Fritz Buri has been known to the English speaking world primarily as an existentialist theologian who took Bultmann’s program of demythologizing or existential interpretation to its radical conclusions and as a critic of Heidegger’s so-called meditative thinking of Being which, says Buri, provides no basis for critical theological reflection. The problem raised by demythologizing and by radical theology, says Hardwick, is finally one of language and meaning, a problem which he expresses in terms of the objective status of theological language. (...) Hardwick argues that while most contemporary theological options ignore or fail to come to grips with the dialectic between non-objectivity and objectivity, Buri’s position provides a dialectic in which he intends that the objectivity of theological discourse take account directly of the non-objectivity of religious faith. The question is whether Buri can accomplish his intention in such a way as to give content to the non-objectivity of the Christian faith. Buri attempts to assign positive meaning to the Christian message by talking of concrete possibilities for existing which can be revelatory to the extent that they are divested of their objectivity and understood as expressions of self-understanding. (shrink)

Although there have been a number of important studies of Karl Jaspers by European scholars, until recently there were in English only the Schilpp volume on Jaspers, brief studies by Allen and Lichtigfield, and a few articles scattered in journals and books. In 1968 Eugene Long published Jaspers and Bultmann. This was followed by three studies published during 1970-71: Charles Wallraff, Karl Jaspers ; Oswald Schrag, Existence, Existenz and Transcendence ; and Sebastian Samay, Reason Revisited. Ehrlich’s book is a welcome (...) addition to the study of Jaspers. Ehrlich was a student of Jaspers in Basel and apparently is devoted to his thought. The book is characterized by a thorough knowledge of the sources. It is a clear-headed discussion of Jaspers’ understanding of faith which takes readers into the central spirit of Jaspers’ philosophy, a spirit characterized by combativeness and openness in communication with others in search for the meaning and truth of human existence. Jaspers’ position is developed in the context of political and religious orthodoxies showing clearly the spirit of freedom and openness which is characteristic of Jaspers’ work. This topic permits the author to explore in detail the themes of communication, authority and tradition, and cipher language which are at the heart of all of Jaspers’ work. (shrink)

Earl R. MacCormick provides his readers with a survey of recent studies in the languages of science and religion arguing that both science and religion employ metaphors and that the one is as vulnerable as the other to attacks of meaninglessness on the grounds of verifiability and falsifiability criteria of meaning. While acknowledging that the contents and intentions of metaphors in science and religion differ, MacCormick argues that science and religion use metaphors for similar purposes and that both create myths (...) when they falsely attribute reality to what are in fact tentative explanations. His conclusion is that one cannot legitimately reject religious language as meaningless on the grounds that its language is metaphorical without recognizing that the language of science is subject to the same criticism. (shrink)

In his interpretation of Scheler’s Wesen und Formen der Sympathie, Luther argues that although Scheler begins his analysis with an investigation of the phenomenon, sympathy, it is in fact the love phenomenon which is shown to be the more fundamental, and further, that Scheler’s clarification of the love phenomenon reveals a dynamic structure of Being. Scheler’s investigation is a phenomenological one, one intended not so much to demonstrate a thesis as to evoke a way of looking at the phenomena of (...) sympathy and love in order that one may understand descriptively what is being lived or experienced. According to Scheler man discovers himself as already in the world in relation to persons and things and thus sympathy and love are relational structures. Given this relatedness each term of a relation is meaningful only as a reference to the other and an analysis of one term independently of the other is an abstraction. Personal being is also within this relational unity and the most significant structure of this unity is said to be love or more concretely, "persons in love." According to Scheler a person is only in relatedness and while there are various levels at which this relatedness may be described Scheler is primarily concerned in Wesen und Formen to describe it at a metaphysical level where Being is said to disclose itself. (shrink)

