232 - Religion, Interpretation, and Diversity of Belief. The Framework Model from Kant to Durkheim to Davidson

Religion, Interpretation, and Diversity of Belief:
The Framework Model from Kant to Durkheim to Davidson
By Terry F. Godlove, Jr.
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1989. 207 pp. $34.50.

The author, who teaches at Hofstra University, has retooled a dissertation and the promise of several scholarly journal articles into a very interesting and creative book about the limits of religious diversity. Along the way, he disputes relativistic understandings of what he calls a framework model of belief-the idea of alternative conceptual schemes (religious or otherwise) for understanding the world. Appealing to both transcendental arguments and a sort of holism associated with the philosopher Donald Davidson, Godlove makes a case for limits on

religious diversity that is based upon the existence of both formal and material constraints to diversity in judgment and belief generally. If Godlove's arguments are correct, diversity in religious belief can extend only to matters of theory and interpretive evaluation that presume a broad agreement about "concrete observational topics." A further interpretive limit on religious diversity is that all such belief systems have enough in common to be identifiably religious.

All this, as Godlove admits, won't get one very far if one's main interest is the material question of where the actual religions of the world agree and disagree on specifically religious topics of concern, but at least it dispels some a priori philosophical objections to the point of such an investigation-not enough commonality among religions to make it possible, or too much agreement to make the effort of detailed comparisons worthwhile.

Some of the chapters, for example, those on Kant and Durkheim, may be of more interest to academics than to clergy or the general educated reader. But all are written in a lucid, lively way so that they serve as introductions to otherwise rather arcane material while furthering the argumentative lines of the book as a whole.

Kathryn Tanner
Yale University
New Haven, Conn.