Philip Blosser is professor of philosophy at Sacred Heart Theological Seminary in Detroit, Michigan. Born in China, he earned his BA in Far Eastern Studies and Philosophy from Sophia University in Tokyo (1974), an MA in religious studies at Westminster Theological Seminary (1979), a Master's in philosophy at Villanova University (1980), and a doctorate in philosophy at Duquesne University (1985). His interests range from phenomenology and moral philosophy to philosophy of religion and theology.
Clearly humans are material. Like all animals, we experience life and act on the world through ou... more Clearly humans are material. Like all animals, we experience life and act on the world through our bodies. Are we, then, simply a sophisticated form of animal life? Scientific materialism posits that all human behaviour will ultimately be explicable solely in terms of brain functioning. ...
I begin by summarizing Stoker’s study of conscience in Das Gewissen. Then I contrast the initial ... more I begin by summarizing Stoker’s study of conscience in Das Gewissen. Then I contrast the initial acclaim it received from well-known phenomenologists with its subsequent undeserved neglect. One reason for the neglect, I surmise, is the waning of general interest in phenomenological approaches. Other reasons include Stoker’s relative isolation in South Africa, declining interest in Christian approaches to philosophy, and Calvinist concerns about the influence of Bavinck’s scholasticism and Scheler’s phenomenological method on Stoker. I argue that none of these reasons justifies the present neglect of Stoker’s magisterial work and its seminal insights.
This essay compares Scheler’s view of the person in his last (“pantheistic”) period with the view... more This essay compares Scheler’s view of the person in his last (“pantheistic”) period with the views of Keiji Nishitani, a Buddhist representative of the Kyoto School of phenomenology. Scheler eschewed a “substantialist” concept of the person, as did Nishitani in view of the Buddhist “non-self” (muga) doctrine. Both had experienced spiritual crises in their lives. Why did Nishitani turn to the Buddhist concept of “absolute nothingness”? Why did Scheler turn from theism to pantheism? Both saw traditional Christianity and its understanding of the person as intellectually inadequate, though for different reasons. Nishitani focuses on the inadequacies of secondary influences (like Cartesianism) in the Western concept of person, while Scheler focuses on problems of theodicy stemming from the problem of evil and of volition (divine and human) as the source of evil. Both abandon the Christian meaning of personhood.
This article was first published in Phenomenology 2005: Selected Essays from North America, Part ... more This article was first published in Phenomenology 2005: Selected Essays from North America, Part 1, Post Scriptum – Organization of Phenomenological Organizations Series, edited by Lester Embree and Thomas Nenon (Bucharest: Zeta Books, 2007), pp. 99-126
This article was first published as the second chapter in the anthology, Max Scheler’s Acting Per... more This article was first published as the second chapter in the anthology, Max Scheler’s Acting Persons: New Perspectives, edited by Stephen Schneck, Value Inquiry Book Series, No. 131 (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 2002). It finds both positive insights as well as unresolved problems in Scheler's understanding of the person.
An earlier version of this article was presented at a meeting of the Max Scheler Society of North... more An earlier version of this article was presented at a meeting of the Max Scheler Society of North America in conjunction with the Central Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association in Chicago, April 16-19, 2008. The present version of it was subsequenly published in Thomas Nenon and Philip Blosser, eds., Advancing Phenomenology: Essays in Honor of Lester Embree, Contributions to Phenomenology, No. 62 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), pp. 251-268. It examines Scheler's claim of the primacy of value-feeling over rationality and his Pascalian view that "the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing." It then considers Karol Wojtyla's challenges to this view and Peter Spader's defense of Scheler against these challenges. Finally, Spader's analysis is itself challenged by arguing that even if values are 'felt' before they are 'understood', they must be understood before moral choices can be responsibly made.
This article was first presented as a paper under the title of “The Difference between the Moral... more This article was first presented as a paper under the title of “The Difference between the Moral and the Simply Normative” at the Max Scheler Society of North America at the Pacific Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association in Pasadena, California, on March 25, 2004, and subsequently published in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 79, No. 1 (Winter 2005), pp. 121-143.
