Each of the books here under review testifies in its own way to the predicament in which philosophy finds itself. But ‘predicament’ has to be taken in a much wider sense than in the title of Professor Barnes’s book. For the predicament of philosophy is this: that the eminent who claim to speak its tongue (and there can be little doubt of the genuine eminence of such thinkers as Russell or Whitehead or Heidegger or Husserl or Maritain or Gilson, to name but several) speak languages not translated, and perhaps not translatable, to each other, about subjects not related, and perhaps not relatable, to each other; and by the very fact of engaging in the conversation of one the would-be philosopher appears to forfeit not merely the right but the very possibility of conversing intelligibly or interestingly with the others; nor (such is the predicament) is he permitted to make any preliminary enquiry before committing himself to one or other company, since to do so is, by the very fact of doing it, to commit himself, in the eyes of one or other group, to an investigation or to some facon de parler vicious and vitiating from the outset. So the contemporary positivist has no use for and is not interested in, and, for the most part, is quite ignorant of, the thought of the existentialist, and the existentialist of the positivist, and each of the thomist, and the thomist of them both. To read the books here reviewed together is to feel the disconcerting difficulties of this predicament.