The Philosophical Foundations of Christian Science: Mary Baker Eddy and Her Radical Metaphysics

Sheldon, Nicholas David. The Philosophical Foundations of Christian Science: Mary Baker Eddy and Her Radical Metaphysics. Cambridge: Boydell & Brewer, Ltd., 2025.

Sheldon’s book, nearly identical to his 2022 doctoral dissertation, attempts to restructure and edit the ideas in Mary Baker Eddy’s textbook Science and Health to produce a concise and more coherent form of her radical idealism. His approach is to extract, re-express, and analyze Eddy’s essential core concepts, which he refers to as the “gold.” In his attempt, which might remind some readers of similar efforts by John Doorly and Max Kappeler, Sheldon sets forth a number of explanatory models taken from the history of philosophy, logic, theology, and mathematics, from Zeno and Melissus, Spinoza, McTaggart, Malebranche, and even Julian of Norwich. He concludes that though there are some “problematic aspects” to Eddy’s system, “it is nevertheless a tour de force worthy of much greater analytical interest” (145). From a practical standpoint, he argues that Christian Science’s objections to the medical consensus concerning Spanish influenza and the COVID-19 pandemic are quite reasonable. Sheldon concludes that “the philosophical idealism underlying Mary Baker Eddy’s system of thought . . . [is] a curious mixture of dazzling intellectual daring and, being very charitable, apparent occasional incoherency” (160). Sheldon found Eddy “an idealist philosopher of great depth, breadth, and originality,” albeit one “untutored in academic philosophy” (10-11).

ISBN (Hardcover): 978-0227180518
ISBN (Softcover):  978-0227180457
ISBN-13 (Kindle): 978-0227180464

See also annotations:

“Radical Idealism and Empirical Metaphysics in the Work of Mary Baker Eddy” by Nicholas David Sheldon