provoked.
Professor Wheelwright's own viewpoint, he tells us, is primarily "Humanistic," that is, a viewpoint which postulates that "all deeply philosophical inquiries must not only start out from the human center, but must be justified at each step by reference to the full range of human interests." But the author's main object in his book is not preachment on behalf of this belief; it is the development of critical insight into problems of "deep and comprehensive - which is to say existential concern." As he remarks, "Indoctrination, even if it would work, is not philosophy." Thus, the Humanist position, while it is frequently evident, is seldom obtrusively so.
If the perennial search for an adequate type of introductory book in philosophy ever comes to an end, it may well be due to the precedent set by Professor Wheelwright in The Way ofPhilosophy.
