Historical study has traditionally been built around the placement of the human at the center of inquiry. The de-stabilized concepts of the human in contemporary thought challenge this configuration. However, the ways in which these challenges provoke new historical perspectives both expand and enrich historical study but are also weak and vulnerable in their concept of the human, lacking or omitting something valuable in our self-understanding. A Personalist Philosophy of History argues for a robust concept of personhood in our experience (...) of the past as a way to resolve this conflict. -/- Focused on those who know history, rather than on the abstract properties of knowledge, it extends the moral agency of persons into non-human, trans-human, and deep history domains. It describes an approach to moral life through historical experience and study, rather than through abstractions. And it describes a kind of historiography that matches factual accuracy to both the constructed nature of understanding and to unavoidable moral purpose. -/- Table of Contents: Introduction Chapter 1. Receiving the Past Chapter 2. Moral Agency Personalism Chapter 3. Shaping Up Time Chapter 4. The Long Experience of Moral Obligation Chapter 5. From Moral Force Ethics to Personalist Philosophy of History . (shrink)

How can we, or should we, talk about God? What concepts are involved in the concept of a Supreme Being? This book is about the search to reconcile modern metaphysics with traditional theism--focusing on the seminal work of Austin Farrer who was Warden of Keble College, Oxford until his death in 1968, and one of the most original and important philosophers of religion of this century. Conti traces the evolution of Ferrar's thought and shows why he preferred a "personalist" approach (...) over Aristotle's metaphysics of "being.". (shrink)

Agamben’s philosophy of education can be arrived at by focusing on the nexus of philology, philosophy and poetry that is prominent in his work. By exploring the functional and semantic reciprocity between these fields, one can identify diverse pedagogies: of language and the poetic voice, of infancy and history, of history redeemed (in the Benjaminian sense), of the cultural image, and of potentiality. These overlapping areas of research share the common trait of Agamben’s personalism, which embraces the view that (...) education expands the affective and spiritual wholeness of the person. (shrink)

Leslie, E. A. Albert Cornelius Knudson, the man.--McConnell, F. J. Bowne and personalism.--Brightman, E. S. Personality as a metaphysical principle.--Hildebrand, C. D. Personalism and nature.--Ramsdell, E. T. The cultural integration of science and religion.--Ensley, F. G. The personality of God.--Harkness, G. Divine sovereignity and human freedom.--Pfeiffer, R. H. Personalistic elements in the Old Testament.--Flewelling, R. T. Personalism and the trend of history.--Muelder, W. G. Personality and Christian ethics.--King, W. J. Personalism and race.--Marlatt, E. B. Personalism (...) and religious education. (shrink)

Foundations of Economic Personalism is a series of three book-length monographs, each closely examining a significant dimension of the Center for Economic Personalism's unique synthesis of Christian personalism and free-economic market theory. In the aftermath of the momentous geo-political and economic changes of the late 1980s, a small group of Christian social ethicists began to converse with free-market economists over the morality of market activity. This interdisciplinary exchange eventually led to the founding of a new academic subdiscipline (...) under the rubric of economic personalism. These scholars attempt to integrate economic theory, history, and methodology with Christian personalism's stress upon human dignity, humane social structures, and social justice. This volume presents the methodological and theoretical foundations for economic personalism through a detailed investigation of human action from two different, yet complementary perspectives: from the personalist perspective of Karol Wojtyla in the Acting Person , and the free-market perspective of Ludwig von Mises in Human Action . By comparing and contrasting the viewpoints of Wojtyla and Mises, the authors develop a comprehensive praxeology capable of analyzing human action from moral and economic perspectives. Beyond Self-Interest illustrates how a unified praxeology could encourage more sustained analysis of the moral dimensions of economic activity while simultaneously softening the utilitarian prejudice of contemporary economic analysis. (shrink)

