This book illustrates the profound implications of Gabriel Marcel's unique existentialist approach to epistemology not only for traditional themes in his work concerning ethics and the transcendent, but also for epistemological issues, concerning the objectivity of knowledge, the problem of skepticism, and the nature of non-conceptual knowledge, among others. There are also chapters of dialogue with philosophers, Jacques Maritain and Martin Buber. In focusing on these themes, the book makes a distinctive contribution to the literature on Marcel.Brendan Sweetman, a native of Dublin, Ireland, is Professor of Philosophy at Rockhurst University, Kansas City, MO, USA. His books include Why Politics Needs Religion: The Place of Religious Arguments in the Public Square (InterVarsity, 2006) and Religion: Key Concepts in Philosophy (Continuum Books, 2007). He has coauthored or coedited several other books, including Truth and Religious Belief (M.E. Sharpe, 1998), and Contemporary Perspectives on Religious Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 1992). Professor Sweetman has published more than fifty articles and reviews in a variety of collections and journals, including International Philosophical Quarterly, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Faith and Philosophy, Philosophia Christi, and Review of Metaphysics. He writes regularly in the areas of continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, political philosophy and ethics.
I hope that this book will be widely read, and I especially commend it to four classes of persons: I. For myself I have come across nothing more important than M. Marcel’s writings here and elsewhere on the problem of metaphysics. I say problem advisedly: for we are all of us these days in the end puzzled as to what exactly metaphysics is. The strict Thomist has his answer: so has the positivist: so too the Biblical theologian who is much too ready to find in the decay of ontology an argument for the authenticity of ‘Biblical perspectives’. M. Marcel was trained in the tradition of idealism: and he knew the influence both of Bergsen and of W. E. Hocking. His conversation with himself certainly betrays their influences: but it is of far wider significance. Professor Ayer and Dr. E. L. Mascall have their answer to the question what ontology is: they have their formulae. Marcel probes beneath these answers; for him ontology is much more than a body of doctrine. It is the intellectual expression of the human situation; what is expressed in the syllogisms of, for instance, Père Garrigou-Lagrange, is valid only in so far as it catches and summarises the very being of man and the universe, as that being is lived through and met with by man in his pilgrimage through life. I find as I read M. Marcel that the frontiers are blurred reflection, metaphysics, spirituality. And that is the strength of his seemingly inconsequent method. In a way he is too wise to suppose that the arguments of the philosophia perennis are enough in their abstract form to convince a man; they only carry conviction in relation to a whole experience of life of which they are the expression. The issues between the Thomist, the positivist, the idealist are not issues simply of doctrine but of life; and to see what they are, one must probe, stretching language beyond the frontiers of poetry, somehow to convey the issues as things through which men live. 2. The book should be studied closely by the moralist whether he be philosopher or moral theologian. Where some of the most familiar ethical ideas are concerned, Marcel reminds us of their ‘inside’ when we so often in our discussion think simply of their ‘outside’. What is a promise? We have our answer pat, our formula which permits us to go on with the discussion of our obligations to keep the promises we have made and so on. We don’t wait to probe. I find myself inevitably using that word ‘probe’ again and again in connection with M. Marcel: for what he does is to probe the unsuspected profundities of the familiar. Most professional students of ethics are morally philistine, men who give little time to penetrating the ‘inside’ of the ideas they are handling. And there Marcel pulls them up short. 3. The book should be widely read by the many Christian ‘fellow-travellers’ of today, those who follow, as it were, afar off the Christian way without themselves coming yet to the point of an act of faith in the Crucified. Its very incompleteness will respond to their groping anxiety, and it will enrich their vision of life. And this it can do because it eschews dogmatic exposition seeking rather to shew the inside of the truly Christian way of life. Fidelity, hope, charity, mystery—these are fundamental categories of the Christian way: and of all these Marcel has much to say, which is in every way fresh and yet at the same time rooted in the tradition of Catholic Christianity. The reader of such a work as Albert Camus’ La Peste, with its preoccupation with the problem of an atheistic sanctity, will understand M. Marcel. In a way he challenges the possibility of Camus’ vision; and he does so not on dogmatic grounds but by an analysis of holiness and goodness which shews indirectly their inseparability from acknowledgment of the all-embracing mystery of God. An age which has known evil as ours has and does still know it, is inevitably interested in goodness; and it is with goodness, as something inevitably issuing out of God because a gift from him, that Marcel’s studies deal. 4. And lastly I commend this book because at a time when minuteness and subtlety of mind are too often the prerogatives of the light-heartedly destructive, he reminds us that a true minuteness and a true intellectual subtlety are rooted in humility and purity of heart, and manifest the soil in which they are nourished by graciousness whose charm none can escape and a strength of argument which none can break.
Seeking Communion as Healing Dialogue: Gabriel Marcel’s Philosophy for Today discusses society’s problems with interpersonal communication, arguing that these issues are more deeply rooted in problems in being. Margaret M. Mullan draws on the work of Gabriel Marcel to explore the meaning of body, of being with, and of being at all in today’s world, answering questions about why we are often unable to dialogue with the people around us, why we feel disconnected and alone even in an increasingly technological world, and how these changing technologies expose and sometimes exacerbate our weak connections to others. Engaging Marcel’s reflective method and theory of communion, Mullan explores how we seek communion amid technology and proposes that Marcel’s reflections are generative contributions to the understanding and study of communication, offering a way to seek healing dialogue in present day. Scholars of communication, philosophy, conflict studies, and media studies will find this book particularly useful.
French existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1883-1973) is one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. The central themes of his philosophy, which are developed with a blend of realism, concreteness, and common sense, continue to be relevant for the plight of humanity in the twentieth-first century. Marcel's thought emphasizes: the attempt to safeguard the dignity and integrity of the human person by emphasizing the inadequacy of the materialistic life and the unavoidable human need for transcendence; the inability of philosophy to capture the profundity and depth of key human experiences, and so the need to find a deeper kind of reflection; the importance of the experience of inter-subjectivity, which Marcel believes is at the root of human fulfillment, and which also finds expression in the transcendent dimension of human experience, a dimension that cannot be denied without loss, and that often gives meaning to our most profound experiences. Marcel is also one of the few contemporary thinkers who manages to do justice to the subjectivity and individuality of the human person, while avoiding the relativism and skepticism that has tended to accompany these notions, and that has plagued contemporary philosophy after Heidegger. He makes an unwavering effort to challenge the moral relativism and spiritual nihilism of his French rival, Jean-Paul Sartre, and of other representative existentialist philosophers. All of Marcel's important ideas are introduced here, ranging from his unique conception of philosophy; to his original approach to epistemology and the nature of knowled to his view on the nature of the human person, including the idea of being-in-a-situation and the importance of the "context" that the subject lives in for the subject's ideas and experiences; to his approach to religious themes, including the issues of the rationality of religious belief, the question of God's existence, and our longing for the transcendent; and his "concrete approaches" of fidelity, hope, love and faith. There are also selections in which he discusses some of his misgivings about the direction of contemporary culture, especially the effects of technology. Book jacket.
William C. Hackett’s English translation of Jean Wahl’s Existence humaine et transcendence (1944) brings back to life an all-but-forgotten book that provocatively explores the philosophical concept of transcendence. Based on what Emmanuel Levinas called “Wahl’s famous lecture” from 1937, Existence humaine et transcendence captured a watershed moment of European philosophy. Included in the book are Wahl's remarkable original lecture and the debate that ensued, with significant contributions by Gabriel Marcel and Nicolai Berdyaev, as well as letters submitted on the occasion by Heidegger, Levinas, Jaspers, and other famous figures from that era. Concerned above all with the ineradicable felt value of human experience by which any philosophical thesis is measured, Wahl makes a daring clarification of the concept of transcendence and explores its repercussions through a masterly appeal to many (often surprising) places within the entire history of Western thought. Apart from its intrinsic philosophical significance as a discussion of the concepts of being, the absolute, and transcendence, Wahl's work is valuable insofar as it became a focal point for a great many other European intellectuals. Hackett has provided an annotated introduction to orient readers to this influential work of twentieth-century French philosophy and to one of its key figures.
Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) was a French existentialist and playwright who authored some 30 plays and an equal number of philosophical writings. This volume presents a translation of his four act play, The Broken World, with illustrations, commentary, a companion essay by Marcel titled Concrete Approaches to Investigating the Ontological Mystery, and a number of relevant appendices. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
In this powerful study Edward Baring sheds fresh light on Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential yet controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century. Reading Derrida from a historical perspective and drawing on new archival sources, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy shows how Derrida's thought arose in the closely contested space of post-war French intellectual life, developing in response to Sartrian existentialism, religious philosophy and the structuralism that found its base at the École Normale Supérieure. In a history of the philosophical movements and academic institutions of post-war France, Baring paints a portrait of a community caught between humanism and anti-humanism, providing a radically new interpretation of the genesis of deconstruction and of one of the most vibrant intellectual moments of modern times.
Much has been written about the great personalist philosophers of the 20th century – including Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mournier, Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, Dietrich von Hildebrand and Edith Stein, Max Scheler and Karol Wojtyla (later Pope John Paul II) – but few books cover the personalist movement as a whole. An Introduction to Personalism fills that gap. Juan Manuel Burgos shows the reader how personalist philosophy was born in response to the tragedies of two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s. Through a revitalization of the concept of the person, an array of thinkers developed a philosophy both rooted in the best of the intellectual tradition and capable of dialoguing with contemporary concerns. Burgos then delves into the potent ideas of more than twenty thinkers who have contributed to the growth of personalism, including Romano Guardini, Gabriel Marcel, Xavier Zubiri, and Michael Polanyi. Burgos’s encyclopedic knowledge of the movement allows for a concise and well-rounded perspective on each of the personalists studied. An Introduction to Personalism concludes with a synthesis of personalist thought, bringing together the brightest insights of each personalist philosopher into an organic whole. Burgos argues that personalism is not an eclectic hodge-podge, but a full-fledged school of philosophy, and gives a dynamic and rigorous exposition of the key features of the personalist position. Our times are marked by numerous and often contradictory ideas about the human person. An Introduction to Personalism presents an engaging anthropological vision capable of taking the lead in the debate about the meaning of human existence and of winning hearts and minds for the cause of the dignity of every person in the 21st century and beyond.
The philosophy of religion is a core area in the study of philosophy, as well as being a subject of growing contemporary interest. It encompasses some of the major and most complex philosophical questions. Does God exist? What is God's nature? Why does God allow evil? What is a religious experience? Are religion and science compatible? What relevance does evolution have for religious belief? It also covers questions concerning the challenge of religious pluralism, a topic of great contemporary relevance. Written with the specific needs of students new to philosophy in mind, Religion: Key Concepts in Philosophy covers the work of major thinkers and outlines clearly the central questions and arguments encountered in studying the philosophy of religion. This is an engaging and clear introduction to a major component of the undergraduate philosophy curriculum, as well as being an ideal support for general readers.
