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Book Reviews : Self-reflection in the Arts and Sciences. By Alan Blum and Peter McHugh. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1984. Pp. 159. $15.00

This book works roughly in three sections. The first establishes a number of traditional precedents for its main thesis, mostly in the forms of Husserl and Marx. The synthesis is achieved inter alia by a cross-reading which takes Marx’s concept of material conditions to refer not to economy but to the Husserlian life-world. The second opens a critique of social scientific approaches to ’self reflection’ (Simmel, Weber, Garfinkel and Habermas) which in various ways fall short of the templates established in the first. And the third works through the positive theses which ’really’ and ’all along’ underpinned the text’s search for a concept of authentic speech and action in self-reflection. To this extent, the text may best be started with its two final chapters.