Like Eugene Kelly’s *Structure and Diversity: Studies in the Phenomenological Philosophy of Max Scheler*, Peter Spader’s *Scheler’s Ethical Personalism: It’s Logic, Development, and Promise* offers some helpful observations in defense of Scheler’s ethics in response to particular criticisms and questions I have tendered over the past decade. For example, in response to hypothetical moral quandaries that I posed in order to question whether Scheler’s hierarchy of material values is in fact able to offer practical moral guidance, Spader notes the importance of discerning the hierarchy of bearers of material values that Scheler differentiates from the hierarchy of material values as such. (p. 278) Accordingly, in response to my persistent suggestion that a tacit reductionism underlies Scheler’s view that the realization (or intended realization) of all material values has moral implications (viz., involves the realization of moral values), Spader again points out the importance of discerning the bearers of various sorts of values. For example, while conceding the relative autonomy of “aesthetic” from “moral” values, Spader notes that the bearers of moral values, in contrast to aesthetic values, are always persons, never mere objects, as in the case of aesthetic values. (p. 284f.) Thus the Schelerian claim that the realization of material values, because it necessarily involves personal agency, inevitably bears a moral significance (involving the realization of moral values) seems securely preserved.
This, however, is where I wish to interject and develop several further distinctions in my line of questioning against the Schelerian legacy. First, I wish to refine the received claim that persons are necessarily and always the bearers of moral values by distinguishing between the person as “subject” and “object” and insisting that the person functions as bearer of values (in the sense of agent) only subjectively. This allows us to concede that non-personal entities may also function as bearers of moral values, if not subjectively as agents, then objectively as things bearing a moral significance or imputation. This shows that the distinction between moral and non-moral values is capable of being analyzed in more careful, considered and helpful detail than hitherto observed, and may need to be so analyzed in order to avoid perpetuating various persistent (if inadvertent) distortions and misunderstanding of the phenomena in question.
Second, I wish to persist in my audacious line of questioning against the received claim that the realization of every good (such as aesthetic good) involves a moral good. Kant’s distinction between the moral and the legal (good, though not morally good) may be a case in point. Here I want to try to refine my distinction between moral and non-moral goods (both in the sense of values and their bearers), and to show that there are many species of good that are irreducible to moral good.
Thirdly and finally, following upon the logic of the foregoing distinction, and in response to Scheler’s language about the ethical and ideal “oughts,” I wish to introduce a new distinction between the “normative” as such, and the “moral” as a species of the normative. Thus I wish to allow for and to acknowledge the sense of “oughtness” or obligation attendant to the realization of various non-moral values, without following what I consider the reductionistic logic that would have us regard every sort of normativity (whether mathematical, logical, economic, aesthetic) as moral normativity. The worthiness of praise or blame attendant to a particular performance of athletic exhertion, mathematical calculation, or interior decoration, may be analogous to that found and experienced within the realm of moral activity, but is not reducible to it.
This article was first presented as a paper at the Third International Symposium of the Max Schel... more This article was first presented as a paper at the Third International Symposium of the Max Scheler Gesselschaft in Jena, Germany, May 22-24, 1997, and subsequently published in Denken des Ursprungs/Ursprungs des Denkens: Scheler's Philosophie und ihre Anfänge in Jena, ed. Christian Bermes, et al. Kritisches Jahrbuch der Philosophie 3 (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1998), pp.160-171. It argues that as invaluable and insightful a defense as Scheler’s “ordo amoris” provides against reductionist impulses in intellectual history, it was not sufficiently worked out by him so as to achieve adequate clarity. Specifically, the conception needs to be worked out more carefully in order to achieve an adequate analysis of the distinctions between the various subjective faculties of value-apprehension, whether the apprehended values are emotional or logical or mathematical; and in order to achieve a clear analysis of the objective interrelationships among both logical and nonlogical values, and moral and nonmoral values.
This article was first presented as a paper at a conference on “Japanese and Western Phenomenolo... more This article was first presented as a paper at a conference on “Japanese and Western Phenomenology” sponsored by the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and the Japanese Society for Phenomenology in Osaka, Japan, 24-27 October, 1989, and subsequently published in Philosophy Today 34, No. 3 (Fall 1990), pp. 195-205. It compares and contrasts the notion of the "a priori" in the traditions of logical empiricism and phenomenology.
This article was first published in Philosophia Reformata, Vol. 58 (1993), pp. 192-209. It exami... more This article was first published in Philosophia Reformata, Vol. 58 (1993), pp. 192-209. It examines Dooyeweerd's philosophical anthropology and identifies several problems in it related to Kant, Dooyeweerd's conception of time, and discrepancies between his philosophical conception of man and his affirmations of Biblical language about man. The work of G.C. Berkouwer and Peter Steen are frequenly referenced.
