Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.4 | The History Cooperative

Jonathan Edwards and the Limits of Enlightenment Philosophy. By Leon Chai. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. xvi, 164 pp. $39.95, isbn 0-19-512009-4.)

This book is more narrowly focused than its title might suggest to historians. It does not pit Jonathan Edwards's Calvinistic philosophical theology against the Enlightenment's science of human freedom. Leon Chai instead wants to show how the structure (and limitations) of late-seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century philosophical argument shaped aspects of Edwards's work. The author examines a fewselected passages from the works of John Locke, Nicolas de Malebranche, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz that illustrate what Chai calls "modes of Enlightenment rationality." He then shows how the epistemological problems each of the three addressed and the logical problems their arguments entailed reappear in Edwards's writings on perception, religious affections, and freedom of the will. In brief but densely packed chapters that juxtapose Edwards and his precursors, Chai offers a logician's analysis and critique of epistemological arguments. . . .

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