Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Quest for Intelligibility (review) (1983)

254 HISTORY OV eHILOSOPHY Daniel J. Wilson. Arthur O. Lovejoy and the Questfor Intelligibility. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 198o. Pp. xvii + 248. $18.oo. In the Preface, Daniel Wilson writes, "The questions a biographer needs to ask about a soldier, or a politician, or even a novelist are quite different from those that must be asked about a philosopher" (p. xii). Although he does not specify what questions he has in mind, it is certainly true that the biography of a philosopher or any other scholar and thinker--whose life is taken up with ideas, research, and the construction of theories--poses peculiar problems. Despite the prevalent fashion in Anglo-American philosophical writing, a philosophy is not simply a set of propositions whose logical relations either do or do not stand up to careful analysis. The arguments that philosophers construct and the conclusions they defend are stated in terms and respond to problems that are at least partly determined by political and cultural as well as by personal circumstances. To understand a philosopher, theretore, requires both a broad understanding of the intellectual context in which the subject worked and a narrow understanding of the meanings of crucial terms the subject used. As much as I enjoyed reading the biographical information that Wilson has collected here, I think the book is seriously flawed both in its presentation of the historical context and in the conceptual precision of its analysis. Wilson describes his book as a "biography... an attempt to trace the personal and intellectual roots of Lovejoy's devotion to rational scholarship and to outline the development of his religious beliefs, his philosophical positions, his historical studies, and his social and political activism," (p. xii). The book's overall structure is biographical in the strict sense. Chapter I deals with his family and unsettling early life, his undergraduate education at the University of California, Berkeley, and graduate education at Harvard, his decision (on James's advice!) not to seek a Ph.D., and how he got his first job, as the entire philosophy department at Stanford. I was especially charmed to learn that James dissuaded Lovejoy from the Ph.D. on the grounds that such work killed creativity and only served to create and perpetuate an intellectual 61ite. Chapters two through fi)ur discuss his philosophical development from 1895 to 19 lo, as well as his resignation from Stanford in a dispute over academic freedom, his next job as (once again) the entire philosophy department, this time at Washington University in St. Louis, and his eventual move to Johns Hopkins. Chapter five, covering 191o through 19~o, presents the unedifying spectacle of Lovejoy's continuing defense of academic freedom and his involvement in the founding of the A. A. U. P. contrasted with his rabid support of U.S. entry into World War I, his opposition to conscientious objection, and defense of the government's right to limit academic freedom during wartime (e.g., to fire teachers who had only been indicted for civil disobedience). Chapters six and seven deal with the twenties and the heyday of Lovejoy's history of ideas work and its connection to his more strictly philosophical theories. Chapter eight (193o- t 962) treats his retirement, the founding of the Journal of theHistory of Ideas, his government work during the Second World War, and the intellectual isolation of his last years. It is unfortunate that this story-line is broken up by long analyses of particular texts that are often little more than careful resumes of Lovejoy's arguments. But the book has, as I have suggested, two problems that are more serious. The BOOK REV1EWS 255 first is the inadequacy of its historical setting. Wilson often mentions Lovcjoy's teachers, especially Howison, James, and Royce. But only Howison's philosophical position is ever explained at all carefully; and Howison is the only teacher to whose position Wilson relates Lovejoy's views as they developed through his life. William James, also Lovejoy's teacher and surely a more widely influential philosopher than Howison, John Dewey, a friend and opponent for many years, and the entire American pragmatic movement are only mentioned, alluded to from...