Author: David W. Rodick Publisher: Lexington Books ISBN: 1498510442 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 153
Book Description
Gabriel Marcel and American Philosophy: The Religious Dimension of Experience examines the philosophy of Gabriel Marcel and its relationship to key figures in classical American Philosophy, in particular Josiah Royce, William Ernest Hocking, and Henry Bugbee. Few scholars have taken sufficient note of the fact that Gabriel Marcel’s thought is vitally informed by classical American philosophy. Marcel’s essays on Royce offer a window into the soul of Marcel’s recent philosophical development. The idealism of early Marcel stemmed from an omnipresent sense of a “broken world”—an experience of rent or tear within the tissue of experience similar to what John Dewey referred to as an “inward laceration of the spirit.” Furthermore, Marcel’s intuition concerning the primacy of intersubjective experience can help us understand W. E. Hocking’s thought. Finally, Marcel’s notion of ľ exigence ontologique clarifies his relationship to Henry Bugbee. Marcel and Bugbee explore the contour of experience—the indigenous circuit of associations pertaining to the self as coesse. Through a reflexive act Marcel refers to as “ingatherdness,” the self undergoes increasing degrees of unification by experiencing “an act of faith made explicit only in a dialectical act of participation.” David W. Rodick shows that Marcel’s relationship to these American philosophers is not coincidental, but rather the philosophical expression of his Christian faith. Marcel’s most important legacy is his commitment to unity of Christian philosophizing, a unity derived from both reason and revelation. Its diversity stems from the objective plurality of what is pursued as well as the subjective plurality of those who pursue it. Christian philosophizing seeks a truth that every Christian believes can never be untrue to itself.
Author: Gabriel Marcel Publisher: Read Books Ltd ISBN: 1446547523 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 219
Book Description
I hope that this book will be widely read, and I especially commend it to four classes of persons: I. For myself I have come across nothing more important than M. Marcel’s writings here and elsewhere on the problem of metaphysics. I say problem advisedly: for we are all of us these days in the end puzzled as to what exactly metaphysics is. The strict Thomist has his answer: so has the positivist: so too the Biblical theologian who is much too ready to find in the decay of ontology an argument for the authenticity of ‘Biblical perspectives’. M. Marcel was trained in the tradition of idealism: and he knew the influence both of Bergsen and of W. E. Hocking. His conversation with himself certainly betrays their influences: but it is of far wider significance. Professor Ayer and Dr. E. L. Mascall have their answer to the question what ontology is: they have their formulae. Marcel probes beneath these answers; for him ontology is much more than a body of doctrine. It is the intellectual expression of the human situation; what is expressed in the syllogisms of, for instance, Père Garrigou-Lagrange, is valid only in so far as it catches and summarises the very being of man and the universe, as that being is lived through and met with by man in his pilgrimage through life. I find as I read M. Marcel that the frontiers are blurred reflection, metaphysics, spirituality. And that is the strength of his seemingly inconsequent method. In a way he is too wise to suppose that the arguments of the philosophia perennis are enough in their abstract form to convince a man; they only carry conviction in relation to a whole experience of life of which they are the expression. The issues between the Thomist, the positivist, the idealist are not issues simply of doctrine but of life; and to see what they are, one must probe, stretching language beyond the frontiers of poetry, somehow to convey the issues as things through which men live. 2. The book should be studied closely by the moralist whether he be philosopher or moral theologian. Where some of the most familiar ethical ideas are concerned, Marcel reminds us of their ‘inside’ when we so often in our discussion think simply of their ‘outside’. What is a promise? We have our answer pat, our formula which permits us to go on with the discussion of our obligations to keep the promises we have made and so on. We don’t wait to probe. I find myself inevitably using that word ‘probe’ again and again in connection with M. Marcel: for what he does is to probe the unsuspected profundities of the familiar. Most professional students of ethics are morally philistine, men who give little time to penetrating the ‘inside’ of the ideas they are handling. And there Marcel pulls them up short. 3. The book should be widely read by the many Christian ‘fellow-travellers’ of today, those who follow, as it were, afar off the Christian way without themselves coming yet to the point of an act of faith in the Crucified. Its very incompleteness will respond to their groping anxiety, and it will enrich their vision of life. And this it can do because it eschews dogmatic exposition seeking rather to shew the inside of the truly Christian way of life. Fidelity, hope, charity, mystery—these are fundamental categories of the Christian way: and of all these Marcel has much to say, which is in every way fresh and yet at the same time rooted in the tradition of Catholic Christianity. The reader of such a work as Albert Camus’ La Peste, with its preoccupation with the problem of an atheistic sanctity, will understand M. Marcel. In a way he challenges the possibility of Camus’ vision; and he does so not on dogmatic grounds but by an analysis of holiness and goodness which shews indirectly their inseparability from acknowledgment of the all-embracing mystery of God. An age which has known evil as ours has and does still know it, is inevitably interested in goodness; and it is with goodness, as something inevitably issuing out of God because a gift from him, that Marcel’s studies deal. 4. And lastly I commend this book because at a time when minuteness and subtlety of mind are too often the prerogatives of the light-heartedly destructive, he reminds us that a true minuteness and a true intellectual subtlety are rooted in humility and purity of heart, and manifest the soil in which they are nourished by graciousness whose charm none can escape and a strength of argument which none can break.
