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Thanks to both Gilson and the authors of the present volume students of twelfth-century phitosophy and theology can now heed the likes of Anselm’s advice.

University of Kentucky Alan R. Perreiah

Visions and Blueprints. Avant-Garde Culture and Radical Politics in Early Twentieth- Century Europe, ed. Edward Timms and Peter Collier (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), xii + 328pp., $39.95.

The eariy years of this century saw a remarkable explosion of cultural innovation and creativity. Writers and artists in ah fields rejected traditional forms and methods. They began to develop and explore a variety of new approaches and techniques, which now go under the general title of ‘modernism’. This diverse movement has profoundly altered the way in which we perceive and think about the world. It is the subject of the present book.

The book is, in fact, a collection of papers which originated from a series of lectures given in Cambridge. The treatment is thematic rather than chronological; but a broad range of topics is covered, which gives a good sense of the great diversity and richness of the modern movement in the years from the turn of the century up to the Second World War. The main focus is on literature. For example, there are pieces on English modernism (Eliot, Pound and Joyce), on ‘The Poetry of Protest’ (dealing with Auden, Aragon and Eluard), and a rather predictable feminist discussion of Proust, Virginia Woolf and surrealism. Cinema, theatre and fine art are also covered,and there are a number of useful pieces on the aesthetic theories of modernism (on Brecht, Benjamin, Lukacs and Gramsci). More unusually, there is an informative article on the Turkish poet Hikmet, and an interesting account of Zionist writing in German in the pre-war period.

The connection of art and politics is a theme which is taken up by many of the contributors. Most of the writers and artists discussed were not only artistically avant- garde but also politically radical. Through the ‘visions and blueprints’ they created, they wanted not just to change consciousness but to transform society. Disillusion with bourgeois society was widespread, and it was not confined to the left. Indeed, it is a common thread which unites the political extremes of both right and left: fascism and communism. While many artists and writers of the period, like Brecht, Aragon, Auden and Eisenstein, were indeed of the left; others were drawn towards right wing, even fascist, views (Eliot, Pound). In this connection there is a particuiarly interesting piece by Judy Davis, exploring the ambivalent political attitudes of the Itatian ‘futurist’ Marinetti.

The fact that poiiticai radicalism was a phenomenon of both the Ieft and right isa theme that is emphasised by a number of the contributors. It is useful to be reminded of this at the present time, when right-wing radicalism is again playing a significant role in contemporary politics in Britain and the United States. Some of the contributors go so far as to suggest that left and right were equally attractive alternatives for the artists of the modern movement; but this is questionable. With some notable exceptions, like Eliot, Pound and Marinetti, the great majority of modernist writers and artists strongly opposed fascism. Many worked actively in support of the anti-Fascist movement and for the Republican cause during the Spanish Civil War. This is documented in an interesting memoir by Margot Heinemann about the Marxist literary journals Left Review and New Writing. Moreover, as Frank Whitford shows in a fascinating and informative piece, the virulent anti-modernism of the Nazis had a catastrophic impact on German art.

This is a wide ranging and vafuable collection,and anyone interested in modernism will

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find things of interest in it. As a collection, it inevitably lacks the coherence of a single author’s work. However, it succeeds better than one would expect of a work by so many different hands, and with such a large and loosely conceived theme. Many of the contributions are not only informative, but also thought-provoking. Particularly noteworthy are the two contributions by Raymond Williams, which must be among the last things he wrote. The first is a characteristically magisterial survey of general themes which serves as an introduction; and the second an intelligent and stimulating discussion of ‘lheatre as a Political Forum’, which rounds off the collection. There is an index but, regrettably, no ‘Notes on Contributors’ to tell us who the authors are. A general bibliography or guide to further reading would also have been welcome in a book which is clearly intended for student use. Nevertheless, students will find much of value in it.

Sean Sayers University of Kent ut Canterbury

Science in Reflection, ed. E. Ullman-Margalit, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 110 (The Israel Colloquium: Studies in History, Philosophy, and Sociology of Science, Vol. 3) (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1988), 237 pp., P.B. n.p.

The previous two volumes in the Israel Colloquium series have spanned so wide a range of topics that there was bound to be something for everyone; but there must have been few who would have been willing to allocate their precious reading time to more than two or three papers per volume. The collection under review (the third in the series) is more homogeneous than its predecessors. In terms of pages, roughly half of the volume is devoted to the philosophy of science (ten contributions), the other half to the history of science (six contributions).

Professor Hempel (‘Limits of a deductive construal of the function of scientific theories’; comments by Y. Ben-Menachem) points out two reasons for why thedeductive- nomological model of scientific theories does not extend to the interface between observation and theory. One reason has been noted and widely discussed in the literature: the problem of inductive or theoretical ascent. The second reason pertains to the transition from a set of statements in the language of some theory to a set ofpredictions in purely observational terms. Such transitions proceed on the background of provisos: unstated premisses which are needed to close the deductive gap between assertions about theoretical entities and assertions about observed entities. The problem with such provisos, so Hempel argues, is that they cannot be eliminated; the provisos needed must be summary, to the effect that no disturbing factors are present. Since such provisos make an ontological claim which, in practice, cannot be discharged, scientists must resort to a methodological maxim in order to judge whether the relevant provisos are satisfied. Interestingly, Hempel combines the deductive-nbmological theory with Kuhnian considerations by proposing the maxim that, ‘. . . at least in periods of what Kuhn calls normal science,. . . only factors of such kinds need be considered as are specifically countenanced by one or another of the currently accepted theories as being nomically relevant to the phenomenon under consideration’ (p. 12).

Jon Elster’s essay ‘The nature and scope of rational-choice explanations” provides a lucid primer on rational-choice explanation and an excellent introduction to his ‘satisficing’ theory of rationality. Elster argues against the view that the available evidence and desires of an agent uniquely determine a best (‘rational’) course of action. Against this view Elster adduces powerful arguments to the effect that (a) there may not be an optimal