Journal of the History of Philosophy

100 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Pascal, and Wolff receive careful attention. And throughout the book brilliant expository passages are to be found. Nevertheless, the book is a disappointment on several counts. First, because it is traditional in the bad sense: it recounts segments of the history of this period with little regard to new and revised interpretations. Paradoxically, many of these interpretations are direct or indirect results of Gilson's own earlier work in seventeenth-century philosophy. I must confess that I had hoped that Gilson would follow up on a suggestion he once made that Suarez was likely to prove an important key to understanding the seventeenth century. There is no longer any question but that he was widely read and highly influential in the seventeenth and even eighteenth centuries. But Suarez is omitted from the index of this text and relegated to a mere footnote citation. By such sins of omission, Gilson fails to do what he has often done--to jar us into re-thinking philosophy and its history. A failure to provide us with a challenge to tradition is one thing, and a reliance on a challenged tradition is another. I realize that tying Locke/Berkeley/Hume together may be useful in course catalogues, but the ties may very well be more deeply rooted in the dialectical patterns formulated by nineteenthcentury German historians than in the texts of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. A text in the history of philosophy can hardly ignore the role that the "British Empiricist" picture has played, but neither can it any longer uncritically take that as the correct picture. There are also sins of commission. One seeks in vain for a sharp edge to the philosophical criticism. There are some sharp remarks but they hardly play dialectical roles, and at best merely reflect an attitude. Commenting on Descartes' citation of Scripture in the Dedicatory Letter (to the Sorbonne theologians) prefaced to the Meditations, the authors gratuitously remark: "It seems, then, that Thomas Aquinas did not pay enough attention to this in illis of the Apostle. Just as Galileo in his Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina, Descartes is explaining Scripture to the theologians." It is this pro-Christian-philosophy attitude, I suspect, that accounts for the inclusion of Sigismond Gerdil, the repetition of nineteenth-century cliches about Pierre Bayle, and the startling omission of a discussion of Antoine Arnauld. And it even dulls the authors' sensitivities to Thomas Reid, whose roots in the Aristotelian tradition are barely discerned. A "Christian-philosophy" is one in which the philosophy is inseparable from Christian revelation, but several apparent candidates turn out not really to be so. Very little is said about the selection criteria employed. No attempt is made here to clarify philosophie .ally the notion of a Christian philosophy nor to locate it intellectually in relation to religion, natural and revealed theology, and philosophy. In brief, the difficulty is that this pro-Christian-philosophy flavor shows itself as an ideological rather than as a philosophical commitment. This is a difficulty which does not arise in, e.g., the histories by Collins or Copleston. Those studies have points of view which Gilson and Langan might take to be pro-Christian-philosophy. But the points of view do not function as extraphilosophical bases for the purposes of ranking philosophers, they function phitosophi. cally in the philosophical dialectic. I cannot help but think that this text would have been a good deal more provocative if its point of view had been the same. HARRY M. BRACKEN Arizona State University Henry More, the Rational Theology of a Cambridge Platonist. By Aharon Lichtenstein. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. Pp. xii + 250.) In his bibliographical essay Mr. Lichtenstein notes that there is no really good comprehensive study of seventeenth-century English thought, though there are several competent BOOK REVIEWS 101 studies of various aspects of the period. Among the latter group the present volume can be numbered for it is a weU-documented and incisive account of one phase of the religious and intellectual life of that century. Admitting at the outset that Henry More lacked scope of interest and expressive power, the author nonetheless undertakes to show that More...