These limitations, though serious, are however the limitations, in a greater or less degree, of all the text-books; and they are balanced in Moral Values by manifold excellences. Some of the best treatments deal with the following subjects: The place of pleasure in the judgment of value, the actual process by which our concrete judgments of (objective) value are formed and the content of these judgments, the value of character as both instrumental and intrinsic and the relation between the two, the place of altruism in the moral life, and finally (nothwithstanding its limitations) the universality and authority of the moral ideal.
Frank Chapman Sharp.
University of Wisconsin
Hitherto the author of Platonism has been known chiefly as the editor of the Nation and as a man of letters. In these lectures, delivered at Princeton University towards the close of 1917 under the provisions of the Louis Clark Vanuxem Foundation, he has given us the fruits of the scholar's patient labor in a more technical and less popular field. The matters discussed in the volume include nearly all of the traditional and more difficult problems of Platonism, with the exception of the chronology of the dialogues. The author's views of the logical (and to a certain extent the chronological) sequence of Plato's writings are summarized at the conclusion of the book, with here and there an interesting argument concerning the articulation of the writings in time or thought. The volume is occupied mainly with the relation of Socrates to Plato, the Platonic psychology, the doctrine of ideas, the cosmogony and metaphysics. Only incidental attention is paid to Plato's theory of the state or the mechanism of government or to his views of education as a system.
More approaches his subject from a fundamentally Graeco-Roman pragmatic point of view, the view of Socrates and the great ethical schools succeeding him, and to a large extent the view of Plato himself, that philosophy is an ars vivendi, a body of maxims, principles, and intuitions essential for the successful conduct of life. He has less interest in the purely scientific, metaphysical or theoretical aspect of thought. He defines philosophy as the "sincere and humble endeavor to make clear and precise to ourselves the fundamental facts of our conscious life. ... Its method and its truth are summed up in the three Socratic theses—scepticism, spiritual affirmation, and the paradoxical identification of virtue and knowledge" (p. 232).
