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What Are Philosophical Systems? By Jules Vuillemin Cambridge University Press, 1986, ix+163 pp., £25.00

In Mr Casaubon's projected Key to all Mythologies 'the vast field of mythical constructions became intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of correspondences'. But this 'capacity of thought and feeling' shrinks to 'a sort of dried preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge'. Professor Vuillemin offers us a similarly ambitious key to all philosophies (via a brief comparison with mythologies). The risks that attend this enterprise might be averted by the critical reflection on philosophical system-building invited by his title. His book, however, exemplifies, rather than dissects, such a system, exposing one to its dangers, instead of diagnosing them. Vuillemin's starting point is that 'the first use of language is to communicate perception' (p. vii). To do this it must contain singular terms which identify perceptually presented things, since no other sentence constituent can 'bear the burden of referring' (p. 42). An investigation of the categories of singular term—including non-perceptual ones—reveals the categories of thing to which we can refer. The philosopher systematizes this ontology by settling on some highest category of referent and explaining others in terms of it. The classification of philosophical systems thus follows the categorization of singular terms. Evidently the classificatory scheme must be independent of the philosophical systems to which it is applied (though a host of philosophical assumptions are walled up in its construction). Vuillemin, therefore, aims to secure philosophical neutrality in his descriptions of perception and of language by adopting a phenomenological method. All that is required of the perceptual categories so described is that they do 'in fact correspond to our subjective experience and exhaust it' (p. 2). This reader could not readily recognize his own experience as enlivened by the repeated operations of association by contiguity and resemblance discerned in Vuillemin's ingenious categorization. The employment of these old empiricist (and latterly structuralist) stand-bys in the description of experience does not strike Vuillemin as philosophically problematic. Little turns on Vuillemin's description of perceptual experience. It is his description of the kinds of elementary sentence which allegedly systematizes all possible ontologies; though why ontology should be constrained by 'the presuppositions of communication' (p. 46) which determine these kinds remains obscure. Vuillemin subtly discriminates five kinds of elementary sentence (the sub-division of the second kind later yielding six (p. 116)). Their singular terms are differentiated by the ways in which they exploit the particular functions of five sentence elements: the predicate term, the subject term,