In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Dramatization of Absolute Idealism:Gabriel Marcel and F. H. BradleyJoseph GamacheI. IntroductionThis paper consists of an observation, a suggestion, and an illustration. First, the observation: in the English-language literature on the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel, there is, so far as I have discovered, a lack of attention paid to the relationship between Marcel and the British philosopher F. H. Bradley (1846–1924).1 Why might be this be? I speculate (this (...) is not the suggestion previously advertised) that the following are possible reasons for this omission. First, Bradley's influence is neglected in favor of what some might regard as the more obvious influence of Josiah Royce (1855–1916). After all, Marcel wrote a series of articles on Royce early in his career that were subsequently published as a monograph and eventually translated into English as Royce's Metaphysics. Second, there is the confluence of narratives concerning Marcel's philosophical development and the dethronement of Bradley and of idealism by figures such as Russell and Moore. According to the former narrative, Marcel's idealist phase ends with the first part of the Metaphysical Journal (about 1915).2 Since Bradley is less widely read these days and is treated simply as one more (even if the chief) representative of British idealism, it is easy to infer that, when he shed his idealism, Marcel also shed any connection with Bradley.But all that I have achieved thus far is the articulation of two reasons why people interested in Marcel have not also been interested in Bradley. Are there any reasons to believe that Marcel was influenced by Bradley in a positive way? Here, we can do no better than to gather some selected texts. In his preface to the English translation of the Metaphysical Journal, Marcel writes: [End Page 17]Meditations on the implications of the word "with" and on metaphysical fruitfulness must in my opinion be counted among the most valuable contributions of the Metaphysical Journal. Later, in the collected writings published under the title Du Refus à l'invocation [translated into English as Creative Fidelity], I was to submit to similar analyses the relations, or rather the super-relations, implies by the French word "chez." Here, unless I am mistaken, I made use of the word super-relation for the first time. The vigorous criticism made by F. H. Bradley (in Appearance and Reality) of the current notion of relation—considered as a pure makeshift—is there extended, and I think I will be never be able to recognize too explicitly what I owe to that great thinker.(Marcel, Metaphysical Journal xii)In the foreword to his pre-Metaphysical Journal works published as Philosophical Fragments 1909–1914, Marcel writes of his early (idealist) phase:I find it hard to understand today how, during the years immediately following the reception of my aggregation degree, and even after having had the privilege of hearing Henri Bergson at the College de France, I could still feel the need to undertake a groping inquiry in such a rarefied atmosphere and with the help of tools borrowed from post-Kantian philosophy. Bradley—I had read Appearance and Reality—should have helped me shake off the strait jacket in which my thought was so tightly bound.(Marcel, Philosophical Fragments 23)In addition to these quotations, I might also add (a) that Marcel had wanted to write a thesis on Bradley, but that the idea had already been claimed by a fellow student (Marcel, Awakenings 74; "Autobiographical Essay" 18), and (b) the existence of a correspondence between Marcel and Bradley in the year 1920, which includes Marcel's sharing with Bradley his articles on Royce.3 Putting this all together, the following picture emerges. Bradley influenced Marcel as a student and in his idealist years, and beyond his idealist years, as the above references suggest.So much for the observation; now for the suggestion. I suggest that Marcel can be read as, in various places throughout his corpus, dramatizing certain Bradleyan themes, thereby drawing out the ontological weight—to use Marcel's phrase—of Bradley's philosophical positions. There is some evidence for this suggestion in Marcel's self-reflection in The Existential... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Friendship: The Future of an Ancient Gift by Claudia BaracchiJoseph GamacheBARACCHI, Claudia. Friendship: The Future of an Ancient Gift. Translated by Elena Bartolini and Catherine Fullarton. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023. 146 pp. Paper, $30.00Friendship: The Future of an Ancient Gift offers a series of reflections on friendship that "outline thoughts, visions, stories." It is well to bear this in mind. There is no sustained discussion of (and (...) not many references to) other commentators or interpreters of the ancient Greeks. Nor is there, despite the title, a sustained philosophical treatment of friendship or its future. It is a series of reflections on ancient Greek texts. These reflections are unified by the theme of friendship, even when friendship seems to recede into the background. Each chapter is organized around a specific text, the reading of which is interspersed with the aforementioned thoughts, visions, and stories.The first chapter focuses on Plato's Timaeus. Friendship in its "most elementary sense" is "looking at the sky" and seeing not only myself, but "myself as us." This sort of cosmic friendship is a look, a "unitive force, a capacity for seeing the bonds and holding together the elements that form every living organism." The second chapter takes up the analogy of the soul and the city in the Republic. I am a friend to myself when the parts of my soul are in harmony.In the third and longest chapter, Baracchi takes up friendship between equals as discussed in the Nicomachean Ethics. The thematic focus is now friendship between persons, and we read that friendship is a "privileged place in which to be," that it "corroborates, strengthens, amplifies, and emphasizes" the friends, that it is the "condition and context for the utmost explication of human dynamis." Friends resemble each other like poetic images "that illuminate and elucidate one another." The third chapter also takes a swipe at "us moderns," whose notions of liberty undermine our ability to appreciate friendship. We moderns "struggle to contemplate seriousness, fidelity, and the depth they entail, without cynicism." The critique is familiar, and trades, at times, on what seems to be a conflation of Hobbes with the entirety of early modern philosophical anthropology. [End Page 535]Chapters 4 through 6 return to Plato, first with a reflection on the Apology and Symposium, and then with a discussion of Aristotle's friendship with Plato. The fifth chapter takes up the tension between the pursuit of truth and the love of one's friends, as that dilemma manifests in the life of a philosopher. Baracchi convincingly argues that Aristotle should be read as honoring the deeper teachings of Plato, and Socrates before him, that one should care about not who holds a belief but only whether the belief is true. Thus did Aristotle resolve the dilemma between truth and friendship. His pursuit of the truth, even when it caused disagreement with Plato, was an act of friendship.Chapter 6 focuses on the origin of the polis as described in the Republic. Baracchi shows how Socrates tries in the Republic to widen the circle of those who count as one's friends, from select others within the polis, to everyone within the polis, to the entire Greek world, as well as to push back against those who argue that enmity is the necessary foundation of the polis. The last three chapters of the book return to Aristotle's views about friendship: first, about the relationship between friendship and justice, second, about friendships between unequals, and lastly, about the embodied aspects of friendship, its sweetness, and pleasure.There are limits, however, to how helpful the work might be to philosophers interested in friendship. The language is often too abstract, as in the recommendation, "to learn to think human community in its entirety, without this entailing the elimination of differences, and without reducing the differences to identity-related and localistic velleities." Or in the claim that the difference between complete and derivative friendship is the former's ability to "to grasp the broader reasons in the finite, and thus to place the contingent in an otherwise articulated context." Too often there are exaggerations that obscure whatever point is... (shrink)