The detailed analysis of a particular quasi-historical numerical example is used to illustrate the way in which a Bayesian personalist approach to scientific inference resolves the Duhemian problem of which of a conjunction of hypotheses to reject when they jointly yield a prediction which is refuted. Numbers intended to be approximately historically accurate for my example show, in agreement with the views of Lakatos, that a refutation need have astonishingly little effect on a scientist's confidence in the ‘hard core’ of (...) a successful research programme even when a comparable confirmation would greatly enhance that confidence. Timeo Danaos et dona ferentis. (shrink)

This essay describes a visionary philosophy of education at Morehouse College. The educational process at Morehouse, construed here as a form of pedagogical personalism, is personified in three luminaries of Morehouse College: Benjamin Elijah Mays, Howard Washington Thurman, and Martin Luther King. The educational process at Morehouse should be interpreted as an ambivalent response to segregation and discrimination in Jim Crow America. Like all black institutions in the South, Morehouse was subject to racist constraints; Morehouse was created and existed (...) in large part due to just such constraints. I attempt to more accurately describe in order to more sensitively appreciate not only how historically black colleges and universities helped to shape the spiritual or intellectual blueprint of the civil rights movement but also how they served—and continue to serve—as ongoing experiments in democratic education. By way of conclusion, I suggest that the pedagogical personalism espoused and practiced at Morehouse College during what has been called her golden age, i.e., 1940–1967, constitutes a significant contribution to the history of higher education in America. (shrink)

Personalism is understood today as the name of an important current in twentieth-century thought which, inspired by the Christian and humanistic traditions of the West, has sought to deepen our understanding of the meaning and value of human personhood. Opposing both individualism and collectivism, personalism has stressed the uniqueness of each person, the meaning and value of interpersonal relations, and the unity that holds persons together and is, ultimately, also personal in itself: the person of God. Personalism's (...) insights into the nature of personhood have broad implications for our view of ethics, politics, education, and religion. The history of personalism has, however, been poorly understood. Jan Olof Bengtsson shows that personalism began as early as the eighteenth century and was a central, international current of thought throughout the nineteenth century - that it was, in fact, more characteristic of the nineteenth century than of the twentieth. (shrink)

In a posthumously published paper, Fr. W. Norris Clarke, S.J., declares that Thomistic personalism is the most creative and fruitful development in twenty-first century Thomism. I agree with Clarke, and I would also add that Thomistic personalism is the most creative and fruitful development in twenty-first centurymoral and political philosophy. Thus, in this paper—focusing on clarification and exhortation—I (i) identify the main commitments of personalism; (ii) identifyweak, moderate, and strong versions of Thomistic personalism; and (iii) suggest (...) that Thomistic personalism is a vocation for the twenty-first century that requirescollaboration between specialists from diverse backgrounds. (shrink)

In “Moral Perfectionism,” an essay in To Shape a New World, Paul C. Taylor explicitly mentions and openly avoids King’s personalism while advancing a type of Emersonian moral perfectionism motivated by a less than adequate reconstruction of King’s project. In this essay, I argue this is a mistake on two fronts. First, Taylor’s moral perfectionism gives pride of place to shame and self-loathing where the work of King makes central use of love. Second, by evading the personalist King, Taylor (...) misses the importance of love as foundational to King’s theory of community, the Beloved Community. In effect, Taylor engages in hermeneutic violence regarding King’s work and self-description as a personalist. I offer an account of King’s love informed by personalism that better situates love and shows why it is central to King’s philosophy. In conclusion I argue the following: Love is a type of orientation, attitude, and standpoint one can take in relation to another person. Philia and eros forms of love are contingent and conditional. Agapic love opens up persons to see the eternal dignity we all possess and is restorative and generative of community. The Holy Spirit that animates King’s conception of history is made manifest or hindered by the choice to act on the agapic principle of love that animates the cosmos. In the end, I suggest that Taylor’s perfectionist insights might be applied to a supplemental development of Kingian moral philosophy in the direction of a fuller virtue ethics. (shrink)

This article is a review of the recently published book Max Scheler’s Acting Persons, edited by Stephen Schneck. It considers some issues regarding the relation between Scheler’s phenomenological personalism and his later metaphysics by way of a discussion of the articles contained in this volume. The review explores the various and varied discussions of the relation between Scheler’s phenomenological notions of person and spirit. It suggests that Scheler’s turn from a phenomenological anthropology to metaphysics has its roots not only (...) in this notion of spirit, which is distinguished both from Husserl’s absolute consciousness and from Heidegger’sDasein, but also in the ontology of values that is embedded in Scheler’s phenomenological axiology. (shrink)

