Volume 27, Number 15 · October 9, 1980
On the Edge
By J.M. Cameron
Nietzsche: A Critical Life
by Ronald Hayman
Oxford University Press, 424 pp., $19.95
All philosophers and their doctrines belong to the history of culture but most thinkers of importance in the history of culture are not philosophers. I am stipulating a fairly strict notion of philosopher, according to which Descartes is a philosopher but Montaigne and Pascal are not, Peirce and William James are philosophers, Emerson is not, John Stuart Mill is a philosopher, Carlyle is not. We can certainly understand 'philosopher' in a broader sense than this; but there is a plain difference, worth paying attention to, between the work of a thinker whose credit rests upon the force of his argument rather than upon the truth of his conclusions, and one whose structures of language, even where they are argumentative, are evaluated by the use of other than logical criteria. It seems odd to ask, though perhaps it didn't seem odd to contemporaries, if Carlyle is 'right' in what he has to say in Sartor Resartus, whereas we are quite certain this is the proper question to ask about most of what Mill writes.
Review, 3260 words
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