I use the word Moralist, somewhat after the French fashion, in the sense of a commentator on the human scene. I apologize for Contemporary, but there was another Camus, way back in the seventeenth century, who is being resuscitated now and who, according to the new Encyclopaedia of Literature , “wrote besides theological works some fifty novels which make him a pioneer of religious edification through popular fiction.” Our Camus is very much of our century and is still a comparatively (...) young man. And he is contemporary not only in the accidental sense that he happens to be alive and writing in our generation. He has suffered in his own flesh with our generation. He is both of us and with us. Born to a working-class French Colonial family in 1913 he knew none of the douceurs de la vie which held the memory in the first World War; while in the second he took an active part in the French Resistance movement and after the liberation edited the periodical Combat . His novels- L'Étranger and La Peste -are not so much works of imaginative creation as fictional records of the events of our time. His plays- Le Malentendu , Caligula , L'État de siège , Les justes -are studies or allegories of moral and political collapse in its various and varying moods. Like Actuelles , a collection of his current writing from 1944 to 1948, both novels and plays are testimonies of the anxieties through which our generation has passed. (shrink)

Roth (1896-1963), the first philosophy professor at the Hebrew U.- Jerusalem, certainly practiced the ethics he preached in his self- imposed exile from Israel to protest the new state's policies. A dozen essays represent his "search, through thought, for the permanent." Includes a complete bibliography of his writings. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

La correspondance entre Descartes et Huygens, quoique maintenant absorbée dans le corpus général des lettres de Descartes, garde son intérêt et son importance propre. A part son caractère unique, comme série complète de lettres échangées entre deux hommes d’une distinction si différente, elle nous montre avec quelle précaution il nous faut accepter le texte des lettres de Clerselier et le récit de Baillet sur la vie de Descartes en Hollande. Et comme toutes les vies de Descartes reposent finalement sur Clerselier (...) et Baillet, notre Correspondance nous montre qu’il est nécessaire d’examiner à nouveau tout le problème. (shrink)

Originally published in 1948. Moses Maimonides was one of the most powerful philosophers of the Middle Ages. The philosophical basis which he elaborated for Judaism had a profound influence on mediaeval Christian thinkers. This volume describes the full background of Maimonides’s thinking in its twelfth-century historical and religious context.

The problem to which the present paper is addressed is one aspect of that of the relationship between Religion and Morality. That God is good is a proposition which presents itself to many with axiomatic force, and by its help the path is traced which leads directly either from Religion to Morality or from Morality to Religion. Yet the reflective mind may well ask: By what evidence, or in what way, do we know that God is good? If the proposition (...) rests on evidence in the ordinary sense, what is it and wherein lies its convincing character? Or if it rests, as is often asserted, on another sort of knowledge altogether, what is this non-experiential cognition and what are its guarantees? Or again, we may ask whether the proposition is analytic, i.e. (shrink)