Psychoanalysis and Ethics by Ernest Wallwork New Haven, CT:  Yale University Press, 1991,  xiii + 344 pp., $35.00.

Ludwig Wittgenstein once compared the philosopher to a traveler who had lost his way. The task of philosophy then became a matter of finding one's way, or as Wittgenstein also put it, of showing the fly the way out of the fly bottle. In the 20th century, no aspect of philosophy has more demonstrably lost its way, I would argue, than ethics, despite the fact that probably more ink has been devoted to the discourse of philosophical ethics than in any other historical period. The problem lies in the extraordinary levels of abstraction attained in the analysis of purely linguistic constructs, particularly in Anglo-American analytic philosophy but also in some continental European circles. Alternatively, some philosophers, particularly in France, overwhelmed by Nietzsche's declaration of the death of God, and by the diminished standing of modernity's own philosophical god, Descartes, have given up the enterprise of ethical inquiry altogether. In the United States, ethics has increasingly split into abstract discussions of the grounds for making certain sorts of ethical statements—a project referred to as metaethics—on one hand, and a veritable explosion of “applied ethics” panels and committees which attempt, with little demonstrable impact, to shape the ethical practices of the professions, most notably business and medicine.

The problem with ethics, as a philosophical project, is that it has lost its way. Certainly that holds the promise of philosophical development, if one takes Wittgenstein's dictum seriously, as I believe we should. But why has ethics lost its way? If one looks at earlier forms of ethical inquiry one immediately sees an important distinction over and against most contemporary efforts. In Aristotle, for example, ethics is imbedded in a much larger philosophical project. His relatively more formal ethics of the Nichomacian Ethics, is contingent on his metaphysics and his epistemology,