realm. These two final chapters need further elaboration, but are magnificently seminal and repay a careful reading.

That the various science-based myths are religious may more readily be granted when their pedigree is recognised; thus the escalator myth derives from the Enlightenment veneration of posterity, while Monods view of the self isolated in alien space is surely an echo of Pascal. Midgleys own preference seems to be for a (much more defensible) Stoicism, and for the pantheist vision (p. 81f.); though she too readily dismisses teleological thinking about the inanimate universe (p. 95) (and seems at one point to ascribe such thinking to Spinoza (p. 82)). At all events the associated theory of value and obligation which she defends deserves to supersede both anthropocentrism and egoism - and might just prove equal to the real problems. UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, CARDlFF ROBIN ATTFIE1.D

Concept and Empathy By NINIAN SMART; edited by DONALD WIEBE Macmillan, 1986. xi + 246 pp. 27.50 This is a collection of 21 essays written by Ninian Smart between 1955 and the early 1980s. Nearly all of them have been previously published.

Part I, Philosophy and the Study oi Religion, presents and exemplifies the wider role for Philosophy of Religion which Smart sees within the field of Religious Studies; wider, that is, than the wearisome re-runs of a small number of problems in Christian philosophical theology, which have become traditional in British philosophy departments. On Smarts view, which I wholeheartedly accept, Religious Studies cannot confine itself to Christianity, or even to theistic religions, but must seek to describe and understand religious phenomena in general. The first and crucial stage of the study of religions is phenomenological; that is, the attempt at understanding must be as inward as possible, in a sense entering into the world view of the religious believer or participant, but also one of epoch&, or bracketing: the question of the truth of the religious claims, the validity of the practices, the existence of the Focus of the religion, is left to one side. This rules out approaches dominated by any one faith; but also supposedly scientific approaches to religions (notably in psychology and sociology) which assume their falsity - usually on the basis of some projectionist theory. Theories about religion are of course important, but should rest on, rather than be presupposed by, the primary stage of description and understanding. For Smart, the truly scientific study of religion embraces not methodological atheism but methodological agnosticism. Within this view of Religious Studies - which Smart has of course been able to give institutional form - Philosophy of Religion has three roles to play. The first, at the primary stage, is that of conceptual analysis - the exploration of religious concepts in their context, to aid the understanding of a religions structure. Thus

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the present book contains essays on transcendence, and the concept of heaven. But Smart is also concerned with higher level concepts; he attempts a kind of comparative understanding of the structure of religions, based on the idea of strands, which are usually related to a type of religious experience; and can occur in isolation, or linked together within one religious structure. The early major essay God, Bliss and Morality (a precursor of the book Reasons and Faiths, 1958) presents four such strands - the numinous, the incarnational, the mystical and the moral. Christianity combines the numinous and the incarnational; Islam is almost purely numinous; early Buddhism almost purely mystical; the Atman-Brahman doctrine of the Upanisads combines numinous and mystical, and so on. When strands are interwoven in the same structure, this makes possible new developments and religious insights; but such combinations can also involve deep-rooted tensions within religions. Smart attempts the same kind of comparative analysis, in a more complex way, in the book Doctrine and Argument in Indian Philosophy (1964).

Also in Part I are indications of another less ancillary role for Philosophy of Religion; that of assessing, or at least working out criteria for assessing, religious truth claims. This concern for truth often alarms those engaged in the history of religions approach to Religious Studies, so concerned are they with the preservation of the scientific neutrality described earlier. But Smart claims that if things are done in the right order the two enterprises need not entangle each other. The task of developing truth criteria is linked, in the paper The Philosophy of Worldviews, with the interesting proposal (developed in the Gifford Lectures Beyond Ideology, 1982) that Religious Studies, and correspondingly Philosophy of Religion, may profitably include in its comparative and analytical domain attempts to give some general meaning to life other than those of the major religions. Smart mentions, for example, Marxism, Maoism and nationalism. He suggests that similar transactions of symbolic power or substance may operate in these structures of thought as in religious structures; and argues briefly for one application of this insight in Religion, Myth and Nationalism.

The third role for Philosophy of Religion, not much developed in this book (though see the early essay Social Anthropology and the Philosophy of Religion), is as part of the philosophy of the social sciences, assessing the methods and presuppositions of sociology, social anthropology and psychology, as they deal with religions. The Winch-type debate about rationality is obviously relevant here.

Part 111 of the book contains fairly abstract accounts of the range and poly-methodic nature of Religious Studies accounts designed to provide blueprints for academic institutions. Its centrepiece, appropriately, is the Lancaster Inaugural Lecture. Again, for a fully developed account of the structure and rationale of Religious Studies one must look not to the preliminary or summary essays here, but to another book The Phenomenon of Religion (1973).

I have tried to indicate what Smarts ideas about Religious Studies have to offer the philosopher of religion bored with the Five Ways and

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Huines Dialogues. The only comment on these ideas I would offer for my own part is that in practice Philosophy of Religion is always potentially critical, even in the primary and fascinating stage of analysis and understanding. It remains to make some comments on this book as it stands. On the evidence of the book, Smart operates better at the level of general exploratory and theoretical insights than in detailed examination of particular religious traditions. Part I1 contains some essays on, for example, Buddhist nirvana; but they are rather slight, and rarely get to grips with primary sources. The major essay in this section is the famous criticism of Zaehner, Interpretation and Mystical Experience; but this is more philosophical than phenomenological/descriptive. (But see the book The Phenomenon of Chrtstianity (1979) for a brilliant if impressionistic analysis of a particular tradition - or collection of traditions.)

A final word on Professor Smarts style; his ideas are, it seems to me, of great power and value, but his expression of them, throughout the last twenty years, has often been convoluted, obscure, not properly worked out. The reader often gets the impression of struggling through an exciting first draft, which has been allowed to stand so that its author can turn to the development of his further insights. Often it is the language which is in an unfinished state, but sometimes the ideas themselves, even some of the most stimulating ones, are little more than hints or sketches, flowing froin Smarts ever fertile mind, but not presented or worked out systematically. UNIVERSITY OF DUNDEE DAVID BASTOW

The Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences Edited by QUENTIN SKINNER Cambridge University Press, 1985. viii + 215 pp. $37.50 cloth, 5.95 paper This book is a platform on which ten social scientists present a view of their discipline as having at long last been released from empiricism and positivism. Their party-line is summarised in a magisterial opening chapter by Quentin Skinner. In 1959, as he reminds us, C . Wright Mills used the term Grand Theory to mock sociologists who try to construct a systematic theory of the nature of man and society (p. 3). For the purpose of Skinners argument, Millss position (in The Sociological Imagination) is equated with Namierite prosopography, Daniel Bells end of ideology, and the Oxford philosophers substitution of the language of morals and the language of politics for morality and politics. According to Skinner, times have certainly changed: these empiricist and positivist citadels of English-speaking social philosophy have been threatened and undermined (pp. 5-6); so would we please welcome the return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences.

The case is then documented in separate chapters, each by a different hand, on Gadamer, Derrida, Foucault, Kuhn, Rawls, Habermas, Althusser, Lkvi-Strauss, and Braudel. All but two of these contributions began life as talks for BBC Radio Three in 1984; and with remarkable

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