This article was first published in The New Oxford Review (April 2002), pp. 18-25, and subsequent... more This article was first published in The New Oxford Review (April 2002), pp. 18-25, and subsequently translated into Russian by Oleg-Michael Martynov in Una Fides (Fall, 2003). It takes as its starting point a debate over ecclesiology in the pages of the Jesuit America magazine between Walter Cardinal Kasper and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in 2001, and uses this as a foil to examine the conflict between orthodoxy and dissent among modern Catholics and the state of the post-Vatican II Church.
This review was first published under the title of "God Among the Philosophers" in the New Oxford... more This review was first published under the title of "God Among the Philosophers" in the New Oxford Review, Vol. 66, No. 9 (October, 1999), pp. 39-42. Alvin Plantinga, an analytic philosopher of religion from the Dutch Reformed tradition, has been twice president of the American Philosophical Association, a founding member of the Society of Christian Philosophers, Gifford Lecturer in Scotland in 1987, and feted in a *Time* magazine article in the spring of 1980 as one of a small number of philosophers responsible for a quiet revolution in which "God is making a comeback" in philosophical circles. The name usually associated with Plantinga's school of religious philosophy is "Reformed Epistemology."
This article was published in Mosaic (Winter, 2008), pp. 2-5. It explores the West's vulnerabili... more This article was published in Mosaic (Winter, 2008), pp. 2-5. It explores the West's vulnerability to irrationalism following its ironic revolt against reason in the wake of the Age of Reason's revolt against faith -- an irony briefly touched upon in Albert Camus' *The Rebel*. This turns on its head the usual conceit that it was the Enlightenment that saved us from the authoritarian irrationalism of the Middle Ages. The irony, again, is that nearly the opposite is true, and as Peter Kreeft points out, Medieval philosophers were rational to a fault, while modern philosophies since the Enlightenment have attacked reason in dozens of ways and dogmatically exalted instead the authority of ideology, politics, the passions, or power, or pragmatism, or positivism, or Deconstructionism, or Marxism, or Freudianism, or Romanticism, or Existentialism, so that nearly the whole of Western philosophy since the Enlightenment has been a sustained attack on reason. Yet another irony is that a representative of the historic bastions of authoritarian dogmatism, Pope John Paul II, should be seen in this context as coming to the defense not of blind faith, but of reason, in his encyclical *Fides et Ratio*, in which he shows how "faith becomes the certain and persuasive advocate of reason."
This article was originally presented as a paper at a meeting of the North Carolina Philosophy So... more This article was originally presented as a paper at a meeting of the North Carolina Philosophy Society at Queens College, in Charlotte, North Carolina, on February 23, 1991, and was subsequently published by the journal, Lyceum, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Fall, 1991), pp. 27-39. The article deals with the question whether the affective faculty of feeling of respect for the moral law fits consistently within Kant's noumenal realm of pure practical moral reasoning.
Clearly humans are material. Like all animals, we experience life and act on the world through ou... more Clearly humans are material. Like all animals, we experience life and act on the world through our bodies. Are we, then, simply a sophisticated form of animal life? Scientific materialism posits that all human behaviour will ultimately be explicable solely in terms of brain functioning. ...
I begin by summarizing Stoker’s study of conscience in Das Gewissen. Then I contrast the initial ... more I begin by summarizing Stoker’s study of conscience in Das Gewissen. Then I contrast the initial acclaim it received from well-known phenomenologists with its subsequent undeserved neglect. One reason for the neglect, I surmise, is the waning of general interest in phenomenological approaches. Other reasons include Stoker’s relative isolation in South Africa, declining interest in Christian approaches to philosophy, and Calvinist concerns about the influence of Bavinck’s scholasticism and Scheler’s phenomenological method on Stoker. I argue that none of these reasons justifies the present neglect of Stoker’s magisterial work and its seminal insights.
This essay compares Scheler’s view of the person in his last (“pantheistic”) period with the view... more This essay compares Scheler’s view of the person in his last (“pantheistic”) period with the views of Keiji Nishitani, a Buddhist representative of the Kyoto School of phenomenology. Scheler eschewed a “substantialist” concept of the person, as did Nishitani in view of the Buddhist “non-self” (muga) doctrine. Both had experienced spiritual crises in their lives. Why did Nishitani turn to the Buddhist concept of “absolute nothingness”? Why did Scheler turn from theism to pantheism? Both saw traditional Christianity and its understanding of the person as intellectually inadequate, though for different reasons. Nishitani focuses on the inadequacies of secondary influences (like Cartesianism) in the Western concept of person, while Scheler focuses on problems of theodicy stemming from the problem of evil and of volition (divine and human) as the source of evil. Both abandon the Christian meaning of personhood.
