Hegel introduced the Phenomenology of Mind as a work on the problem of knowledge. In the first chapter, entitled “Sense Certainty, or the This and Meaning,” he concluded that knowledge cannot consist of an immediate awareness of particulars ). The tradition discusses sense certainty in terms of this failure of immediate knowledge without, however, specifically addressing the problem of reference. Yet reference is distinct from knowledge in the sense that while there can be no knowledge of objects without reference, there (...) may be reference without knowledge. If that is the case, then the failure of immediate knowledge does not entitle us to conclude anything about the success or failure of reference. It is not surprising, then, that a few scholars have begun to examine sense certainty primarily as a thesis about reference. (shrink)

Bernhard Deister’s book Anthropologie im Dialog is a comparison of aspects of Karl Rahner’s theology with the psychology of Carl Rogers. Here the dialogue partner of the German philosophical theologian is an American psychologist of influence. The author begins: “These pages present two exemplary pictures of the human person, from theology and psychology. They unfold their approaches in an interdisciplinary dialogue.” The following pages summarize this comparison. Both thinkers see the human being as an active subject living in the tensions (...) between individuality and relation­ship, and then between immanence and transcendence. Building on this, Rogers’ psychology centers on the dynamics and emotions accompanying life with social groups, while Rahner is frequently involved in drawing particular theological disciplines like moral theology or ecclesiology forward into creative reflections on tradi­tion, spirituality, and praxis amid church and society. (shrink)

The Encyclopedia of Philosophy could state accurately in 1967: "Of all the major German philosophers, Schelling is the least known in the English-speaking world." A tentative survey discloses few articles and books on one who is casually ranked with Hegel. There is, in fact, not one book-length study in English on Schelling’s thought.

The nephew of the German philosopher Martin Heidegger was ordained a priest in the Roman Catholic Church for the Archdiocese of Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany. Heinrich Heidegger, born in 1928, was the son of Fritz Heidegger , the younger brother of the philosopher. Soon after the ordination of a Roman Catholic to the priesthood he celebrates his First Mass, and after that special Eucharist there follows a dinner and reception enhancing the day. The following pages give a translation of the (...) remarks made in 1954 by Martin Heidegger at the dinner after the First Mass of his nephew Heinrich. There are then some reflections on themes from this brief discourse relating to Heidegger’s thinking, motifs like the disclosure of Being, the centrality of individual existence, and the pervasiveness of history. In 2002, Fr. Heinrich Heidegger responded to an inquiry about the priest’s close relationship to his uncle, and that essay gives a further context for information on Heidegger and faith and church. (shrink)

Paul Tillich and Karl Rahner were Christian theologians who thought out of a modern perspective: transcendental, existential, and historical. One was from a Protestant church joining Calvinist and Lutheran traditions, and the other belonged to the Roman Catholic Society of Jesus; both studied Immanuel Kant and learned from Martin Heidegger. Tillich's theology unfolded amid and after the two World Wars with marked cultural changes, while Rahner's years were particularly marked by the changes of Vatican II and cultural shifts after 1960. (...) Both are known for fashioning a theology of the Kingdom of God wider than church membership. This comparison looks at their audiences, the structure of the major systematic work of each, similarities illustrated in a few themes, and contrasting orientations. (shrink)

Among the almost fifty speakers at the Davos Seminars from 1928 to 1931 were Paul Tillich and Erich Przywara, S.J. Tillich discussed contemporary philosophies of religion with the Catholic Przywara. While the basic question of these lectures at Davos was the suitable form of religion for the modern person, the speakers often were presenting theologies, Lutheran and Catholic, on grace and nature. Tillich went beyond both the liberal Protestantism of the late nineteenth century and the new dialectical theology of Karl (...) Barth, while Przywara sought to leave behind a sterile neo-medievalism for a new philosophy of revelation drawing on Thomas Aquinas, John Henry Newman, and Max Scheler. Przywara reviewed many of Tillich's writings, and in the 1950s he was invited to contribute an essay to a volume honoring the Protestant theologian who had been forced to immigrate to the United States in 1934. Tillich and Przywara were an early ecumenical encounter. (shrink)

This text considers Aquinas the theologian, his profession as a teacher and preacher, his influence past and present, and theology as the subject of his thought and most of his writings. It examines the Summa theologiae in terms of its purpose and multiple structures. The centre piece of this volume is a tour through the themes of Christianity, as presented in the Summa, themes which range from Triune divine being, to the graced person as the image of God, and a (...) member of the body of Christ, to the life beyond death. (shrink)

Catholic theology today is not so much a new idea about God or Christian data but word, message, and medium interpreting and communicating the kerygma.

This article describes the presence of Karl Rahner in philosophical, theological, and propagandistic works published in the Soviet Union or published outside the USSR and distributed within it. Some references to Rahner appeared in self-published works without the approval of Soviet censors. These included the works of Orthodox theologians such as Sergej Želudkov and Alexander Men’. Other references to Rahner appeared in anti-religious propaganda and in works by Marxist-Leninist philosophers such as Bronislavas Juozas Kuzmickas. By 1992, the year following the (...) collapse of the USSR, Rahner began to receive a more favorable reception in the writing of philosophers such as Elena B. Timerman. (shrink)

Without exaggeration one can trace the beginnings of the Schelling renaissance taking place now in the last decades of this century to the symposium held at Bad Ragaz in 1954. That meeting, whose proceedings were published in a limited edition, was held to honor the one hundredth anniversary of Friedrich Schelling's death. The event and the volume did not receive great attention. An anniversary symposium, twenty-five years later, and this collection of the symposium's addresses indicate how far Schelling studies have (...) progressed in recent decades. (shrink)