An important milestone of 20th Century philosophy was the rise of personalism. After the crimes and atrocities against millions of human beings in two World Wars, especially the Second, some philosophers and other thinkers began to seek arguments showing the value of each human being, to expose and denounce the folly of political structures that violate the inalienable rights of the individual person. -/- Karol Wojtyla appeals to the ancient concept of 'person' to emphasize the particular value of each (...) human being. The person is unique because of their subjectivity by which they possesses an unrepeatable interior world in the history of humanity. Their rational nature grants them a special character among living beings, among which is the transcendence to the infinite. Wojtyla magisterially shows how each human being's personhood is rooted in a conscious and free subjectivity, which is marked also by personal and social responsibility. Wojtyla's original philosophical analysis takes for its starting point the human act, in which consciousness and experience consolidate voluntary choices, which are objectively efficacious. By their acts, the person determines their own personhood. This self-dominion manifests the person and enables them to live together in a community in which one's neighbor can be a companion on the voyage of life. -/- This work provides a clear guide to Karol Wojtyla's principal philosophical work, Person and Act, rigorously analyzing the meaning that the author intended in his exposition. An important feature of the work is that the authors rely on the original Polish text, Osoba i czyn, as well as the best translations into Italian and Spanish, rather than on a flawed and sometimes misleading English edition of the work. -/- Besides the analysis of Wojtyla's masterwork, this volume offers three chapters examining the impact of Wojtyla's anthropology on the relationship between faith and reason. (shrink)

Medical ethics enjoyed a remarkable degree of continuity from the days of Hippocrates until its long-standing traditions began to be supplanted, or at least supplemented, around the middle of the twentieth century. Scientific, technological, and social developments during that time produced rapid changes in the biological sciences and in health care. These developments challenged many prevalent conceptions of the moral obligations of health professionals and society in meeting the needs of the sick and injured .The Anglo-American textbook of Beauchamp and (...) Childress became the referential work for the discipline of `bio-ethics'. The authors are convinced that a long history of ancient, medieval and modern health care reflection remains very disappointing from the perspective of contemporary biomedical ethics: “It shows how inadequately, and with what measure of insularity, problems of truthfulness, privacy, justice, communal responsibility and the like were framed in past centuries ”. They defend the four principles approach to biomedical ethics, an approach which somewhat disparagingly has been called principlism.The influence of their work has been so strong that bio-ethics seemed to become overwhelmed by the importance of their contribution. It even created a large separation between Anglo-American approaches in bio-ethics and the European-Continental approach . In any case, contemporary biomedical ethics incorporates theoretical conflicts of considerable complexity, and the diverse theories make it no easier.The personalist approach to biomedical ethics presents itself as a typical European reaction to the rapid changes in medicine and health care. Some call it, however, a kind of renewal of the old Thomistic approach, whereby the concept of `nature' has been replaced by the more dynamic concept of `person'. In that way personalism has been situated by many observers as a `person' centred natural law tradition which focuses on the rational nature of the human person as the moral norm of nature. This gives the impression that personalism is only a very `static' variant of the natural law approach.I would, however, defend the opinion that personalism offers a very dynamic and creative approach to the complexities of recent developments in biomedicine. In what follows, I will illustrate this by clarifying two basic dimensions of the integration of personalism in biomedical ethics: the personalist approach offers a relational foundation for medicine as a healing profession and it presents an ethical framework for the integration of new developments in medicine. First, however, I would like to situate the importance of this theoretical reflection for medical ethics. (shrink)

