The present article focuses on American and European personalism during the early part of the twentieth century . The immediate predecessor of the personalist movement as such was the philosopher Rudolf Hermann Lotze who inspired two of his students, Methodist Borden Parker Bowne and Rudolf Eucken. In France, in the meantime, Charles Renouvier published his Le personnalisme in 1903, while Emmanuel Mounier later presented personalism as a new political philosophy under the influence Alexandre Marc’s comments on Nicolai Hartmann’s Ethik. Mounier’s (...) Manifeste au service du personnalisme develops a dialectical critique on both liberal bourgeois individualism and all forms of collectivism, all, in his opinion, ‘inverted theocracies’ with shared dehumanizing tendencies. As alternative, it was necessary for personalism to become the leading spiritual and philosophical guide in order to Refaire la Renaissance . As a matter of fact, Jacques Maritain’s Humanisme intégral might justly be considered a first attempt to describe the nature of a new civilization in any detail. Maritain is more explicit on the Christian face of this new humanism, while refuting any kind of mancentred humanism. Mounier’s and Maritain’s personalist ideas together with Max Scheler’s non-formal ethics of value and his Aktlehre had a considerable influence on Louis Janssens. In Personne et société he not only criticizes several contemporary European ideologies in line with Mounier, but he also accepts that persons can only be really known by co-operation, in line with Scheler’s idea of inter-subjectivity and Aquinas’ idea of the social nature of the human being. Following Maritain, Janssens distinguishes between the human being as individual and the human person. Individuality contains a material component, characterized by its concrete position in space and time, while the person and his/her spiritual component facilitate a movement away from the self towards others in freedom and love. The person is not only understood as the highest value, he/she is able to control the hierarchy of values by his/her ordo amoris, a flexible undertaking influenced by the love of others in which love opens each person for growth towards higher values. (shrink)

The author presents and compares Maritain’s and Aquinas’s accounts of our discovery (1) of being as existing; and (2) of being as being (ens inquantum ens or the subject of metaphysics). He finds that especially in his final discussion of how one discovers being as being, Maritain’s account suffers greatly from the absence of any appeal to Aquinas’s negative judgment of separation and also from the omission of reference to the role of judgments of existence in one’s discovery of a (...) premetaphysical notion of being. Wippel finds no evidence in Aquinas’s texts for Maritain’s defense of an intuition of being or of existence. (shrink)

The paper offers a historical survey of the emergence of logical formalization in twentieth-century analytically oriented philosophy of religion. This development is taken to have passed through three main ?stages?: a pioneering stage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (led by Frege and Russell), a stage of crisis in the 1920s and early 1930s (occasioned by Wittgenstein, logical positivists such as Carnap, and neo-Thomists such as Maritain), and a stage of rehabilitation in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s (led (...) by the Cracow Circle and Quine). (shrink)

The recent retrieval of Christian humanism by Charles Taylor and Nicholas Boyle invites further theological elaboration; in particular, to clarify the relationship between their humanist concern for the common good and their Christian desire for religious transcendence. Jacques Maritain provides some such elaboration by grounding Christian humanism on the doctrine of the Incarnation. This article complements that foundation through a consideration of the Thomistic doctrine of hope, which describes how the believer approaches God under the aspect of the human good. (...) Hope therefore includes, in a single virtue, the two potentially disparate elements of contemporary Christian humanism. Concluding reflections on recent interpretations of Vatican II and on religious fundamentalism give some historical substance to this theoretical claim. (shrink)

This article argues that Maritain’s philosophy of human intellection was more indebted to Bergson’s views on the centrality of intuition, metaphysics, andthe instrumental character of scientific reason, than some of Maritain’s published criticisms of Bergson might lead one to believe. Toward the end of his life Maritain spoke of twentieth-century Thomism’s debt to Bergson.

In this paper I investigate how works of fine art differ from products of craft. I argue that historical and institutional definitions are incomplete becausethey fail to explain what is common to everything we call art. I then consider the way in which Francis J. Kovach and Jacques Maritain define art. I argue thatKovach’s four-fold division fails on logical grounds. Maritain’s division, however, makes the distinction between fine and useful art a matter of degree, not a division into separate species. (...) This does reflect our use of the word art, and means that, when we call something a work of fine art, we are not designating it as part of a species. Rather we signify that it possesses a particular attribute which, in some way, belongs to every product of human making, but is more clearly present, or more attended to, in works of fine art. (shrink)

The integration of personalism into business ethics has been recently studied. Research has also been conducted on humanistic management approaches. The conceptual relationship between personalism and humanism , however, has not been fully addressed. This article furthers that research by arguing that a true humanistic management is personalistic. Moreover, it claims that personalism is promising as a sound philosophical foundation for business ethics. Insights from Jacques Maritain’s work are discussed in support of these conclusions. Of particular interest is his distinction (...) between human person and individual based on a realistic metaphysics that, in turn, grounds human dignity and the natural law as the philosophical basis for human rights, personal virtues, and a common good defined in terms of properly human ends. Although Maritain is widely regarded as one of the foremost twentieth century personalist philosophers, his contribution has not been sufficiently considered in the business ethics and humanistic management literature. Important implications of Maritainian personalism for business ethics as philosophical study and as practical professional pursuit are discussed. (shrink)

El presente trabajo pretende exponer dos posibles visiones acerca del conocimiento de las esencias en Tomás de Aquino. Por un lado, desde la crítica del conocimiento del filósofo Jaques Maritain, quien pondrá en tela de juicio que el acceso del hombre a las esencias de las cosas sea tan simple como suele presentarse, conduciendo así a lo que hemos llamado una postura gnoseológica. Por otro lado, intentaremos mostrar que probablemente existe otro horizonte de lectura distinto al sostenido por el filósofo (...) francés. Y tal horizonte puede llevarnos a entender las afirmaciones del Aquinate desde una mirada que hemos denominado metafísica. (shrink)

Maritain’s position as concerns the distinction and the relationship between the sciences and philosophy is not easy to present in a precise manner. In fact, different interpretations have been proposed. In this article, we focus on the invaluable contribution made by the French philosopher whose thought draws largely fromt hat of Thomas Aquinas. Maritainian doctrine on the levels of knowledge seems to guarantee both the autonomy of the different orders of knowledge as well as the relationship among them. Furthermore, it (...) contains underlying ideas in harmony with recent developments in epistemology. (shrink)