Steinkrauss has written a text for students taking their first course in aesthetics. The book is intentionally traditional and systematic, for while Steinkrauss does not eschew the importance of detailed analyses of selected problems, he does see a need for beginning students to gain an overview of the problems with which philosophers are concerned in the arts. Beginning with what might be called, in a broad sense, a phenomenology of aesthetic experience, the author combines descriptions of distinguishing characteristics of aesthetic (...) experience with frequent references to examples in the arts in an attempt to assist students to reflect on their ordinary aesthetic experiences and judgments. Aesthetic experience is intentional for Steinkrauss, that is, refers to some object, and this leads to the second chapter of the book in which he discusses the work of art. Steinkrauss is aware of some of the difficulties associated with defining a work of art but shows little patience with the efforts of some philosophers in the analytic tradition to provide definitions or to show that definitions are not possible. Steinkrauss prefers to speak of what he calls distinguishing characteristics of works of art. (shrink)

Search for Gods is an exploration of man’s experiences in his natural and cultural world with the intent of rediscovering and describing the transcendent foundation of human existence which is said to be the ground of man’s freedom and his achievement of the fullness of his being-in-the-world. Writing from a Heideggerian perspective, Vycinas argues that the mythical world view, in which man is open to and takes part in transcendental reality, understood as the play of nature’s forces, was replaced in (...) Western thought and culture by an anthropocentric view in which man establishes his own world, and the transcendental is removed to the perimeter of the unreal. In the anthropocentric world, man understands the absence of the transcendental foundation to be a mark of his supremacy. But Vycinas holds that this is merely a phase in the cultural development of man and argues that when man meditates on his ways he will discover the insecurity of his ways and begin to search for foundations other than anthropocentric ones. (shrink)

Process philosophy is said by some to be the future of American philosophy. This collection of essays, ranging from studies of Whitehead to Camus and Sir Muhammad Iqbal, extends the discussion far beyond the boundaries of North America. Several of the essays are of a more systematic character. Donald Hanks analyzes the category of process as a pre-conceptual principle used to organize experience into an intelligible pattern. Andrew Reck provides an analysis of the meaning and justification of what he considers (...) to be the ten ideas or categories requisite for a system of process philosophy. Charles Schmidtke argues that process philosophy faces a fundamental decision regarding whether the character of reality as process is given as an ultimate datum or whether process philosophy structures reality in accordance with the characteristic of creative becoming. Other essays in the volume are concerned with the concept of process in the work of a variety of philosophers, some of whom are less directly in the process tradition. Ramona Cormier analyzes the relationship of the process of experience to its unchanging aspect in connection with Camus’ concern for the meaningfulness of life and the limitations of rational inquiry. Bertrand P. Helm provides a study of James’ concept of time and Patrick S. Madigan a study of the concept of space in Leibniz and Whitehead. Whitehead’s understanding of the interaction of things provides the basis for R. Kirby Godsey’s study of the categories of substance and relation in Whitehead, and Robert C. Whittemore provides an introduction to the process philosophy of Sir Muhammad Iqbal, the little known poet-philosopher and sometime student of James Ward. James Leroy Smith’s article on Whitehead and Marx is a critical comparison of their political philosophies.—E.T.L. (shrink)

Published as volume 10 in the series Analecta Husserliana, edited by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka, this volume is an English translation and revision of the book published in Polish in 1969 under the title, Osoba i Czyn. It is a phenomenological study of man understood as the acting person. It differs from the primary philosophical trend since Descartes in that the primary focus is on action rather than on the cognitive function of persons. Action is taken as a particular moment in experiencing (...) the person and is held to give us insight into the essence of what it is to be a person. Action is understood as conscious action, human action with stress on the purposes and deliberations of action. Morality is held to constitute an intrinsic feature of the action of persons and because of this the findings of this study have implications for ethics. However, the author makes it clear that his interests in this volume are not in moral values as such but only as they give us deeper insights into the nature of the person. (shrink)