It is generally accepted that truth is a norm of belief and that, whatever else this might mean, it implies that a person is obligated to believe a proposition only if it is true. Yet this seems to conflict with the norms by which friends form beliefs about each other. For instance, if friends are required to practice interpretive charity in the formation of their beliefs about each other, obligations to believe propositions that are false might arise. In this paper, (...) I assume that there is some such obligation of interpretive charity, and I investigate whether it may be reconciled with the truth-norm. I take for my starting point an account of interpretive charity from the work of Dietrich von Hildebrand, which I develop by critical retrieval of related works by Max Scheler and Gabriel Marcel. The paper concludes that Marcel’s thought on fidelity and reflection is best suited to complete von Hildebrand’s account in such a way as to achieve the sought-after reconciliation of the norms of truth and friendship. (shrink)

The present work argues that value is a properly philosophical concept, the study and understanding of which therefore requires philosophical inquiry. It does so by bringing together two, quite different, philosophers: R. G. Collingwood and Dietrich von Hildebrand. From the former, this work takes its account of what differentiates philosophical concepts. From the latter, it takes the concept of importance as differentiated into intrinsic value, objective goodness, and subjective satisfaction. After explicating the distinctive features of philosophical concepts (the intensional overlap (...) of their classes and their situation on a “scale of forms”), it argues that, despite prima facie difficulties, von Hildebrand’s categories of importance can be arrayed as a scale of forms, in which the categories of importance are not only differences in kind, but also differences in degree. The overall result is one illustration of how philosophers can argue for philosophy’s special domain of competence. (shrink)

Whether and how truth is a norm of belief is a contentious issue in contemporary epistemology. In this paper I retrieve Aquinas’s conception of truth in order to advance a new answer to the question of what grounds the truth-norm. I begin by contrasting the two dominant contemporary accounts of this grounding, showing ways in which each succeeds and fails. Unlike the currently dominant accounts, my account seeks to ground the truth-norm in the nature of truth, as opposed to the (...) nature of belief. Ultimately I argue that Aquinas’s conception of truth furnishes us with an account of the grounding of the truth-norm that satisfies three conditions of adequacy. Such an account (1) grounds the truth-norm in the nature of truth, (2) captures the breadth of epistemic evaluation, and (3) makes sense of the fact that truth is a norm specifically for the human person. (shrink)

Whether and how truth is a norm of belief is a contentious issue in contemporary epistemology. In this paper I retrieve Aquinas’s conception of truth in order to advance a new answer to the question of what grounds the truth-norm. I begin by contrasting the two dominant contemporary accounts of this grounding, showing ways in which each succeeds and fails. Unlike the currently dominant accounts, my account seeks to ground the truth-norm in the nature of truth, as opposed to the (...) nature of belief. Ultimately I argue that Aquinas’s conception of truth furnishes us with an account of the grounding of the truth-norm that satisfies three conditions of adequacy. Such an account grounds the truth-norm in the nature of truth, captures the breadth of epistemic evaluation, and makes sense of the fact that truth is a norm specifically for the human person. (shrink)

