The old guard still dominates the German scene. Jaspers leads with three publications, the monumental new volume of P. A. Schilpp's Library of Living Philosophers which appears first in German as Karl Jaspers (W. Kohl-hammer, Stuttgart); the third edition of his Philosophie in three volumes with an important “Postscript 1956” (Springer, Berlin); and the second edition of his Existenzphilosophie also with a new postscript explaining the situation in which these lectures arose (De Gruyter, Berlin). These volumes offer an opportunity for re-examining his philosophy, and are indeed used by himself for this purpose and therefore indispensable to any serious student of his thought. The Schilpp volume naturally offers the greatest amount of new material with its twenty-four contributors who have more or less succeeded in discussing a philosophy of pure reflexion without specific doctrines. They allow Jaspers to clarify his thought, especially concerning the problems of existential communication (in reply to Fritz Kaufmann's elaborate and penetrating defence of a more general theory), of psychology, history and politics.

Professor A. D. Ritchie's remarks (Philosophy, January 1957, p. 65) cannot go without some reply, since otherwise they would only have the effect of increasing the already considerable confusion on the subject of Cybernetics.

The eighth Congrès des Sociétés de Philosophic de Langue Française at Toulouse, which, I should perhaps explain, was the first gathering of its sort to which I have been, was just about as unlike a Joint Session as an English philosopher might well have imagined it to be. Many of the differences arose naturally from the simple facts that French philosophy is very unlike British and that philosophers in France are greeted with banquets, civic receptions, concerts and other hospitable entertainments when they meet together in congress. But there are other differences too. For one thing, the contributions are not only as a rule very different in content; they are also different in form. A general theme (a very general theme) is set with a certain number of sub–headings. Then anybody who wishes may submit a “communication,” having if possible at least some appearance of relevance to the titular theme–though if this is not possible, it doesn't seem to matter very much as it may be included all the same. Obviously enough, if some share of the available space and time is to be given to every philosopher who wants it, (and in France, where philosophy is a school subject, there are a very great number of philosophers), nobody is going to get very much. The result of all this is to be seen for this year in the Acts of the Congress L'Homme et son prochain (Presses Universitaires), where hardly any of the no less than 76 contributors has more than four pages to himself. (At the Congress itself, the author of each such communication was allocated 3/4 hour for exposition and discussion. The five addresses which were given at full length before the whole assembly meeting together, and which included one superb performance in the manner of a philosophic chansonnier, are not included in this volume, but are to be published separately.) In the circumstances it would have been wholly surprising if such Acts had turned out to be anything other than a mainly tedious assortment of mostly undistinguished fragments, which is not, I fear, likely to prove of much interest to any reader of this Survey; which is a pity, as it is not only the receptions and the outings that make this Congress worth attending.

The claims that Dr. F. H. George (Philosophy, April 1957, p. 168) makes on behalf of his machines are obscurely stated. Does he claim (1) that a machine has been made and has actually produced a kind of response which is incalculable, given the specification to which it has been built and also the prescribed conditions, what is put in for the particular performance in question? “Incalculable” does not mean that nobody has bothered to calculate, but that somebody has bothered, that the calculations show that the response in question is not among the calculated ones, that it is not chance or mechanical breakdown, but a specific response to something specific among the given conditions. If he could substantiate this claim, then I would reluctantly agree that some machines are cleverer and more thoughtful than I thought possible, and some men sillier and less thoughtful, for they deliberately design machines to do they know not what.