Influenced by the intellectual historical approach, scholars researching the history of Latvian philosophical thought have turned their attention to analyzing archival materials. Texts such as letters and diaries have become a research focus. While this tendency enhances the exploration of the history of philosophy, it also creates new challenges. As the complexity of the historical narrative in philosophy intensifies, it becomes increasingly difficult to understand these processes in a broader context. To alleviate the issue of fragmentation, one possible solution is (...) to explore local theories. Latvian theory delineates a net of individuals who engage in interactions with one another, thereby developing the flow of ideas. In examining the influence of personalism within the intellectual space of Latvia from the end of the nineteenth to the first third of the twentieth century, this article reveals two philosophemes of Latvian theory: substantiality and panentheism. (shrink)

Many personalists have argued that an adequate account of the human person must include an account of subjectivity as irreducible to anything objectively definable. The personalists contend that Aristotle lacks such an account and claim that he fails to meet three criteria that a theory of the human person must fulfill in order to have an account of subjectivity as irreducible. I show first that some later Aristotelians fulfill these criteria, and then that Aristotle himself also does so. He describes (...) four characteristics of human subjectivity that are considered crucial by many personalists. I do this through an interpretation of Aristotle’s accounts of substantial actualities, nous, friendship, and beauty. (shrink)

In the time at my disposal I limit myself to tenets distinctive of a system of idealism founded by Borden P. Bowne. Two years before his death, in 1908, Bowne wrote Personalism, a condensed epitome of works that in themselves are worthy of a distinctive place in late nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophy. Bowne’s system was to be powerfully elaborated by Edgar S. Brightman, the first holder of the Borden Parker Bowne Chair in Philosophy in Boston University, which (...) I was to hold from 1953 to 1975, and followed by John N. Findlay since 1978. Professor J. Cook Wilson of Oxford, writing four years after Bowne’s death, said that he “always urged ‘the study of Bowne as the most important of the modern American philosophers.’” This is not the place to record the admiration of William James and of William E. Hocking, among other admirers in America and abroad, or to identify contemporaries and recent scholars as well as pupils of Bowne and Brightman. But Bowne’s disciple, Ralph Tyler Flewelling, who founded The Personalist, and Robert N. Beck, Brightman’s pupil, who established Idealistic Studies, cannot go unmentioned. (shrink)

In preparing these remarks, I have felt keenly an appreciation for and philosophic kinship with Walter Muelder’s position, partly because I have found his paper to contain a clear demarcation of a personalistic humanism from its Marxist counterpart—and personalism here need not be limited to philosophers holding a Personalism with a capital “P”; and partly because I think he and I are philosophic kin, although not quite brothers. I say this because, on the one hand, I do not (...) think his critique of Marxist humanism cuts quite deeply enough, on target as I think it is; and, on the other, his proposals about socialism and collectivism for the future go rather too far toward what I would take to be a depersonalization of social existence. Let me begin with the first of these two observations. (shrink)

A good deal of discussion about the existence of God among contemporary continental philosophers centres on the anthropological conditions that precede the affirmation or denial of such a being. The starting point is the person centred world of the existentialists, the phenomenologists and the personalists, and not the cosmological centred universe of the medieval world. It is one’s view of man and what one considers to be most profound in man, that leads some philosophers to affirm the existence of God (...) today and which leads others to deny his existence. More specifically it is their views on intersubjectivity, that is on the relationships between persons, that marks the parting of the ways between these two groups of philosophers today. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to explore the differences between the Idealist personalism present in Britain and America, and the Realist personalism, proper to all the different branches of European or Continental Personalism: dialogic, communitarian, phenomenological, classical ontological, and modern ontological. After making clear that not all the British personalists are idealists, but mainly those linked to personal idealism, we will discuss whether we can speak of personalism in a similar sense as idealistic and realistic (...) personalism. Secondly, we will analyze four points in order to compare the peculiar traits of personalism in these philosophies: the phenomenality of matter; the problem of experience; metaphysics and person; and corporeality, personality, and person. Special attention is paid to A. S. Pringle-Pattison and Borden Parker Bowne, as the leaders of idealistic personalism in Britain and the United States. (shrink)

This distinctive and contemporary departure from hackneyed discussions of political theory introduces readers to a contemporary personalism rooted in the work of Bartolome de Las Casas and emerging again in the contributions of Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin as well as the liberation theology of Gustavo Guiterrez and Jon Sobrino. Thomas R. Rourke and Rosita A. Chazarreta Rourke introduce readers to new sources of personalism by investigating and revising the intellectual history of this theory and its development.

