Worldview: The History of a Concept

Worldview: The History of a Concept. By David K. Naugle. Eerdmans, 384 pp., $26.00.

WORLDVIEWS MAKE a difference. How we think about ultimate reality, human nature, the natural world and the course of history significantly determines how we live. This is David Naugle's underlying assumption. Naugle, a professor of philosophy at Dallas Baptist University, is an evangelical whose work reflects Reformed thinking. He sets out both to provide an historical overview of the concept of worldview and to delineate a Christian worldview.

Naugle explores how worldview was defined by and the role it played in the work of a broad array of thinkers, including Kant, Nietzsche, Polanyi and Freud. A century ago the concept, often referred to by the German word Weltanschauung, was quite popular, though definitions abounded. Worldview was never quite as significant for philosophy as it was for theology and the social sciences, but in many disciplines it was deemed to play a pivotal role in people's basic orientation to the world and their commitments and values.

Naugle points out that though Protestantism, Catholicism and Orthodoxy have differed theologically, "there...