Joy cog hill biography of abraham

B O O K R E V I E W S Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, Vol. 35(4), 409–412 Fall 1999 q 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. CCC 022-5061/99/040409-04 Richard Wightman Fox and Robert B. Westbrook, Eds. In Face of the Facts: Moral Inquiry in American Scholarship. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. 300 pp. $49.95. ISBN 0-52162133X. Broader than the title, this rich and various collection enlightens us to the recent conceptual history, interests, and disputes characterizing eight academic fields. Despite the stimulating quality of the contributions, the book is likely to disappoint the readers most likely to read it, given the understandable but probably impossible desire to rediscover methods that would establish binding relations between empirical inquiry and moral authority. The authors engage an old problem, and this book can be seen as one expression of the contemporary stage in a dialectic beginning in the sixteenth century with the skepticism of Montaigne and the politiques’ quest for nontheological grounds of intellectual reconciliation after the bloodbath of the wars of religion. Some late-twentieth century fields of scholarship, of course, do claim absolute truths reminiscent of Protestant a