This article is dedicated to Nikolai O. Lossky’s intuitivism and personalism and their significance in the context of Russian philosophy. The author demonstrates how Lossky’s study of Russian philosophy influenced his work and allowed him to take a second look at a number of philosophical issues, indicating ways to develop them further. As a result of his research, Lossky discovered ideas close to his own in the works of various other Russian philosophers. Lossky became especially interested in two authors, (...) Vladimir S. Solovyov and Fyodor M. Dostoevsky. He created interpretations that examined Solovyov’s philosophy and Dostoevsky’s works from the positions of intuitivism and personalism. The study of Russian thought Lossky undertook in his book History of Russian Philosophy gave him a strong impetus for developing his own philosophical views, which were aimed at bringing philosophy and religion into closer proximity. (shrink)

The article attempts to compare personalist aspects in the works of Vasily Zenkovsky and Vladimir Lossky. It is shown that two types of philosophical personalism (metaphysical and existentialist) in the history of Russian thought set the framework for two types of theological personalism presented respectively by Zenkovsky and Lossky. The philosophy of Lev Lopatin was the important source for the principles of Zenkovsky’s personalist vision. The relevant philosophical background on Lossky’s personalism is provided by Nikolai Berdyaev’s works. (...) The article considers the deep criticism by the French theologian Jean-Claude Larchet, who seeks to demonstrate philosophical and existentialist sources of Lossky’s theological personalism, rather than patristical ones. It is noted that the criticism addressed to Lossky’s theory may slide to challenging the very possibility of an Orthodox theological personalism as a line of thought. It is shown that Zenkovsky’s works, presenting a nonexistentialist type of personalism, do not provoke such criticism. It’s concluded that whereas Lossky’s legacy in its personalistic aspect is challenged, Zenkovsky’s personalism enables another way of conceiving “Orthodox theological personalism.”. (shrink)

The concept of person is a primary interest of the contemporary intellectual world. Modern literature, films, theater, theology and philosophy focus their attention increasingly on the meaning of person. The current interests of philosophers can activate and direct their reading of the history of philosophy. The rereading of the history of philosophy with a new interest can lead to new insights and discoveries. Through these insights and discoveries, philosophies of the past come to life in the present and influence the (...) future. One of the tasks of contemporary philosophers is to read and examine philosophies of the past under the light of the current interest in person so that errors of previous philosophers might be avoided and insights of previous philosophers might be assimilated. The rereading, examination and exposition of past philosophers is and must be a community project. Both the vastness of philosophical literature and importance of dialogue, if progress is to be made, necessitate that the project be undertaken by many. This exposition of William Torrey Harris’ philosophy is offered as part of the project. Though Harris’ philosophy has been identified as a personalism, it has not received adequate study as a personalism nor has Harris’ concept of person been sufficiently examined. Of Harris, Nicholas Murray Butler wrote. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger cited him as “the most potent philosophical power... in all of contemporary philosophy.” Ortega y Gasset called him “the first man of genius, the Adam of the new Paradise.” Writing at a crucial time in intellectual history, his influence has extended to persons as diverse as Dietrich von Hildebrand, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Karol Wojtyla, Jurgen Habermas, Ernst Bloch, and members of the generation of thinkers that developed in the German universities during the Weimar years. Despite this far-reaching impact, the (...) social theory and philosophy of Max Scheler have never been examined for the significance of their political thought. This book opens the possibility of deriving a contemporary political theory from Scheler’s philosophy and social theory, based on his understanding of the person, the community, and the significant new directions these elements suggest. Standing at some distance from modern liberalism, conservatism, and Marxism, both in their bourgeois and Enlightenment varieties, Scheler’s personalism has its roots in the rich admixture of life philosophy and phenomenology that gave rise to Martin Heidegger’s early philosophy. It is a philosophical anthropology founded on Scheler’s own realist phenomenology, sociology of knowledge, and non-formal ethics. The book considers Scheler’s many works and includes translations and reviews of unpublished materials. It includes an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary name sources. (shrink)