The author challenges the narrow philosophical perspective that has characterized much contemporary Anglo-American philosophy and calls for both an expansion of the boundaries of experience and an understanding and appreciation of ordinary experience. Aware that he is dealing with dimensions of experience in which it is difficult to achieve conceptual clarity, McDermott echoes James, who wrote in Psychology—Briefer Course, "It is... the reinstatement of the vague and inarticulate to its proper place in our mental life which I am so anxious (...) to press on the attention.". (shrink)

Harper appeals to philosophy, literature, psychiatry and theology from Augustine to R. D. Laing to present what he calls a coherent picture of the major existential themes found in interior experience. This is not a book in existential philosophy in the usual sense. Indeed Harper argues that academic philosophers have failed to adequately treat interior experience. Interior experience, he says, is largely emotional and does not yield easily to analysis and conceptualization. Harper’s style is exploratory and suggestive, even lyrical at (...) points, as he interprets human experience in accordance with the themes: existence, insecurity, the void, self-isolation and presence. Human existence is, according to Harper, what I make it to be. Yet it is also characterized by insecurity or anxiousness, a sense of estrangement rather than fulfillment and reconciliation. The experience of contemporary man is characterized not only by insecurity but also by a sense of emotional and spiritual disability. God is absent and man experiences reality as indifferent and himself as alone and isolated in a void. Man is not, however, without hope for there is in existentialism and in personal experience the parallel theme of presence, being open to reality as grace, which gives hope of acceptance and love, satisfying the whole man. Harper’s study is scattered with references to Augustine, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Camus, Sartre and others. But these references are controlled from Harper’s own perspective, the result of his meditations on his own and other reports of interior experience. In the Afterword, Harper makes this perspective and his view of the nature of philosophy more clear.—E. T. L. (shrink)

This is an essay in the tradition of classical philosophy which has passed through the criticisms of contemporary philosophy. Lieb argues that views of man which treat him as a conglomerate of separate parts or powers are inadequate because they fail to account for the unity and singleness of beings. We are, according to Lieb, active beings and action is always interaction. We are things to which and in which change takes place and we in turn change other things. We (...) are in time but we also stand apart from it in the sense that we act on time. This does not mean, however, that we are merely transient. We achieve some identity and to explain this we appeal to a being beyond transience with which we interact and we think of this as God or as a kind of god. And to explain that we and our activity incorporate an intelligible and partly public character we appeal to another reality, the intelligible continuity that we find in things or what philosophers have called the Good. (shrink)

John Macmurray, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Edinburgh University, is best known for his Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Glasgow in 1953-54. In those lectures, Self As Agent and Persons in Relation, Macmurray develops the thesis that the form of the personal is the agent and that the self as agent is constituted in its relation to the other. For Macmurray this means that one should no longer conceive the self primarily as a knower set over against objects (...) and as an individual set over against other individuals. He begins with the self understood practically as agent and as an agent who can understand and fulfill himself only through a mutuality of relationships. Universal human community is the ideal norm of human activity and, because community requires relations with a personal other, the notion of universal community ultimately requires a universal and personal other which in its fullest development is the idea of God. It is in religion, then, that the personal finds its fullest expression. (shrink)

Dupré argues that at the center of the cultural crisis of our time is an objectivist attitude, an attitude which results in thinking of human existence using models appropriate to objects with the result that transcendence is lost and man is thought of as a thing to be manipulated. However, a mere retreat into subjectivity is not the answer to this crisis. What is needed is reflection on the subject itself in order to give it a content of its own, (...) and Dupré suggests that a key to this kind of reflection is given in the work of Husserl and Heidegger. It is within the temporality and historicity of the being of man that man discovers his transcending of objectivist states and an openness to the divine, understood as other than an ultimate object separated from the self and opposed to it. Dupré’s brief and provocative book is primarily a series of reflections on the inner life of human existence, guided by critical reflection on the Judaeo-Christian tradition, in which he believes the inner transcendence of the self to have been articulated. It is the passive open character of man to which Dupré invites our particular attention, not the objectifying manipulating character, which is reflected prominently in our technological age. (shrink)