A Philosophical Testament

Professor Grene is a charming companion, witty, clear and unassuming in her prose. This is quite an achievement when her subject matter concerns nothing less than the most intractable epistemological and metaphysical issues in the history of Western thought and such figures as Kant, Heidegger (with whom she studied as a very young woman), and Jaspers (with whom she also studied). Her life stories are cleverly woven into this highly abstruse discussion.Her book is an attempt to say "where we are and where we should be" in epistemology and what might be called the theory of the person. Logic chopping, analytical philosophers searching for intellectual figure eights will be disappointed, the rest of us are heartened by her chastisement of the empiricist tradition, her fresh readings of Kant and Heidegger, and her adoption of an unflinching attitude of "confrontation" with regard to the knowledge question. There is no attempt to evade the real difficulties of her subject.Read this book and you will learn a lot about epistemology -- and you will also smile a great deal.