Author: John Kaag Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux ISBN: 0374713111 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 273
Book Description
The epic wisdom contained in a lost library helps the author turn his life around John Kaag is a dispirited young philosopher at sea in his marriage and his career when he stumbles upon West Wind, a ruin of an estate in the hinterlands of New Hampshire that belonged to the eminent Harvard philosopher William Ernest Hocking. Hocking was one of the last true giants of American philosophy and a direct intellectual descendent of William James, the father of American philosophy and psychology, with whom Kaag feels a deep kinship. It is James’s question “Is life worth living?” that guides this remarkable book. The books Kaag discovers in the Hocking library are crawling with insects and full of mold. But he resolves to restore them, as he immediately recognizes their importance. Not only does the library at West Wind contain handwritten notes from Whitman and inscriptions from Frost, but there are startlingly rare first editions of Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant. As Kaag begins to catalog and read through these priceless volumes, he embarks on a thrilling journey that leads him to the life-affirming tenets of American philosophy—self-reliance, pragmatism, and transcendence—and to a brilliant young Kantian who joins him in the restoration of the Hocking books. Part intellectual history, part memoir, American Philosophy is ultimately about love, freedom, and the role that wisdom can play in turning one’s life around.
Author: Gabriel Marcel Publisher: ISBN: Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 358
Book Description
Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973) was a French existentialist and playwright who authored some 30 plays and an equal number of philosophical writings. This volume presents a translation of his four act play, The Broken World, with illustrations, commentary, a companion essay by Marcel titled Concrete Approaches to Investigating the Ontological Mystery, and a number of relevant appendices. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Author: Brendan Sweetman Publisher: Rodopi ISBN: 9042023945 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 187
Book Description
This book illustrates the profound implications of Gabriel Marcel's unique existentialist approach to epistemology not only for traditional themes in his work concerning ethics and the transcendent, but also for epistemological issues, concerning the objectivity of knowledge, the problem of skepticism, and the nature of non-conceptual knowledge, among others. There are also chapters of dialogue with philosophers, Jacques Maritain and Martin Buber. In focusing on these themes, the book makes a distinctive contribution to the literature on Marcel.Brendan Sweetman, a native of Dublin, Ireland, is Professor of Philosophy at Rockhurst University, Kansas City, MO, USA. His books include Why Politics Needs Religion: The Place of Religious Arguments in the Public Square (InterVarsity, 2006) and Religion: Key Concepts in Philosophy (Continuum Books, 2007). He has coauthored or coedited several other books, including Truth and Religious Belief (M.E. Sharpe, 1998), and Contemporary Perspectives on Religious Epistemology (Oxford University Press, 1992). Professor Sweetman has published more than fifty articles and reviews in a variety of collections and journals, including International Philosophical Quarterly, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Faith and Philosophy, Philosophia Christi, and Review of Metaphysics. He writes regularly in the areas of continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, political philosophy and ethics.
