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The Philosophy of Jonathan Edwards: A Study in Divine Semiotics. By STEPHEN H. DANIEL. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1994. 224 pp. $22.95.
Likely to frustrate many historians, Stephen H. Daniel's work ought nevertheless to be required reading among the Edwards guild, for it provides perhaps the best philosophical introduction in English to Edwards's major writings. (Daniel himself recognizes Mikles Veto's La Pensee de Jonathan Edwards [1987] as the finest guide to the place of Edwards in the history of ideas.) Along with its intrinsic merit, I like Daniel's book because it may confirm (apparently independently) from a philosophical perspective something I argued from a historian's perspective in Paradox Lost: Free Will and Political Liberty in American Culture, 1630-1760 (Johns Hopkins, 1993): Edwards's philosophy is best understood as premodern, and hence inherently conservative.
Daniel is likely to frustrate...