Marquette Studies in Philosophy – serie

This work provides an introduction to the full-range of Neo-Thomist writings, and should be of interest to students of 19th- and 20th-century theology and philosophy.

This book is designed to fill a long-standing gap in the general literature of 20th century philosophy in that it offers a comprehensive view of the philosophy of Max Scheler (1874-1928) and opens up substantial discussions that have hitherto been largely overlooked. The book is solely based on the original texts of the German Collected Edition as well as posthumous and untranslated materials. References to English translations have been made whenever available.The Mind of Max Scheler familiarizes the reader with strains of European thought that are rapidly gaining interest in the Americas, Asia, and Europe itself. Already the pivotal questions, “Who are we?” “What is a human being” reveal the relevance Scheler’s thought has to the self-questioning stance that appears to mark this century’s philosophy as a whole. He also presents us with a cosmic view of what it means to be human, and one is amazed at the scope of his approach that goes beyond his better known European contemporaries Heidegger, Husserl, Ortega, or philosophers of our present time. He addresses spurious value patterns that suffuse the age of capitalism and provides answers, among them, the gleaning of historical textures that are emerging toward the future and through which a lingering awareness of the eternal will eventually surface from the depths of human existence.

Over the past decade there has been renewed interest in the thought of the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel. An English translation of his autobiographical final work Awakenings as well as a collection of his essays on music have recently been published by Marquette University Press. Major philosophical works of his have been reprinted, the foremost among them being the two volume The Mystery of Being, a work in which Marcel discusses almost all of the major components of his thought and which he said contained an approximate synthesis of his ideas. Marcel was among the first to enunciate the distinction between intersubjective (I-thou) relations and subject to object (I-him/her) relations: the important difference between having and being and between problems and mysteries; the phenomena of the lived body and sensation; the concretely situated and dependent character of human existence as well as its supratemporal, transcendent dimension; the centrality of faith, hope, and love in human life, and our obscure and frequently unrecognized but, nevertheless, real experiences of an Absolute Thou and of our dead loved ones. However, Marcel's philosophical writings, including The Mystery of Being, although innovative and insightful, are often not easily understood by even his most sympathetic readers. This chapter by chapter commentary is meant to be used along with Marcel's own words in The Mystery of Being. It is written for those who, though attracted to his work, find it difficult to grasp. That is, the intended audience is not just scholars who have studied Marcel in depth but educated people who are interested in entering into the philosophical reflections of one of the majorCatholic thinkers of the twentieth century.

Written before 1989, when he was stationed in East Berlin with Dutch television and utilised his stay there to write this book as a dissertation for the University of Groningen, it showed how GDR party and historians had sought to reinterpret German history to legitimize their socialist dictatorship and in the process had manipulated history.Although the focus of the book is on the ways in which GDR historians have interpreted and reinterpreted three key figures, Luther, Frederick II (!), and Bismarck, from the perspective of their place in German nation building, the translation offers in fact the only up to date history of historiography in the GDR in English. It is preceded only by Andreas Dorpalen's German History from a Marxist Perspective, written in the 1970s with very different questions in mind. Dorpalen in an excellent study surveys work in the GDR on all phases of German history from the Middle Ages to the recent past and critically assesses the contributions which these writings have made to scholarship beyond ideological lines. Brinks concentrates specifically on the question which the tension between a German national identity and a distinct GDR socialist identity played in GDR historical literature, the former viewing Germany in ethnic terms, the latter defining it in class terms.

Our impressions of leisure today often involve rest, relaxation, and freedom from work. These impressions are misguided if their limits remain unchallenged. This book reveals the deep essence of leisure by repositioning it as a philosophy of communication that cultivates the mind/body. Fashioned after Calvin Schrag’s The Self after Postmodernity, this work explores leisure in discourse, leisure in action, leisure in community, and leisure in transcendence. By integrating the philosophies of Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, Levinas, Pieper, and others, we can illuminate the transformative nature of leisure and experience a reawakening of the contemplative spirit in action.

This book aims to guide its reader through the notorious difficulties of Merleau-Pony's famous "Phenomenology of Perception". The author contextualizes, reconstructs, clarifies and, where necessary, completes Merleau-Ponty's analyses chapter by chapter.

Unlike many of his contemporaries John Henry Newman was comfortable with evolution. This was just one aspect of his lifelong interest in science - Newton was something of a hero. Newman had also, of course, thought deeply about religion. So when, in the late 1850s and early 1860s, he began speculating about the nature of reality - and specifically about the relation between the physical and human worlds - he saw the need to combine a scientific understanding of the physical universe with a Christian understanding of the human person. The Notes he left about this difficult topic were made available in 1970, but they are hard to make sense of. This book presents a readable version of the Notebook and locates them in the cultural and intellectual context of the age. The Newman that emerges is an astonishingly modern thinker, whose ideas bear scrutiny in the light of major philosophical and scientific advances of the twentieth century, from Einstein and Wittgenstein to Turing and Dennett. The Thoughtful Heart opens new insights into Newman’s genius and argues that ‘materialism’ and the concept of a truly unified and radically free human being are not as incompatible as people have thought. Time, Newman wrote, “is necessary for the full comprehension and perfection of great ideas.” Perhaps this is the time for his own great ideas on metaphysics to be fully comprehended at last.

A collection of essays spanning thirty years of her work in Newman studies, Katherine Tillman’s essays complement the many publications on Newman’s theology and spirituality. With degrees in philosophy and literature, Tillman elaborates the broad reach of Newman’s philosophical, educational, historical and classical acumen. Attentive to his philosophical methodologies and to recent Newman scholarship, she compares Newman’s views on a wide range of issues with those of other thinkers, classical and modern.Included in the essays are such topics as Newman’s meaning of “views,” of relations between faith and reason, of imagination, on the college in relation to the university, on research, on whether virtue can be taught, on the development of ideas, on prepredicative experience and on phronesis, on “the gentleman” in relation to the Oratorian, on human nature, and on worldly wisdom in relation to holy wisdom. Newman, Man of Letters, is seen as unique in his prolific and wide-ranging genius.