“NOT YET THE LAST”

In recent years, Roman political thought has attracted increased attention as intellectual historians and political theorists have explored the influence of the Roman republic on major thinkers from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment. Held up as a “third way” between liberalism and communitarianism, neo-Roman republicanism promises useful, persuasive accounts of civic virtue, justice, civility, and the ties that bind citizens. But republican revivalists, embedded in modern liberal, democratic, and constitutional concerns, almost never engage closely with Roman texts. This book takes up that challenge. With an original combination of close reading and political theory, the book argues that Cicero, Sallust, and Horace inspire fresh thinking about central concerns of contemporary political thought and action. These include the role of conflict in the political community, especially as it emerges from class differences; the necessity of recognition for an equal and just society; the corporeal and passionate aspects of civic experience; citizens' interdependence on one another for senses of selfhood; and the uses and dangers of self-sovereignty and the bodyfantasy. Putting classicists and political theorists in dialogue, the book also addresses a range of modern thinkers, including Kant, Hannah Arendt, Stanley Cavell, and Philip Pettit. Together, the book's readings construct a new civic ethos of advocacy, self-criticism, embodied awareness, imagination, and irony.

Stephen Mulhall's book is a contribution to the debate on Wittgenstein's discussion of the idea of a private language, a debate which now stretches over some fifty years. However, rather than assuming the standard approach of focusing on the possibility of or the idea of a private language, and the significance of this to the philosophy of mind or language, Mulhall takes a different approach. His strategy is to bring considerations of Wittgenstein's methodology to bear on interpreting his remarks on private language, and in this way to find a new angle to the topic. I think this strategy is successful, enabling Mulhall to produce interesting close readings of Wittgenstein's remarks, and to make important points about his methodology – even though the focus on methodology seems limited in certain respects (see below). In particular, Mulhall's readings of Wittgenstein's remarks seek to illustrate how the form and content – what Wittgenstein says as compared with how he says it – are not sharply distinguishable in his writings. This intertwinedness of form and content is significant because it throws doubt on the predominant tradition of Wittgenstein interpretation, which seeks to extract generally applicable arguments from his remarks, intending thus to state more clearly his regrettably idiosyncratically expressed thoughts. The traditional approach, however, exhibits insensitivity to the details of Wittgenstein's text, an insensitivity suspicious given his painstaking attention to the details. Was Wittgenstein's endless redrafting of his remarks merely a personal obsession, or did it serve philosophical purposes? Although the answer is not obvious, there is clearly an issue here to be addressed, to which Mulhall importantly draws attention. Another, not unconnected, happy deviation from the norm is Mulhall's attention to Stanley Cavell's often ignored discussions of Wittgenstein on private language, from which Mulhall draws significant methodological lessons.

Reviewed by: The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson Michael J. McGandy Naoko Saito The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson American Philosophy Series. Foreword by Stanley CavellNew York: Fordham University Press, 2005. xvi + 210 pp. This book presents the reader with a tantalizing and sometimes frustrating mixture of philosophical enterprises. Saito examines the role of imagination in personal growth and education as presented in the philosophies of Ralph Waldo Emerson (who coined the expression "gleam of light" in "Self-Reliance") and John Dewey. She also joins in conversation the 19th century Emerson, the early 20th century Dewey, and the contemporary Stanley Cavell. Finally, Saito offers insights that will aid educators as they balance the sometime contrary aims of achieving educational standards and inspiring personal development. These are all worthy projects. There is no doubt that each project has relations to the other two and that each gains force and clarification from those relations. Yet it is evident that, within the compass of 160 pages, it is not easy to do all three things and do them well. It is then principally as a standard academic monograph addressing education and imagination in the works of Emerson, Dewey, and Cavell that The Gleam of Light should be considered. Libraries and scholars of American philosophy will want this book on their shelves as a resource on these crucial topics and as a new reading of these important figures in philosophy. Saito is at her best when she engages in textual analysis and comparison in order to bridge the gulf that Cavell claims (see Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome) exists between Dewey and Emerson. Scholars of Emerson and Dewey (and perhaps of Cavell) will find The Gleam of Light an interesting study that highlights important connections among Emerson's concept of imagination, Dewey's idea of impulse, and Cavell's theme of Emersonian moral perfectionism. The book is rich in presentations of texts well-known as well as obscure. The upshot of Saito's reading is that the Emersonian concern for the project of moral perfection is found to be quite alive in Dewey's pedagogical outlook and that questions regarding the goals of Deweyan education can be addressed from the standpoint of the cultivation of the native imaginative capacities of individuals. In sum: Education is a matter of identifing, cultivating, and, when necessary, retrieving the gleam of light intrinsic to each person. Readers interested in Saito's creative and fine reading of these three philosophers will have to be wary, however. In the course of drawing their works into relationship she cannot resist the anachronistic impulse to bring all three into conversation as if they were contemporaries fully aware of each one's respective body of writing. This is interesting rhetorically, but questionable in a work that is firmly grounded in the history of philosophy. Moreover, as it is only Saito who is in the position to create this three-way [End Page 303] conversation, her anachronistic gestures occur at times when she should forthrightly join that conversation and make her own claims. Taking a step back from Saito's close reading of the major texts of these three philosophers, readers will also find a larger argument for ameliorating differences between pragmatism and idealism via an aesthetic analysis of human experience and action. This might be Saito's principal contribution. Looking to Dewey's Experience and Nature and Art as Experience, Saito finds that these works lay more emphasis on individual experience and imagination. It is when one considers experience from the first-person standpoint (appropriately infused with aesthetic categories) that the apparent scientistic quality of Dewey's philosophy is constrained and the Emersonian theme of personhood is highlighted. The claim undergirding this approach is that while idealism and pragmatism differ widely when considered from the standpoints of epistemology and metaphysics, it is in aesthetics that there are grounds for conceptual reconciliation. This is a provocative thesis that bears further consideration by Saito and others. The Gleam of Light is less satisfying when one considers the book from the standpoint of pedagogical theory. Saito aims to contribute to the discussion regarding goal-oriented...