Religion, Rationality and Community. Sacred and Secular in the Thought of Hegel and His Critics (review)

16o JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 26:1 JANUARY 1988 that Spinoza's terminology is dated, but thinks that one can expect that in a work written several centuries ago. On the whole, however, Curley restricts himself to giving only textual explanations; he does not give a critical evaluation of Spinoza's thought. This he has already done elsewhere. I have made quite a few tests in order to check Curley's translation and I have found him very accurate and reliable. He also accounts for all of the readings that might be questioned; in these accounts he discusses alternative readings found in works by English, French, German, and Dutch scholars. The principle, however, determining where he has given a commentary and where he has not has remained obscure to me. In most cases Curley offers only remarks which support his translation or his reading of the text, but sometimes he also gives remarks to elucidate the text for a modern reader (e.g., where Spinoza has a discussion with Boyle on chemical experiments ). He does not, however, do this consistently. Further, I have noted some inaccuracies in Curley's commentary. For example, in discussing the well-known problem of the relationship of the dialogues to the rest of the text in the Short Treatise, Curley writes (49ff): "The dialogues have sometimes been thought to be earlier than the main text, and theories of Spinoza's development have been constructed on that assumption" and in a note he continues: "The references to other parts of the Treatise and the dialogues' connection with one another seem good evidence for this." Here evidently a mistake has crept in, for, if the dialogues have references to other parts of the Treatise, they must have been written later. On the whole I agree with Curley's cautious commentary. In one place, however, I thought I had a better solution for interpreting Spinoza's text. In the difficult passage in the book on Descartes, II, prop. ~7, schol., I think I have found the solution in making a distinction between the points B and C and the bodies present in B and C, whereas Curley simply says: "The text.., frequently has 'B' where we might have expected 'C'" (286, note). Of course, many other minor remarks could be made. But all of this does not detract from the great merit Curley has earned in presenting to us the results of his fine scholarship. H. G. HUBBELING Groningen University, The Netherlands Robert Gascoigne. Religion, Rationality and Community. Sacred and Secular in the Thought of Hegel and His Critics. International Archives of the History of Ideas, Vol. lo5. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985. Pp. xiv + 3o8. DFL 160. This work, critically sympathetic towards Hegel, is divided into three major sections dominated by the principle that Hegel's work was intended to "evolve a genuinely Christian humanism" from the historical encounter of the Enlightenment and Christianity . Due to either the misunderstandings or ambitions of Hegel's first disciples or to the persistent opposition of his rivals, philosophical and otherwise, his grand synthetic BOOK REVIEWS 161 effort collapsed. And so it was that by the revolutionary year of 1848 (the date that also fixes the historical boundary of this study) the two antithetical schools that would have found their dialectical Aufhetmng in Hegelian philosophy were precipitated into an even more oppositional relationship: the atheistic humanism of Young Hegelianism was left to confront the "religious otherworldliness" of such as the later Scheiling and Kierkegaard. The author's schema might well be envisioned as an example of a dialectical movement in reverse, in which the historically given moments of the Enlightenment and Christianity were found to emerge in an enhanced antithetical opposition after an attempted Hegelian synthesis. In any case, the schema lends itself to an evident tripartite division of the subject: Hegel's attempted synthesis, the failure of Young Hegelianism to comprehend it, and the refusal of others to accept it. This is the order followed in Gascoigne's work. Following a brief introduction, the first chapter of the book concerns itself with examining Hegel's "ambivalent" attempt to unify, under speculative philosophy, the religious and secular world in...