Author: Jean Wahl Publisher: Fordham Univ Press ISBN: 0823273032 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 286
Book Description
Jean Wahl (1888–1974), once considered by the likes of Georges Bataille, Gilles Deleuze, Emmanuel Levinas, and Gabriel Marcel to be among the greatest French philosophers, has today nearly been forgotten outside France. Yet his influence on French philosophical thought can hardly be overestimated. Levinas wrote that “during over a half century of teaching and research, [Wahl] was the life force of the academic, extra-academic, and even, to a degree anti-academic philosophy necessary to a great culture.” And Deleuze, for his part, commented that “Apart from Sartre, who remained caught none the less in the trap of the verb to be, the most important philosopher in France was Jean Wahl.” Besides engaging with the likes of Bataille, Bergson, Deleuze, Derrida, Levinas, Maritain, and Sartre, Wahl also played a significant role, in some cases almost singlehandedly, in introducing French philosophy to movements like existentialism, and American pragmatism and literature, and thinkers like Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Jaspers, and Heidegger. Yet Wahl was also an original philosopher and poet in his own right. This volume of selections from Wahl’s philosophical writings makes a selection of his most important work available to the English-speaking philosophical community for the first time. Jean Wahl was Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne from 1936 to 1967, save during World War II, which he spent in the United States, having escaped from the Drancy internment camp. His books to appear in English include The Pluralist Philosophies of England and America (Open Court, 1925), The Philosopher's Way (Oxford UP, 1948), A Short History of Existentialism (Philosophical Library, 1949), and Philosophies of Existence (Schocken, 1969).
Author: Gabriel Marcel Publisher: Fordham Univ Press ISBN: 9780823221844 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 261
Book Description
These lectures and essays were regarded by Marcel as the best introduction to his thought. Creative Fidelity not only deals with perennial themes of faith, fidelity, belief, incarnate being, and participation, but also includes chapters on religious tolerance and orthodoxy and an important critical essay on Karl Jaspers.
Author: Gabriel Marcel Publisher: ISBN: 9781587313264 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
French existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1883-1973) is one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. The central themes of his philosophy, which are developed with a blend of realism, concreteness, and common sense, continue to be relevant for the plight of humanity in the twentieth-first century. Marcel's thought emphasizes: the attempt to safeguard the dignity and integrity of the human person by emphasizing the inadequacy of the materialistic life and the unavoidable human need for transcendence; the inability of philosophy to capture the profundity and depth of key human experiences, and so the need to find a deeper kind of reflection; the importance of the experience of inter-subjectivity, which Marcel believes is at the root of human fulfillment, and which also finds expression in the transcendent dimension of human experience, a dimension that cannot be denied without loss, and that often gives meaning to our most profound experiences. Marcel is also one of the few contemporary thinkers who manages to do justice to the subjectivity and individuality of the human person, while avoiding the relativism and skepticism that has tended to accompany these notions, and that has plagued contemporary philosophy after Heidegger. He makes an unwavering effort to challenge the moral relativism and spiritual nihilism of his French rival, Jean-Paul Sartre, and of other representative existentialist philosophers. All of Marcel's important ideas are introduced here, ranging from his unique conception of philosophy; to his original approach to epistemology and the nature of knowled to his view on the nature of the human person, including the idea of being-in-a-situation and the importance of the "context" that the subject lives in for the subject's ideas and experiences; to his approach to religious themes, including the issues of the rationality of religious belief, the question of God's existence, and our longing for the transcendent; and his "concrete approaches" of fidelity, hope, love and faith. There are also selections in which he discusses some of his misgivings about the direction of contemporary culture, especially the effects of technology. Book jacket.
Author: Gabriel 1889-1973 Marcel Publisher: Hassell Street Press ISBN: 9781014317094 Category : Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
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Author: David W. Rodick
Author: Gabriel Marcel
Author: John Kaag
Author: Gabriel Marcel
Author: Brendan Sweetman
Author: Gabriel Marcel
Author: Jean Wahl
Author: Gabriel Marcel
Author: Gabriel Marcel
Author: Gabriel 1889-1973 Marcel