Being in the World: A Quotable Maritain Reader (Quotable Maritain Readers) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 026800899X ISBN 13: 9780268008994

Verlag: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

The work of the lay Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) continues to provoke and inspire readers to engage in a Thomistic approach to many of the questions facing the world today. Maritain’s wide-ranging thought touched on many fields, including aesthetics, anthropology, educational theory, moral philosophy, and ethics, as well as Thomism and its relationship to other philosophical stances.

In Being in the World: A Quotable Maritain Reader, Mario O. D’Souza, C.S.B., has selected seven hundred and fifty of the most salient quotations found in the English translations of fifty-four works by Jacques Maritain. Organized into forty thematic chapters, ordered alphabetically, the book serves as an overview of the areas that Maritain's writings addressed. By referring to entries in Being in the World, readers can quickly locate key passages in Maritain’s writing on a given topic and then turn elsewhere to the full texts for more in-depth study. Complete with a detailed index of key terms, the Reader will be an essential reference tool for the study of Maritain in English.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Mario O. D'Souza, C.S.B., is dean emeritus of the Faculty of Theology at the University of St. Michael's College, Toronto, where he holds the Basilian Fathers Chair in Religion and Education.

Jonathan R. Seiling is an independent scholar affiliated with the University of Toronto.

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I first began reading the works of Jacques Maritain during my undergraduate years while studying philosophy at University College, Dublin. I remember our professor of general metaphysics, the then Fr. Des mond Connell, later the cardinal archbishop of Dublin, encouraging us to read Maritain, adding that he was sure that Maritain was a saint. I soon discovered the intellectual rigor of Maritain’s thought. Preparatory and rudimentary as Maritain’s book An Introduction to Philosophy may seem from its title, it was hardly a work for an undergraduate to grapple with. I am reminded of another “introductory” work that is equally demanding and, although written in a different way and with a different audience in mind, equally rewarding. Like Maritain’s Introduction to Philosophy, it can overwhelm the neophyte expecting a rudimentary work for beginners. I refer to Introduction to Christianity by Fr. Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI.

Maritain’s Introduction to Philosophy presupposes more than a cursory knowledge of the history of philosophy. I was taught philosophy historically, as I believe it should be taught to undergraduates, and I have learned over the years that Maritain’s philosophical corpus is as much a sustained commentary on the history of philosophy as it is a commentary on the integral life of the human person in interaction with the wealth of the created and uncreated orders. Maritain’s engagement with the history of philosophy leads him to state: “The answers which phi losophers have given to the problem of human nature correspond strictly with the position they adopt towards the problem of abstraction.”1 Maritain’s name remains closely associated with that of St. Thomas Aquinas, but his knowledge of the history of philosophy enables him to comment upon, critique, and, when necessary, incorporate the thought of philosophers ranging from the Pre-Socratics to Edmund Husserl. Maritain commands this vast historical field with articulate intellectual precision, and he does not shrink from taking on philosophical giants such as Descartes, Kant, Hegel, and Bergson. And although his disagreement with three great Western thinkers was particularly strong and polemical in his work The Three Reformers: Luther― Descartes―Rousseau, most of his works show a much more measured and charitable tone. Nevertheless, Maritain does not shy away from stating his disagreements clearly and unequivocally.

It is also worth noting the enormous project that Maritain undertook as a philosopher. His own philosophical edifice is both imposing and capacious, containing within it the many ways of encountering the world. He developed a systematic and synthetic corpus on the human engagement with the created and uncreated orders, ranging from meta - physics and political philosophy to the philosophy of nature and aesthetics. Maritain recognized the legitimate place and role of science, both as a specialized form of knowledge and as an essential means of revealing and responding to the given of the world. However, he vigorously opposed interacting or responding to the world in exclusively empirical and measurable terms, for in this he saw the reduction and diminution of human personhood itself, which, in turn, would lead to the diminution of society and of the common good. For, as he reminds the reader, in ultimate terms, the common good is much more than the visible patrimony of a state; it is much more than bricks and mortar, essential though they are. In holding that the common good is something “ethi - cally good,” he maintained that “the common good is not only a system of advantages and utilities but also a rectitude of life, an end, good in itself or, as the Ancients expressed it, a bonum honestum. . . . Only on condition that it is according to justice and moral goodness is the common good what it is, namely, the good of a people and a city, rather than a mob of gangsters and murderers.”

For Maritain, human values―goodness, truth, beauty, the progression of society, the pursuit of the common good, the transcendence of religious faith and belief―were all forms and examples of responding to the invitation of being in the world. Reducing such human responses and engagement to the empirical and measurable alone would be to confine human experience to a dark and lonesome prison, where the dynamic and life-giving light of the intellect and reason were shut out, leaving one to languish, bereft of any source, means, or hope of freedom. Maritain would undoubtedly have agreed with Bernard Lonergan, another philosopher in the Thomist tradition, in condemning the “infantile solution that the real is what is given in immediate experience,” and that “knowing . . . is a matter of taking a good look; objectivity is a matter of seeing of what is there to be seen; reality is whatever is given in immediate experience.”3 Like Lonergan, Maritain believed that meaning, values, and the quest for goodness, truth, and beauty could not be contained by what was given in immediate and sensible experience alone. Of course, he affirmed, like his master St. Thomas Aquinas, that knowledge begins in and through the senses, but human knowledge is more than just sense knowledge.

(Excerpted from Introduction)

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: University of Notre Dame Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 026800899X
• ISBN 13: 9780268008994
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 328
• Herausgeber: D'Souza C.S.B. Mario, Seiling Jonathan R.
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland