You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Dr. Adler is Associate Professor of the Philosophy of Law at the University of Chicago and he here essays to tell us the consequences of Platonism and Positivism in Psychology.
It is not without a certain amount of curiosity that one finds an introduction by Dr. Franz Alexander—who among other things states that his approach and conclusions to a problem are the direct opposite of those of the author; and yet he writes an introduction under the facile rationalization that one is apt to get one's nose too near the grind stone and maybe lose perspective. Yet Alexander does emphasize the radical antithesis between psychoanalytic empiricism and the thomistic positivism of the author, steeped in Aristotle and in Thomas Aquinas; all stated in a forest of woods.
To Adler “philosophy is a body of logical conclusions drawn from common sense observations.” One can understand a bit of one's amusement at the innumerable philosophies all apparently mused on ‘common sense,’ whatever that may mean. Our experience has been that every man who relies on what he calls ‘common sense’ is one who relies on his own sense, much as the Quaker thinks all the world is queer save me and ‘out of courtesy’ includes the wife who is ‘sometimes touched.’
To us the work is a lot of word splitting—aptly termed blab-blab by Stuart Chase in his striking study.