BOOKS
643
For such a fall nobody is to blame, not capitalism, not the Horatio
Alger fix, not the Jewish father, not even the Jewish mother. Not even
Delmore Schwartz himself. His life becomes an American myth.
Nobody wi ll ever explain it fully. It stands as it was, and carries no
consolation .
JACK LUDWIG
PHILOSOPHY AT HARVARD
THE RISE OF AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY. By Bruce Kukllck.
Yale
University Press. $17.95.
Wir wissen noch nichi, wie
philosophische Texte zu
interpretieren sind.
Dieter Henrich
Historians of phi losophy now tend to treat the doctrines
they describe in abstraction from any contexts save those provided by
anterior doctrine, so that the succession of specu lations and conjec–
tures, of arguments and refutations, has the shape of a sustained
conversation among contemporaries. Practising philosophers them–
selves address their predecessors as distant, somewhat retarded, if
brilli ant, co ll eagues, the accident of whose historical location is
irrelevant to th e cOl1lent of their utterances, and Plato, Descartes, and
Professor X of Pittsburgh are all invoked in the same disarmingly
