This work is a revised presentation of Kupczak’s dissertation, The Human Person as an Efficient Cause in the Christian Anthropology of Karol Wojtyla. It is introduced by Michael Novak’s article, “The Christian Philosophy of John Paul II”, which serves as an excellent entrée to Kupczak’s analysis of Wojtyla’s system.

This work is largely based on Reimers’s doctoral dissertation, written under Rocco Buttiglione, an Italian philosopher and close collaborator of Wojtyla. In essence, however, it is less a focussed study of the thought of Karol Wojtyla than an attempt to insert that thought into a different conceptual context and to illuminate it by way of comparison and synthesis. The analogue to Wojtyla’s thought, in this case, is that of C. S. Peirce. Peirce’s analysis of habit, as a kind of major (...) premise or a sign of the meaning of an action, is compared to Wojtyla’s more dynamic approach to the relationship between act and meaning, in Reimers’s characterization, “as the moment of experience of choice”. (shrink)