The present collection of studies by the well-known logician and philosopher J. M. Bochenski include as its principle contribution an analysis of authority, dealing with both cognitive authority in the epistemic sphere and deontic authority in the sphere of action. Where cognitive authority is closely bound up with concepts such science and rationality, the concept of deontic authority can be used to analyse and make precise notions such as freedom, tolerance and anarchism and the concept is shown to be indispensable to the analysis of the concept of a free society. The analytic method which runs through all the studies here collected proves its worth particularly in the author's highly original studies of social and economic institutions such as the university and the industrial concern. Bochenski's philosophy of the industrial enterprise in particular establishes results and lines of inquiry which will be of importance to future research. Two of the contributions concern themselves with the relation of philosophy to Weltanschauung and religion providing analyses which are seen by the author as a prolegomena to a still to be written major work in the philosophy of religion. The volume includes also a study of the much-discussed problem of animal experiments, the author proposing a general framework of discussions resting on a new and fruitful application of decision theory. The studies published in this volume are written not by a social scientist but by a logician and a methodologist. Thus they are characterized both by conceptual clarity and by methodological precision. But they are rare in the field of social philosophy. The work may indeed be regarded as a collection of scientifically well-established guides to action, for they represent a rare attempt to come to grips with practical problems using analytic methods, and to show how one might successfully deal with such problems from a scientific point of view.
Of interest to:
Philosophers, theologists, social scientists
