John F. Crosby

My interlocutor is Locke with his reduction of person to personal consciousness. This reduction is a main reason preventing people from acknowledging the personhood of the earliest human embryo, which lacks all personal consciousness. I show that Catholic Christians who live the sacramental life of the Church have reason to think that they are, as persons, vastly more than what they experience themselves to be, for they believe that the sacraments work effects in them as persons that can only be believed but that cannot be experienced within themselves in this life. I also show that Christians and non-Christians alike have an experience of moral good and evil in themselves that implies that they are, as moral persons, far more than they find in their conscious self-presence. It is, therefore, natural to think that if my being as person so far exceeds my consciousness, I may well have once existed as person even before the awakening of consciousness.

Central to the Cowdin-Tuohey paper is the concept of a moral authority proper to medical practitioners. Much as I agree with the authors in refusing to degrade doctors to the status of mere technicians, I argue that one does not succeed in retrieving the moral dimension of medical practice by investing doctors with moral authority. I show that none of the cases brought forth by Cowdin-Tuohey really amounts to a case of moral authority. Then I try to explain why no such cases can be found. Developing an insight that is common to all the major moral thinkers in the philosophia perennis, I show that doctors are professionally competent with respect only to a part of the human good; morally wise persons are competent with respect to that which makes man good as man. I try to show why it follows that a) professional expertise has no natural tendency to pass over into moral understanding, and that b) doctor and non-doctor alike start from the same point in developing their understanding of medical morality. It follows that the authors fail in their attempt to de-center the moral magisterium of the Church by setting up centers of moral authority outside of the Church.

This article responds to Dr. Gallup's comments on animal rights. We are not yet ready to discuss whether animals have rights as long as we cannot give a better account of why human persons have rights than the account offered by Dr. Gallup. He thinks that persons have rights only if we say they do. I claim that we have rights for a very different and far more rational reason, namely because we are persons. We say we have rights not to create them but to register the existence of rights which we had before we said anything on the subject. Rights are social in the sense that they can be respected or violated only by another person. But they are not social in the sense that they are conferred by a social consensus. As soon as one person encounters another, the rights of each become actual, and this whether the rights are socially recognized and vindicated or not; for they emerge necessarily as a result of the fact that it is two persons who encounter each other. The only way Dr. Gallup can resist my position is to maintain that there are no persons in reality, but that a being is a person only if we say so. 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Towards the end of his response to me, Lee presents an argument for the necessity of interpreting all evil as privation. I counter this argument by showingthat it works only for what I call “formal” good and evil, but not for what I call “contentful” good and evil. In fact, evil that is “contentful” presents a challenge tothe privation theory that I had not discussed in my article. I then proceed, in the second part of my response, to revisit the three cases of evil that in my original paper I had presented as challenges to the privation theory. I engage Lee’s objections to these three counterexamples and I try to explain in a new way why the principle of badness in each of them, especially in pain/suffering and in moral evil, is not just a lack or a deficiency.

Phenomenologists were concerned with showing that essential structures of being, knowable by rational insight, are found more abundantly than commonly thought. Reinach shows that in the civil law there are essential structures, such as the structure of promising or of owning. These pre-positive structures provide the civil law with a foundation that can be known by philosophical insight. Though the enactments of the civil law are changeable, essential foundations are not. Of particular significance is Reinach's concept of a social act, that is, of an act that addresses another and has to be heard by the other in order to be complete. Reinach shows that the essence of legally relevant acts, such as promising, comes to evidence when they are understood as social acts.

In this article I explain various points of contact between Newman and the Catholic philosophical tradition. I begin with Newman’s personalism as it is found in the Grammar of Assent, especially in the distinction between notional and real assent, and in the distinction between formal and informal inference. Then I proceed to Newman’s personalism as it is found in his teaching on conscience and on doctrinal development. I then consider Newman as proto-phenomenologist and also as an Augustinian thinker. Finally, I discuss Newman’s teaching on moral and intellectual virtue in The Idea of a University. If I had to pick one utterance of Newman that epitomizes his philosophical thought in a way that engages Catholic philosophers, I would pick the motto of the Grammar of Assent: “Non in dialectica complacuit Deo salvum facere populum tuum.”

