Abstract

Babolin, one of the foremost Italian interpreters of modern German philosophy with a special interest in the direct analysis of the rapport Man/god, self/other than self, has written a close and persuasive account of the German theologian Guardini as a thinker concerned with ‘Otherness’. The methodology, as in his 1965 volume Essere e Alterità in Martin Buber is copious but precise, with a gratifying clear distinction between what the author has added to the chiefly Italo-German tradition of criticism and his own review of that tradition, which is contained in the first section of the book. The second chapter contains an exhaustive review of the theory of ‘polar opposition’ axiomatised in Guardini’s Der Gegensatz which was published in 1925, just two years after Buber’s Ich und Du. Babolin’s third section covers ‘Otherness’ in Guardini’s Welt und Person, published in 1939.