Jamie Mclachlan

In 1937, Emmanuel Levinas published a review of Lev Shestov’s Kierkegaard et la philosophie existentielle in the journal Revue des Études Juives. This essay includes a translation of his review as well as an introductory essay that contextualizes it. In her Emmanuel Levinas: The Problem of Ethical Metaphysics (1972), Edith Wyschogrod contended that Levinas’ short review contains what “might well be taken as the program of his own future work.” Both seek a way out of ontology, but Shestov seeks his escape through a violent wrenching out of the tradition of Western ontology. Levinas would later dub this attempt “the wound that bleeds throughout Shestov’s work.” Unlike Shestov, Levinas does not seek a lost primordial freedom that existed before being and has been lost ever since. Because Levinas’ ethics takes its rise in the relation to the other person, he does not suffer from Shestov’s continual wound that cannot be escaped.

In 1971 the French publishing house Aubier-Montaigne published Gabriel Marcel’s previously unpublished 1909 study “The Metaphysical Ideas of Coleridge and their Connection with the Philosophy of Schelling” under the title, Coleridge et Schelling. Marcel’s interest in Schelling is a neglected but very important part of Marcel’s philosophical development. There are several striking similarities between Marcel and Schelling, but I will confine the major thrust of this paper to one issue: the unique way that Marcel and Schelling deal with the relation of freedom and human suffering. This essay focuses on Schelling’s writings that are closestto Marcel’s thought on freedom and suffering, these cover the period from 1809 to around 1815 and include, most importantly for Marcel, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters (Hereafter referred as Of Human Freedom), and two works Schelling left unpublished the “Stuttgart Seminars,” and first draft of The Ages of the World.

Kevin Schilbrack’s manifesto Philosophy and the Study of Religions is an important foundational work for two fields: philosophy of religion and religious studies. The philosophers of religion sometimes appear to better fit Donald Wiebe’s characterization of religionists as crypto-theologians. They seem only really concerned with Christian theology or at the most theism, despite the fact that Christianity only accounts for about a third of what we could call religious people on the planet and theism only about half. They seem to have taken the part of Mr. Thwackum, the Divine, at least in part against Mr. Square, the Philosopher, in that wonderful dispute in Henry Fielding’s The Adventures of Tom Jones:Thwackum replied, this was arguing with the usual malice of all the enemies to the true Church. He said, he doubted not but that all the infidels and hereticks in the world would, if they could, confine honour to their own absurd errors and damnable deceptions; ‘but honour,’ he says, ‘is ..

Preview:/Review: James G. Hart, Hedwig Conrad-Martius’ Ontological Phenomenology, ed. Rodney K.B Parker, 284 pages./ James Hart is an important phenomenological scholar and thinker who is the author of several books and many articles on Husserl, Husserl’s Utopian Poetics, and the phenomenological movement. This book is Hart’s dissertation written at the University of Chicago between 1969 and 1972. The book has an appendix of the opening sections of Conrad-Martius’s Metaphysics of the Earthly translated by Rodney Parker, who encouraged Hart to publish this dissertation almost 50 years after he had defended it at the University of Chicago. Hart first encountered Conrad-Martius through his mentor at Catholic University, Thomas Prufer, who was a friend of Hedwig Conrad-Martius. The Prufers spent summers in Munich where Conrad-Martius taught and Prufer attended her lectures as a student. Hart’s major professor at Chicago was Mircea Eliade and his interest in myth coincided with Conrad-Martius’s work. But Hart’s dissertation was directed by Langdon Gilkey. Hart went to study in Munich in 1967, unfortunately, Conrad-Martius had died in 1966. Hedwig Conrad-Martius’ Ontological Phenomenology is the only monograph in English on the Munich phenomenologist Hedwig Conrad-Martius. She is usually considered a “marginal thinker” in the phenomenological movement and one of the Munich circle of phenomenology. The book is part of Springer’s series on “Women in the History of Philosophy and Sciences.” The discussion of women in the history of philosophy could give a broader picture of whether Conrad-Martius is a marginal figure or whether her thought should have a broader audience. Historical accident certainly has something to do with her relative obscurity. Being a woman, she had a difficult time getting to her habilitation. This situation only became worse in the Third Reich.

The papers presented in this volume honor Thomas O. Buford. Buford is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at Furman University where he taught for over 40 years. Many of the papers in this volume are from former students. But Professor Buford is also a pre-eminent voice of forth generation Personalism, and Boston Personalism in particular. Personalism is a school of philosophical and theological thought which holds that the ideas of “person” and “personality” are indispensable both to an adequate understanding of all metaphysical and epistemological problems, and the key to an adequate theory of ethical and political human interaction. Most personalists assert that personality is an irreducible fact found in all existence, as well as in all interpretation of the meaning of existence and the truth about experience. Anything that seems to exist impersonally, such as inanimate matter, nevertheless can exist and have meaning only as related to some personal being, according to personalists. The Boston Personalist tradition was innaugurated by Borden Parker Bowne and continued by Edgar S. Brightman, Peter Bertocci, John Lavely, Carol Robb and Martin Luther King.

Preview: In Jane Campion’s recent film version of Thomas Savage’s Power of the Dog, young Peter comes across his, and his mother’s tormentor, Phil’s secret hiding place. There he discovers in a lean-to the cowboy homophobic Phil’s copies of Physical Culture. As he leafs through the magazines, he sees the famous pictures of Eugen Sandow and his fig leaf posed as the Farnese Hercules. The scene does not appear in Savage’s novel. Flash backward or forwards a few years depending on whether you place Peter and Phil in 1925 or 2021 and you have Tim Curry as Dr. Frank-n-Furter belting out the invitation to guests to “take in an old Steve Reeves movie” in the introductory musical number “Sweet Transvestite” in the musical extravaganza The Rocky Horror Picture Show.