This volume, Czech Philosophy in the XXth Century, is a crucial accomplishment at this juncture in the history of the Czech peoples, and indeed of all peoples of Central and Eastern Europe.

Today they emerge from a long period of forced universalism and are able, once again, to take account of their distinctiveness. Day by day, however, this is proving more difficult than had been imagined. Conflicts, even atrocities, show the fragility of approach to constructing a more human world by legal accords regarding human rights, elaborated painstakingly since World War II. Too easily these fall before the deep inner passions of peoples or the hesitancy of nations to enforce their general declarations. From this emerges evermore clearly the importance of the inner commitment of a people, without which formal or external restraints risk being reduced to obstacles to be avoided, circumvented or undermined, or simply never applied.

This has been long and deeply felt by the Czech people. As a small people surrounded by large, mobile and self-concerned nations, it was always clear that their welfare depended upon factors that transcended the multiple and changing interests of this world. In order that these many concerns be convergent there is need for a foundation that can provide unity in human affairs. In order that no one be simply at the disposition of others, the basis for the dignity of peoples must transcend them all. This is the profound human truth of Thomas Aquinas' famous five ways to the existence of God: changing thrives when grounded in permanence--otherwise it is empty confusion and conflict.

This lesson, learned in tears, is perhaps the most urgently needed insight in this period of looming tragedy in the region and throughout the world. This volume is essentially an exploration of the history of the profound ways in which this insight has shaped the many facets of the modern Czech mentality, from its history before modern times, through the characteristics of its modern beginnings, to its articulation through positivism, structuralism and phenomenology.

For the beginning of Czech intellectual history one would need to return to the founding of Charles University in Prague in 1348, among the earliest universities in Central and Eastern Europe. There, the philosophy was scholastic in character, which meant essentially the great century synthesis of the transcendent vision of Christian Platonism with the emergent, more scientifically structured, Aristotelian structures physics and metaphysics. Thomas Aquinas united these spiritual and material dimensions in the one human nature, and resolved the division between mankind and God through the theology of the incarnation in the one person of Christ, where Nicholas of Cusa saw the definitive union of heaven and earth.

For the Czech mind this basic unity in transcendence was never lost. Thus, where the French Enlightenment meant a secularization of the world and of man, Czech thought reflected the efforts of the reformation and counter-reformation to understand man in fundamental relation to the divine. This appears, of course, in the "idealism" of chapter IV and in the following two chapters on philosophy and Czech Protestantism and Catholicism, each of which suggests the deep drama of the effort to uphold the transcendence needed for human dignity.

But this is truly the recurrent theme of the whole volume. It undergirds the great contribution of Czech philosophy to phenomenology and thus to the sense of person and freedom which finally worked the liberation of Czechoslovakia and the other Central and Eastern European nations in 1989. It is reflected in the philosophy of history where M. Novak takes up Bergson; it is manifest as well in the dynamics of Czech ethical thought which moves not only from the transcendent to the concrete, but from empirical observation in factual terms to the religious context of human meaning.

Surprisingly and in reverse, this emerges in the history of positivism itself in Czech culture. Here, the drama is essentially that of the encounter of the closed anticlericalism and naive humanism of nineteenth century in Western Europe with the sobering realities of Central Europe. It is reflected in the experience of young Czech scholars, trained in the West where they encounter the new sciences which they were anxious to contribute to their people. Rather consistently, however, in time they stripped off the limitation of meaning to the empirical in order to reach for a deeper and more integrating basis. Hence, though the distance in space is not great and the contacts and interchanges were intense, Czech positivism was never that of the Vienna Manifesto.

Indeed, despite the ardent proclamation of positivist intent, one is hard put to find consistent instances of positivism as generally understood. Thus, Czech positivism would seem to come down to the effort to establish a dimension of scientific thought independent of faith and based upon sense experience--though, importantly, never limited thereto. This is reflected in many ways, but perhaps never so brilliantly as by T.G. Masaryk himself. He was bound in a love-hate relationship with positivism as a necessary, but not sufficient, foundation for political life. This he complemented by deep religious concern. It was of major philosophical importance that he sent his young friend, E. Husserl, to his old teacher Catholic Brentano, from whom Husserl drew on appreciation of intentionality and of the human spirit. This. in turn, opened his way to the development of phenomenology and eventually to Charta 77 and the events of November, '89.

The final chapter makes an eloquent plea for allowing the diversity of the human spirit to blossom, and for the tolerance which will be needed for the future. It rightly says that the sense of diversity could be a major contribution of the Czech region to the contemporary search of mankind. To this I would add the rich Czech contribution to the deep sense of the meaning of life and its transcendent principles which affirm at once both the dignity of every person and their fundamental interrelatedness as the bases for peace and harmony. Indeed, in the end, the last chapter's fear of nationalism spinning out of control forms the historical lesson from the first chapter of Traditions and Present Problems of Czech Political Culture Czech Philosophical Studies, I, on anarchy, regarding compromising principles for tactics, namely, that it does not work.

The chapters of this volume progressively unfurl the persistent and brilliant effort of philosophy in Czech culture to articulate the meaning of high principle for human life. It is an elegantly worked analysis of the significance of the principled life for philosophy as for life as a whole.

George F. McLean