In this essay, I try to advance the reception of Karol Wojtyła’s seminal essay “Subjectivity and the Irreducible in Man.” In particular I try to understand and to think through the distinction that he makes between the “personalist” and the “cosmological” image of man. I unpack Wojtyła’s concept of subjectivity, which underlies all that he says about the personalist image of man. I give particular attention to all that he says about the unity formed by the two images. I then proceed to apply Wojtyła’s analysis to a certain cosmological challenge to a personalist understanding of man: it is the challenge that comes from looking at the immensity of the cosmos and at the infinitesimal smallness of man in it and of thinking that man is swallowed up in this immensity and obliterated in his importance. I argue that precisely the subjectivity of the person implies that there is in each person an “infinite abyss of existence” so that each person is in reality his or her own whole and is no mere part of the cosmic whole but is incommensurable with it.

In the course of his polemic against Kant’s moral philosophy, Scheler was led to depreciate moral obligation and its place in the existence of persons. This depreciation is part of a larger anti-authoritarian strain in his personalism. I attempt to retrieve certain truths about moral obligation that tend to get lost in Scheler: moral obligation is not merely “medicinal” but has a place at the highest levels of moral life; the freedom of persons is lived in an incomparable way in responding to moral obligation; obligation and obedience even have an indispensable place in the existence of Christians. Drawing on the studies of Scheler by Rudolf Otto, Karol Wojtyla, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Dietrich von Hildebrand, I show how Scheler’s personalism is corrected and enhanced once we distance ourselves from his anti-authoritarian animus against obligation and restore obligation to its place in the existence of persons.

My interlocutor is anyone who denies peisonhood to the embryo on the grounds that a human person can exist only in conscious activity and that in the absence of consciousness a person cannot exist at all. I probe personal consciousness to the point at which the distinction between the being and the consciousness of the human person appears, and argue on the basis of this distinction that the being of a person can exist in the absence of any consciousness. I proceed to argue that it is not only entirely possible for the embryo to be a human person, but that, given the embodied peisonhood of us human beings, this is the only reasonable assumption which we can make. Keywords: human embryo, personhood, being, consciousness, embodiment CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

It is proposed to test the privation theory of evil by examining three kinds of evil: (1) the evil of the complete destruction of some good (as distinct from the wounding of that good); (2) the evil of physical pain; and (3) certain forms of moral evil in which the evildoer is hostile to some good. It is shown that in none of these cases does evil seem to fit the privation scheme, and that in the second and third case evil seems to be in some way “more” than privation. In conclusion it is argued that to entertain such doubts about the privation theory has nothing to do with restoring a Manichean view of evil. In fact, one can entertain these doubts and still affirm that evil is parasitic on good.

Newman often argued like this in debate: “you do not accept this claim of mine because you think that it is exposed to certain objections; but this is unreasonable of you, because you make this other claim which is also, if you think it through, equally exposed to the same kind of objections; therefore, you should either withdraw your objections against me, or else give up that claim that you have been making.” Some contemporaries of Newman thought that he unwittingly lent support to unbelief by defending his views with this “kill-or-cure” argument, as he called it. This essay defends Newman’s argument against his critics in such a way as to contribute to an understanding of Newman’s rhetoric.

Metropolitan John Zizioulas has recently written a probing assessment of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s The Nature of Love. Zizioulas has thereby opened a dialogue between his own theological personalism and von Hildebrand’s phenomenological personalism. In this paper, I am at continuing this dialogue. I formulate three objections that I see Zizioulas raising to von Hildebrand’s claim that love exists as a value-response. In considering them, I try to eliminate misunderstandings, to identify areas of agreement and disagreement, and to show where each of these thinkers has something to gain from the encounter with the other. Most of all, I aim at working towards an understanding of love that incorporates the insights of both von Hildebrand and Zizioulas.