Foundations of Economic Personalism is a series of three book-length monographs, each closely examining a significant dimension of the Center for Economic Personalism's unique synthesis of Christian personalism and free-economic market theory. In the aftermath of the momentous geo-political and economic changes of the late 1980s, a small group of Christian social ethicists began to converse with free-market economists over the morality of market activity. This interdisciplinary exchange eventually led to the founding of a new academic subdiscipline (...) under the rubric of economic personalism. These scholars attempt to integrate economic theory, history, and methodology with Christian personalism's stress upon human dignity, humane social structures, and social justice. This final volume in the series systematically applies the praxeological and theoretical foundations of the personalist tradition to free-market economic theory. Unlike the previous two, this work defends economic liberty in theologically sensitive terms that reference the personalist tradition, without compromising the disciplinary integrity of either economics or social ethics. (shrink)

The article seeks to refute the popular idea in Russian-language scientific literature of French personalism as a homogeneous and monolithic movement, briefly pointing out the existence of three of its internal movements: Esprit, Ordre Nouveau and Jeune Droite. Focusing on the figure of D. de Rougemont, this study nevertheless shows the close connection between these three groups and the commonality of ideological quests. Dwelling in detail on the confessional context of the differences between Esprit and Ordre Nouveau, the author (...) demonstrates that both groups are still united in the perception of the concept of “personality” as a spiritual imperative for a person in the 1930s (albeit not agreeing on some details of its definition) and criticism of contemporary political regimes. (shrink)

Foundations of Economic Personalism is a series of three book-length monographs, each closely examining a significant dimension of the Center for Economic Personalism's unique synthesis of Christian personalism and free-economic market theory. In the aftermath of the momentous geo-political and economic changes of the late 1980s, a small group of Christian social ethicists began to converse with free-market economists over the morality of market activity. This interdisciplinary exchange eventually led to the founding of a new academic subdiscipline (...) under the rubric of economic personalism. These scholars attempt to integrate economic theory, history, and methodology with Christian personalism's stress upon human dignity, humane social structures, and social justice. This second volume in the series surveys the anthropological foundations to the disciplines of economics and moral theology. The first part of the book presents an overview of the German, French, and Polish branches of personalist thought. Particular attention is given to theological anthropology, especially as it is developed by such thinkers as Emmanuel Mounier, Max Scheler, Gabriel Marcel, Karol Wojtyla, and Emil Brunner. Part two surveys models of human nature that have been espoused by various schools of free-market thought—including mainstream neoclassical economics. In conclusion, the authors demonstrate how an expanded understanding of human nature can augment the ability of economic science to model and predict human behavior. (shrink)

The thick-esse /thin-essence view asserts that esse—the act of existing—constitutes all of the ontological positivity, perfection, and intelligibility of a being, while essence is simply an internal limitation or mode of the esse of a being. In this paper I explain why Fr. W. Norris Clarke’s Thomistic personalism relies on the thick-esse /thin-essence view; acknowledge three objections to the thick-esse /thin-essence view; reply to these objections; and provide a positive argument for the thick-esse /thin-essence view. I conclude that Clarke’s (...) reliance on a thick-esse /thin-essence view does not militate against his Thomistic personalism; on the contrary, it militates in its favor. In order to reach this conclusion, though, I make it clear that the details of Clarke’s thick-esse /thin-essence view must be modified to fall in line with the details of William E. Carlo’s thick-esse /thin-essence view. (shrink)

I explore the personalism embedded in von Hildebrand’s moral philosophy, and then I explore the personalism in his later account of love. I claim that his personalism was significantly developed in his later work, and that it can be still further developed by us. I begin by explaining what Hildebrandian value-response is, and then I proceed to show how he subsequently qualified this foundational concept, first in his Ethics but especially in his late work, The Nature of (...) Love, and here especially through the concept of Eigenleben that was introduced in that work. I am particularly interested in showing why the personalism of von Hildebrand’s thought is enriched through this concept. (shrink)