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GEORGE BURCH
interest. His oral style is like that of an inspired prophet, the inspiration being his recollection of his conversations with his father. He does not develop his argument consciously, but struggles, sometimes incoherently, to bring up from his subconscious mind the memory of those half forgotten discussions. Asking him a question evokes a vivid example of what Plato called recollection.
Unlike his father, Kalidas Bhattacharya has an oral style which is often obscure but a written style which is a model of clarity, although not always of literary elegance. He has written three books and many articles. His first and most important book, Alternative Standpoints in Philosophy (Ph.D. thesis, 1945; published 1953), develops the logic of alternation and applies it to the conscious functions knowing, feeling, and willing. His second book, Object, Content and Relation (P. R. Scholarship thesis, 1951), applies the logic of alternation to the content of perception and to relations. His third book, The World and the Concept of Necessity (not yet completed), modifies the logic of alternation and applies it to the ideal and the actual.
The foundation of his philosophy is a theory of knowledge. The central problem of philosophy, he says, is how knowledge is possible-not merely synthetic knowledge a priori but any knowledge. Knowledge and object are so opposed in nature that their conjunction is contradictory, yet as a matter of fact they are not only conjoined but united in the close unity "knowledge of object." Knowledge, whether perception or memory or inference, is the subjective feeling of an object, while object is that which is known as not itself knowledge. We may accept their unity, in spite of their incompatibility, as a synthetic unity of contradictories, but this Hegelian approach is only one possible solution. We may assume the subjective enjoying attitude, in which consciousness is felt as identical with the feeling of it, or we may assume the objective contemplative attitude, in which object is felt as standing over against the feeling of it. At the perceptual level, consciousness, object, and their unity exhaust the experience, but at higher levels of knowledge there is a third element, content. Images and universals, for example, are contents but not objects. Contents are alternately objective and subjective as knowledge progresses
