A Robert Spaemann Reader

Robert Spaemann (b. 1923) is one of the leading Catholic philosophers in Europe today. He is professor emeritus at the University of Munich, and was also professor at the Technische Hochschule of Stuttgart and at the University of Heidelberg. Professor Spaemann has taught at various institutions around the world, and has received honorary doctorates from universities in Switzerland, America, Chile, and Spain. He is a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Papal Academy for Life, as well as an honorary member of the Chinese Academy of the Sciences. Professor Spaemann is the author of over a dozen books including Basic Moral Concepts and Persons: The Distinction between 'Someone' and 'Something' and hundreds of essays, which have been translated into many languages. In 2001, he was awarded Heidelberg's Karl Jaspers Prize.D.C. Schindler is an Associate Professor of Metaphysics and Anthropology at the John Paul II Institute at The Catholic University of America. Prior to this appointment, he was an Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Humanities Department at Villanova University. His publications include The Catholicity of Reason (Eerdmans, 2013), and he has translated books and articles from German, French, and Italian. Professor Schindler is one of the editors of the North American edition of Communio: International Catholic Review.Jeanne Heffernan Schindler is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Cultural and Pastoral Research at the John Paul II Institute in Washington DC. Professor Schindler was formerly an Associate Professor of Political Theory in the Humanities Department at Villanova University. She has published numerous articles and book chapters in the fields of political theory, ethics, law, and Catholic Social Thought. She edited a volume on Christianity and Civil Society: Catholic and Neo-Calvinist Perspectives, published by Lexington Books in 2008.

Spaemann tends, admittedly, to write in a more exploratory, historicizing and dialectical way than is the norm in Anglophone philosophy. But this style masks, I believe, a highly integrated and rigorous vision-a vision well conveyed by this engrossing, erudite and long-overdue volume.

• Introduction ; 1. A Philosophical Autobiography (1983) ; 2. Nature (1973) ; 3. The Traditionalist Error: On the Sociologization of the Idea of God in the 19th Century (1953) ; 4. Bourgeois Ethics and Non-Teleological Ontology (1963) ; 5. From the Polis to Nature: The Controversy Surrounding Rousseau's First Discourse (1973) ; 6. In Defense of Anthropomorphism (2008) ; 7. On Human Dignity (1985) ; 8. Education as an Introduction to Reality: A Speech Commemorating the Anniversary of a Children's Home (1988) ; 9. What Does It Mean to be Cultured? (1995) ; 10. Natural Existence and Political Existence in Rousseau (1965) ; 11. Individual Actions (2000) ; 12. Being and Coming to Be: What Does the Theory of Evolution Explain? (1984) ; 13. The Meaning of the 'Sum' in the 'Cogito Sum' (1987) ; 14. The Undying Rumor: The God Question and the Modern Delusion (2007) ; 15. What Does It Mean to Say that 'Art Imitates Nature'? (2007) ; 16. The End of Modernity? (1986)