miscellany or whether its papers have an underlying unity which makes it more than their sum; whether it is, in short, a volume in some way fit to inaugurate a new series in the history of ideas. I believe, with some reservation, that it is. While the papers have no expressed or obvious unity of purpose, certainly no unity zyx of subject- matter zyxwvut - apart from the fact that they are about Descartes, Cartesianism, and anti-Cartesianism - they do have an underlying unity of viewpoint. Their authors zyxwvut see, zyxwv as many philosophers do not, that philosophical problems 5 in some sense, perennial, are, nevertheless, not timeless. Philosophical problems are formulated and re-formulated, solutions are proposed, accepted, modified, or rejected, in particular historical contexts. In the case of Descartes and Cartesianism the general context is a century of scientific and religious revolution and the particular context is France. Hence, the bottom line is academic and ecclesiastical politics, and ultimately, during the personal reign of Louis XIV, national policy. By treating some at least of the major (if apparently disparate) problems of Cartesianism within their contemporary context, by emphasizing the political currents and counter-currents underlying particular “philo- sophical”, “scientific” and ‘I theological” controversies, the contributors to this volume not only clarify the nature of these problems and controversies, they demonstrate to pot-shot and coat-hanger historians how intellectual history ought properly to be done. INSTITIITE FOK ADVANCED STUIIY i’KINCF.‘TON n. A. s. SCHANKULA AND I’NIVF.KSITY zyxwvuts OF KENTllCKY Leibniz zyxwvutsrq und Locke Clarendon Press, 1984. xiii + 215 pp. €17.50 By NICIIOIAS JOI.I.EY Leibniz seems to have written the Nem Essujls on Huniun IJnderstunding in the hope of inciting Locke to public controversy. On the traditional view, as Nicholas Jolley puts it in this excellent book, “a champion of rationalism rides forth to do battle with a champion of empiricism” (p. 6). Jolley’s own understanding of the text is rather different: “it is metaphysics, and the nature of the mind above all, which provides the dominant motive for Leibniz’s whole critique of Locke, and constitutes its most pervasive theme” (p. 162). Epistemology is accordingly given a back seat (in Ch. IX), and we are told, as Isaac Jacquelot was told by Leibniz himself, that “the New Essuys is a book directed against materialism” (p. 7, cf. p. 102). The claim might seem a strange one, not only because much of the work deals, like the Essuv itself, with quite other topics, in a seemingly disconnected way, but because Locke is not a materialist. Yet, as Jolley argues convincingly, Leibniz is by and large unable or unwilling to treat Locke’s principled agnosticism about the nature of the mind as anything but covert materialism. Much like Stillingfleet and some other contemporary critics of the Essay, the theologian in Leibniz was too incensed by Locke’s rejection of all proofs of the natural immortality of 141