Books, Arts & Manners

Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century, by Sidney Hook (Harper & Row, 628 pp„ $29.95)

According to the customary definition of the role of the philosopher, the life of thought is supposed to be a distanced and serene overview of what is to be known concerning the nature of things—and of the act of knowing, the way the systematic mind proceeds. But with Sidney Hook this familiar vocational archetype is completely inapplicable. Not that Professor Hook has neglected the disinterested priorities of his discipline. Since he first, in 1927, joined the Department of Philosophy at New York University, he has properly attended to his primary vocation—has taught and written of developments in modern philosophy from the special vantage of his own version of pragmatism. Even in his new book, at the age of 84, Hook continues to maintain that “looking back from the perspective of the veteran of the many wars and feuds of the academy, one cannot fail to be impressed with how unimportant they all seem in the light of genuine scholarly achievement.” Yet though he speaks of it as “a diversion from my primary interest,” it is the rest of his intellectual life that makes this philosopher exceptional.

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M. E. Bradford

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Out of Step: An Unquiet Life in the Twentieth Century, by Sidney Hook (Harper & Row, 628 pp„ $29.95)

According to the customary definition of the role of the philosopher, the life of thought is supposed to be a distanced and serene overview of what is to be known concerning the nature of things—and of the act of knowing, the way the systematic mind proceeds. But with Sidney Hook this familiar vocational archetype is completely inapplicable. Not that Professor Hook has neglected the disinterested priorities of his discipline. Since he first, in 1927, joined the Department of Philosophy at New York University, he has properly attended to his primary vocation—has taught and written of developments in modern philosophy from the special vantage of his own version of pragmatism. Even in his new book, at the age of 84, Hook continues to maintain that “looking back from the perspective of the veteran of the many wars and feuds of the academy, one cannot fail to be impressed with how unimportant they all seem in the light of genuine scholarly achievement.” Yet though he speaks of it as “a diversion from my primary interest,” it is the rest of his intellectual life that makes this philosopher exceptional.