Reviews Of Books -- By: Anonymous

Journal: Westminster Theological Journal
Volume: WTJ 08:2 (May 1946)
Article: Reviews Of Books
Author: Anonymous


Reviews Of Books

Erich Frank: Philosophical Understanding and Religious Truth. New York: Oxford University Press. 1945. x, 209. $2.50.

The substance of this book was first given by its author, the distinguished German historian of philosophy, as the Mary E. Flexner lectures for 1943 at Bryn Mawr. In the book additions have been made, chiefly in the form of notes. It is always hard to know just what to do with long notes. In the case of this book a fairly happy compromise was arrived at: not at the bottom of the page nor all together at the end of the book, but at the end of the several chapters. The indexing of the book deserves favorable mention, the more important notes being included under that name in the general index. For a translation into fluent English idiom Mrs. Edelstein deserves great credit.

Professor Frank’s learning is at once encyclopedic and profound. His book could well be used as a plea for the kind of education formerly associated with the German gymnasia and universities and now being re-heralded in some places in our country. Perhaps that is why several fearful outcries against this book have come in the form of reviews from the pens of certain well-known positivist and pragmatist philosophers of religion. For the undogmatic pretensions of certain radical democrats in education — I refer to the recent volume An Authoritarian Attempt to Capture Education, to which John Dewey contributed the keynoting essay — reveal themselves to be fully as authoritarian but incomparably more shallow and, pragmatically (!), utterly incapable of genuinely educating the mind as this product of the old humanistic training. It does not escape the reader that the author is a paradigm of historical learning, and takes seriously his own doctrine of the “historicity” of man.

The architectonic plan of the book is always clear. Each chapter leads to the formulation of a problem which becomes the material for the succeeding chapter. Beginning with man as he finds him, centered in himself, Frank discusses The Nature of Man, The Existence of God, Creation and Time, Truth and Imagination, History and Destiny, Letter and Spirit. In six chapters we have discussed for us the philosophical importance of the modern emphasis on the natural and anthropological sciences, the nature and failure of the historic theistic arguments, scientific and religious ideas,

a theory of art, and a philosophy of history. The notes provide full accounts of the history of the more important concepts discussed. The author proves to be as much at home in Aquinas, Kierkegaard and Marx as he has long been known to be in Plato, the Pythagoreans and Augustine. It seems, however, that there is a ...

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