98 



SCIENCE. 



[N. S. Vol. XXI. Xo. 525. 



FOURTH ANNUAL MEETING OF THE 

 AilERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL 

 ASSOCIATION. 



~ The foixrth meeting of the American 

 Philosophical Association was held in Phil- 

 adelphia, December 28-30, 1904, attended 

 ' by about sixty members. In addition to 

 the president's address, which was deliv- 

 ered on the evening of the twenty-ninth by 

 Professor Ladd on the general subject, 

 ' The ]\Iission of Philosophy, ' and which 

 contained an able and eloquent plea for 

 philosophy as a comprehensive and organ- 

 ized Weltanschauung, thirty papers were 

 either actually I'ead or read by title at the 

 five sessions of the meeting. Two of the 

 sessions were of special interest, that com- 

 memorative of tlie centenary of the death 

 of Kant held on the afternoon of the first 

 day of the meeting, and the joint session 

 with the American Psychological Associa- 

 tion held the following morning. At the 

 Kant session, in which the newly formed 

 Southern Society for Philosophy and Psy- 

 cliology was represented by its secretary. 

 Professor E. P. Buehner, of the University 

 of Alabama, who read a paper, based on a 

 careful comparison of passages, on 'Kant's 

 Attitude towards Idealism and Realism,' 

 one naturally looked to see what estimate 

 American philosophers now put on the 

 work of the most infiuential philosophical 

 thinker of the past century. Five papers 

 were read dealing with as many aspects of 

 Kant's philosophy. The general impres- 

 sion which they made on the mind of at 

 least one hearer was that, in the opinion 

 of the jnost careful sludents, Kant is 

 neither to be ignored, nor belittled, nor 

 'outflanked,' nor, on the other hand, to be 

 unduly exalted, })ut to be critically studied, 

 and that he still counts, if not as the para- 

 mount, at least as one of the most potent 

 influences in the pliilosophieal thinking of 

 our lime. Perhaps the widest divergence 

 from Kant's teaching appeared in Pro- 



fessor Joyce's paper on 'Kant's Doctrine 

 of the Basis of Mathematics.' Royce 

 held that the certainty of mathematical 

 science is rightly no longer regarded as 

 depending on constitutionally predeter- 

 mined forms of perception. And yet in 

 another respect he held Kant to have been 

 unquestionably right, so far, namely, as he 

 declaimed that constructive synthesis and 

 observation of its ideal results are both 

 necessary for mathematics, an insight 

 which has profoundly influenced the prog- 

 ress of mathematical scrence. The nearest 

 "approach to a eulogy of Kant was in Pro- 

 fessor Caldwell's paper on the 'Present 

 Significance of Kant's Ethics.' Professor 

 Caldwell contended that Kant's teaching 

 had been misunderstood, and in particular 

 that it was not open to the charge of mere 

 fornuilism commonly broiight against it : 

 that the significance of Kant's ethics lay in 

 his spiritual philosophy of human nature, 

 a philosophy implied in all recent attempts 

 to treat moral judgment as one of valua- 

 tion, in recent epistemological assumptions 

 aboiit personality and in the theory of sov- 

 ereignty or autonomy in the ethics of social 

 democracy ; that his emphasis on the stand- 

 ard as the law of pereonal dealing in a 

 social realm frees us from many of the 

 difficulties in the teleological moral philos- 

 ophy of the present; and that his version 

 of the standard is the one most consonant 

 with a true theory of moral progress. Pro- 

 fessor Tufts read a paper on the 'Signifi- 

 cant and the Non-Essential in Kant's .Es- 

 thetics,' a part of his philosophy which 

 was held to contain, perhaps, as large ele- 

 ments of permanent value as anything he 

 ever wrote, and Professor G. W. Knox gave 

 an interesting address on the 'Influence of 

 Kant on Theology,' calling attention espe- 

 cially to the affinities between Kant's nega- 

 tive criticism of the ontological argument 

 and the primacy he assigned to the prac- 

 tical reason and the theology of the school 