Recent epistemology and value theory have become more open to the role played by affectivity in the constitution of human knowledge of value. In this paper, two figures important to the phenomenological and personalistic traditions are retrieved as precedents for this contemporary development: Edith Stein and Dietrich von Hildebrand. In the first part of the paper, Stein’s phenomenology of affective acts is adapted as an account of the structure of “value-grasping acts.” The second part of the paper identifies two difficulties (...) that arise on the basis of Stein’s account: how do we know that an emotion constitutes a response to intrinsic value, and how do we know an emotional response to value is most attuned to its object? The remainder of the paper responds to these difficulties, thereby legitimating the account as a viable moral epistemology. These responses draw inspiration from von Hildebrand’s phenomenological accounts of value-response and freedom. (shrink)

Recent epistemology and value theory have become more open to the role played by affectivity in the constitution of human knowledge of value. In this paper, two figures important to the phenomenological and personalistic traditions are retrieved as precedents for this contemporary development: Edith Stein and Dietrich von Hildebrand. In the first part of the paper, Stein’s phenomenology of affective acts is adapted as an account of the structure of “value-grasping acts.” The second part of the paper identifies two difficulties (...) that arise on the basis of Stein’s account: how do we know that an emotion constitutes a response to intrinsic value, and how do we know an emotional response to value is most attuned to its object? The remainder of the paper responds to these difficulties, thereby legitimating the account as a viable moral epistemology. These responses draw inspiration from von Hildebrand’s phenomenological accounts of value-response and freedom. (shrink)

It is a curious feature of early modern epistemology and its contemporary heirs in analytic philosophy that belief is held both to be involuntary, and to be subject to a prescriptive norm of evidence. I begin by laying out these theses, pointing out the tension that exists between them, as well as discussing how they put pressure on religious faith. I then ask why the first thesis—doxastic involuntarism—has come to be so dominant. Following my diagnosis, I advance reasons to think (...) that the thin concept of belief presupposed by doxastic involuntarism is not faithful to our ordinary and more substantial concept of belief. I conclude by outlining an alternative understanding of what it means to believe that p, based on insights of St. Thomas Aquinas and Gabriel Marcel regarding belief and opinion, as well as the relationship between persons and their beliefs. (shrink)

According to some contemporary epistemologists, truth is a norm of belief: for any proposition p, one ought to believe that p only if p is true. It is sometimes also held that the evaluation of beliefs in terms of their truth-value is universal: truth is a norm of all, and not merely some, of one’s beliefs. Taken together, these claims have inspired the “friendship objection” to the truth-norm. According to this objection, friendship sometimes requires that friends violate the truth-norm when (...) it comes to their beliefs about each other. I begin by discussing how the friendship objection poses a potential problem for the Catholic philosophical tradition. Then, I attempt to resolve the objection by arguing that it is committed to a false dilemma about friendship. Drawing on insights of Gabriel Marcel and Dietrich von Hildebrand, I sketch a virtue by which friends negotiate the demands of both friendship and truth. (shrink)

This paper studies the 1918 entries of Gabriel Marcel’s Metaphysical Journal. This study is situated within an argumentative reading of these entries, according to which they present a novel variety of skepticism: first personal skepticism regarding my ability to answer the questions: who am I and do I believe. The force of this skepticism is developed at length, with particular reference to self-interpretation and the temporality of human persons. Two solutions are retrieved from Marcel’s later work. It is argued that (...) the kind of skepticism under investigation presents a natural opening onto faith. For the philosopher interested in providing such an opening, then, it is especially important to correctly describe this kind of skepticism and distinguish it from other varieties. The life and work of Marcel, who lived and surmounted this very skepticism, is therefore especially worthy of study and elucidation in service of the relationship between philosophy and faith. (shrink)

The work of Gabriel Marcel is retrieved and set in relation to the question of moral epistemology. I begin by surveying Marcel’s long-running critique of a false dilemma with implications for the nature of our knowledge of values. According to this dilemma, a person’s knowledge of something is either objective, and therefore transcendent but impersonal, or it is subjective, and therefore personal but immanent, reaching only one’s inner states. Applied to the knowledge of values, this false dilemma leaves philosophy with (...) a choice between accounts of value-knowledge as scientific/objective knowledge or value-knowledge as self-knowledge. Building on Marcel’s critique of this false dilemma, I suggest a program for a Marcelian moral epistemology that identifies the comportments by which human person are receptive to values and hence to knowledge of values. Two examples of such comportment are discussed in relation to the problem of value-knowledge: exigence and fidelity. (shrink)