A.J. Ayer

If only Hugh Gaitskell had not died when he did. If only he had led the Labour Party into the General Election of 1964. He had at last succeeded in imposing his ascendency over the party – an ascendency repeatedly challenged in the eight years he had led it, all the time in opposition. Would he not have become Prime Minister with a larger majority? Would not his government have dealt more successfully with the economic troubles of the Sixties? Might he not have retained power in 1970, and so saved us from the disastrous years of the Heath government? Might we not consequently have been spared our present discontents?

Professor Wiggins’s new book was originally intended to be a revision of his book Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity, which appeared in 1967 and had been allowed to go out of print. Like the earlier book, it is concerned with questions of identity, and especially with the identity of things which persist through change, and it advances the same theory of individuation. So much, however, has been added, and so earnest an attempt has been made to clarify what the earlier book had left obscure, that this ranks as an independent work. Though it is less arcane than its predecessor, the density of its argument and the author’s predilection for symbols still make it difficult reading, but the philosophical interest of its subject, and the thorough honesty of its treatment, more than make up for this deficiency. There is no denying the importance of having a proper theory of identity, and even if not all his arguments carry equal conviction, the attempt which Wiggins has made to supply this need deserves to be treated with very great respect.

Professor Van Fraassen’s book is a recent addition to the Clarendon Library of Logic and Philosophy which Mr Jonathan Cohen is editing for the Oxford University Press. Its aim, as expressed in the blurb, is ‘to develop an empiricist alternative to both logical positivism and scientific realism’. In fact, Van Fraassen has very little to say about logical positivism, which he regards as philosophically outmoded, and devotes nearly all his energy to confronting scientific realism with what he calls a constructive alternative. This consists of three interlocking theories, one of them concerning the relation of scientific theories to the world, which Van Fraassen identifies with their ‘empirical import’, the second a theory of scientific explanation, and the third an account of probability as ‘it occurs within scientific theories’. Van Fraassen claims to have avoided technicalities throughout, but he presumes that his readers have a fair command of logic and mathematics, and I doubt if his treatment of probability, in particular, would mean very much to anyone who was not already well versed in quantum physics. Van Fraassen’s own command both of the history of physics and of the contemporary literature bearing on its philosophy is not in doubt.

On the flyleaf of Messrs Beauchamp and Rosenberg’s book about Hume’s theory of causation, Professor Donald Davidson says of it: ‘This is certainly the best available discussion of Hume and causality. It is much more than that, however: it is the best book-length treatment of causality.’ Professor Davidson is perhaps a little biased by the fact that the authors’ views on the nature of causality coincide so very closely with his own. I should not myself rank their book quite so highly, among those that have appeared in recent years, as J.L. Mackie’s The Cement of The Universe, to which indeed they pay respectful tribute. One of the merits of their book, which has, however, the defect of making it rather stodgy reading, is that with the exception of my own little book on Hume, in the OUP ‘Past Masters’ series – which, since they pay attention to my other writings, I take to have appeared only after their manuscript was completed – there is practically no modern contribution either to the philosophy of Hume or to the topic of causality that they fail to acknowledge and often to discuss, sometimes in greater detail than its interest seems to warrant. I was momentarily puzzled by a series of references to a philosopher called ‘Gertrude Anscombe’ until I remembered that Professor Elizabeth Anscombe’s initials were G.E.M.