This is a moving human record of a quiet sage reflecting in the almost lost art of conversation upon the eternal topics of the human condition—history, science, religion, personality—ending with the frank admission: ‘This awareness of worth in human beings develops very early. Most attempts to formulate it in words fail... one always knew it when encountered. Truly, I may say to you that this is the only thing of any importance that I know; and, as you see, I cannot (...) communicate it.... Words do not express our deepest intuitions. In the very act of being verbalized they escape us’. (shrink)

The present collection of essays was designed by translator David Lachterman to provide the reader with a better understanding of Scheler’s major work, Formalism in Ethics and Non-formal Ethics of Values, which will also be published in translation by Northwestern University Press. Lachterman provides us with an illuminating preface which sketches the general character of Scheler’s thought, particularly its relationship to Husserl and Heidegger, and which discusses each of the five selections. Four of the five essays presented here are incomplete (...) works, and three were never published in Scheler’s lifetime. The first, "The Idols of Self-Knowledge," is an attempt to differentiate psychical and physical phenomena and criticizes the way Brentano went about making this distinction. In "Ordo amoris" Scheler maintains with Augustine and Pascal, the priority of love over cognition. In "Phenomenology and the Theory Cognition," Scheler develops his own account of the phenomenological method. "The Theory of the Three Facts" represents Scheler’s views on the distinction between phenomenological, scientific and common sense "facts." The last essay is entitled "Idealism and Realism" and demonstrates "that it is a mistake to opt for either one of the parties to this conflict," and argues instead for a phenomenology of essences. The last section of this text, which was to be a confrontation of Scheler with the then recently published Being and Time, never appeared but is still awaiting publication in the critical edition of Scheler’s works. One welcomes Prof. Lachterman’s initiative in making available to the English reader these essays of one of the most significant figures in twentieth century German philosophy.—J. D. C. (shrink)

The problem of distinguishing within the same investigation between the scientific and the philosophical orders of constructive thinking has increased with the complex speculation of current theory and urgently demands systematic clarification, against the dangers of ambiguity and abuse of evidence. M. Maritain has proposed a detailed conceptual classification, which expands Aristotle’s division of the planes of abstraction: his pioneer effort is still under discussion even in Scholastic circles. In particular his proposed distinction of mathematics and its allied empirio-schematic and (...) empirio-metrical sciences from the philosophy of nature, which he brought nearer to, and yet really distinguished from the empiriological sciences has been recently criticised by the Laval and Forest Hill schools in North America. Now Father Connolly outlines this debate and bravely offers a tentative ‘compromise theory’. Restricting philosophy to metaphysics proper, he proposes that “some of the empiriological sciences belong to the philosophy of nature—and to this extent the theory agrees with the anti-Maritain position; secondly, some of the empiriological sciences fall outside its orbit and, along with Mathematics, constitute a distinct field of human knowledge—and to this extent the theory agrees with the Maritain position”. (shrink)

Professor Macquarrie, now of Union Seminary, New York and noted as a specialist student of existentialist theology, has bravely faced a laborious undertaking in this careful survey of the varieties of religious thinking in Europe and North America during the past sixty years of our century. His scholarly addition to the valuable Library of Philosophy and Theology of the Student Christian Movement covers the wide field of Western theology, natural and supernatural, believing and unbelieving, from the formal system of Absolute (...) Idealism dying in the first decade with its attendant personal idealism and philosophies of spirit, through a new pragmatism and a realism to be confronted by a new positivism, a sociology and philosophy of history, a new challenge from logical empiricism and analysis, and positive replies from a new theology of the Word, neo-Thomism and existentialism. (shrink)

Professor Macquarrie, now of Union Seminary, New York and noted as a specialist student of existentialist theology, has bravely faced a laborious undertaking in this careful survey of the varieties of religious thinking in Europe and North America during the past sixty years of our century. His scholarly addition to the valuable Library of Philosophy and Theology of the Student Christian Movement covers the wide field of Western theology, natural and supernatural, believing and unbelieving, from the formal system of Absolute (...) Idealism dying in the first decade with its attendant personal idealism and philosophies of spirit, through a new pragmatism and a realism to be confronted by a new positivism, a sociology and philosophy of history, a new challenge from logical empiricism and analysis, and positive replies from a new theology of the Word, neo-Thomism and existentialism. (shrink)