The family of questions around which this book revolves includes: What is the relation between fact and value? Are they essentially unrelated, or are fact and value interdependent and separable? Arthur Holmes attends to these questions by undertaking a historical journey that begins with the pre-Socratic philosophers and ends in the nineteenth century with J.S. Mill and Nietzsche. Along the way he visits not only a selection of philosophers but a few theologians (including Luther and Calvin) as well. God is a constant companion on Holmes’s journey: first, because, as he says, ‘he wants to explore the fact-value connection in the larger context of metaphysical and theological views’ (p. vii); and secondly, because one cannot undertake an historical exploration of the fact-value connection in Western philosophy without including God as a critical point of reference. If one has read other works by Holmes (e.g. Contours of a World View, Shaping Character), one will not be surprised by his conclusion in Fact, Value, and God, that we do not live in a value-free universe and that ultimately fact and value are inseparably united in their common Creator. What Holmes discovers throughout the history of Western philosophy are four distinguishable approaches to the fact-value connection. These are as follows. (1) The ‘maximalist position’ (the Greeks, Kant, Hegel), in which fact and value are linked intrinsically, even teleologically, in the cosmic order of things. (2) The ‘mediating position’ (Descartes, Hume, Reid), in which fact and value are rooted in and a function of the passions or moral sentiments. (3) The ‘minimalist position’ (Hobbes, Mill, Bentham), in which value is a function of hedonistic psychology, of human experiences of pleasure and pain. (4) The ‘moral skeptics’ position (Nietzsche), which rejects ‘any fact-value relation at all. With no God and no natural moral order we are left in a value-free world’ (p. 174).

The value of this work lies not only in its accessible treatment of a single issue in ethics—the relation of fact and value—but also in the clear and concise introduction it provides to the history of Western philosophy, especially ethics. Both novice and expert, students of theology as well as students of philosophy, can benefit greatly from this readable study. However, Holmes is not always entirely reliable in his assessment of these philosophers and their approaches to the fact-value relation. Nietzsche, for example, does not reject ‘any fact-value relation at all’; nor does he abandon us to a ‘value-free world’. Although Nietzsche’s transvaluation of Western values threatens to stand Christian values on their head, this is not the same as a value-free world, a world free of any fact-value relation. If anything, Nietzsche’s ‘perspectivalism’ (there are no facts, only the interpretation of facts), about which Holmes has a fair amount to say, endows all human knowledge of the world, with value-laden judgements. Furthermore, although this is a fine and worthy book to digest, its value is somewhat limited by the fact that Holmes’s study comes to a rather abrupt halt in the nineteenth century, leaving readers to wonder about attempts by twentieth-century philosophers to sort out the fact-value connection. Holmes admits that his ‘work is selective’ (p. viii); but by omitting the twentieth century entirely he is too selective, so much so that the ends of the threads he is weaving are left frayed and dangling. Holmes does explain that he includes Mill and Nietzsche ‘in order to introduce the empiricist and non-cognitive bases for ethics that dominate the twentieth century’ (p. viii). But ethics in the twentieth century surely cannot simply be abandoned to empiricism and non-cognitive ethics, especially in the second half of the century. Indeed, even an examination of the earlier and later views of Wittgenstein regarding fact-value relations provides the reader with a glimpse of the rich diversity of ethical reflection that we inherit and for which we are responsible. Holmes’s fine book, accordingly, should be supplemented by a treatment of ethics in the twentieth century: I recommend Alasdair Macintyre’s Short History of Ethics as an accessible work that includes a brief analysis of ethics in the first half of the twentieth century, or the more advanced Twentieth-Century Ethical Theory by Steven Cahn and Jeram Haber.

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