The Search for Truth

Abstract

PHILOSOPHY is a subject of study as earnest and important as any individual science. Prof. Bell apparently does not share this view, however, for in his book, which has the characteristics of a brilliant joke, he simply uses some aspects of the history of science as an occasion to poke fun at philosophy and to launch an attack on philosophers. Thus, he tells us that a considerable part of the efforts of the Greek thinkers “seems to have centred round the verb ‘to be’ “. And again, that “Aristotle and Plato were presently to prepare the ingenious noose with which the Middle Ages were later to hang themselves; and Euclid was to tie knots around the vital parts of geometry which were to paralyse its creative function for two-thousand years” (pp. 97-98). Or again, that “the theologians of the Middle Ages before the Twelfth Century had built their cathedral of learning and reason” on the first half of Aristotle's logical treatise (p. 143). For him, St. Anselm, Abelard and William of Occam were “incurably logic-mad”; and Duns Scotus deserves immortality on the only count that “his name has passed into the English language in the word dunce”.

The Search for Truth

By Prof. Eric Temple Bell. Pp. x + 279. (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., 1935.) 7s. 6d. net.