This article was first published in Phenomenology 2005: Selected Essays from North America, Part ... more This article was first published in Phenomenology 2005: Selected Essays from North America, Part 1, Post Scriptum – Organization of Phenomenological Organizations Series, edited by Lester Embree and Thomas Nenon (Bucharest: Zeta Books, 2007), pp. 99-126
This article was first published as the second chapter in the anthology, Max Scheler’s Acting Per... more This article was first published as the second chapter in the anthology, Max Scheler’s Acting Persons: New Perspectives, edited by Stephen Schneck, Value Inquiry Book Series, No. 131 (Amsterdam: Rodolpi, 2002). It finds both positive insights as well as unresolved problems in Scheler's understanding of the person.
An earlier version of this article was presented at a meeting of the Max Scheler Society of North... more An earlier version of this article was presented at a meeting of the Max Scheler Society of North America in conjunction with the Central Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association in Chicago, April 16-19, 2008. The present version of it was subsequenly published in Thomas Nenon and Philip Blosser, eds., Advancing Phenomenology: Essays in Honor of Lester Embree, Contributions to Phenomenology, No. 62 (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), pp. 251-268. It examines Scheler's claim of the primacy of value-feeling over rationality and his Pascalian view that "the heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing." It then considers Karol Wojtyla's challenges to this view and Peter Spader's defense of Scheler against these challenges. Finally, Spader's analysis is itself challenged by arguing that even if values are 'felt' before they are 'understood', they must be understood before moral choices can be responsibly made.
This article was first presented as a paper under the title of “The Difference between the Moral... more This article was first presented as a paper under the title of “The Difference between the Moral and the Simply Normative” at the Max Scheler Society of North America at the Pacific Division meetings of the American Philosophical Association in Pasadena, California, on March 25, 2004, and subsequently published in the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 79, No. 1 (Winter 2005), pp. 121-143.
Like Eugene Kelly’s *Structure and Diversity: Studies in the Phenomenological Philosophy of Max Scheler*, Peter Spader’s *Scheler’s Ethical Personalism: It’s Logic, Development, and Promise* offers some helpful observations in defense of Scheler’s ethics in response to particular criticisms and questions I have tendered over the past decade. For example, in response to hypothetical moral quandaries that I posed in order to question whether Scheler’s hierarchy of material values is in fact able to offer practical moral guidance, Spader notes the importance of discerning the hierarchy of bearers of material values that Scheler differentiates from the hierarchy of material values as such. (p. 278) Accordingly, in response to my persistent suggestion that a tacit reductionism underlies Scheler’s view that the realization (or intended realization) of all material values has moral implications (viz., involves the realization of moral values), Spader again points out the importance of discerning the bearers of various sorts of values. For example, while conceding the relative autonomy of “aesthetic” from “moral” values, Spader notes that the bearers of moral values, in contrast to aesthetic values, are always persons, never mere objects, as in the case of aesthetic values. (p. 284f.) Thus the Schelerian claim that the realization of material values, because it necessarily involves personal agency, inevitably bears a moral significance (involving the realization of moral values) seems securely preserved.
This, however, is where I wish to interject and develop several further distinctions in my line of questioning against the Schelerian legacy. First, I wish to refine the received claim that persons are necessarily and always the bearers of moral values by distinguishing between the person as “subject” and “object” and insisting that the person functions as bearer of values (in the sense of agent) only subjectively. This allows us to concede that non-personal entities may also function as bearers of moral values, if not subjectively as agents, then objectively as things bearing a moral significance or imputation. This shows that the distinction between moral and non-moral values is capable of being analyzed in more careful, considered and helpful detail than hitherto observed, and may need to be so analyzed in order to avoid perpetuating various persistent (if inadvertent) distortions and misunderstanding of the phenomena in question.
Second, I wish to persist in my audacious line of questioning against the received claim that the realization of every good (such as aesthetic good) involves a moral good. Kant’s distinction between the moral and the legal (good, though not morally good) may be a case in point. Here I want to try to refine my distinction between moral and non-moral goods (both in the sense of values and their bearers), and to show that there are many species of good that are irreducible to moral good.
Thirdly and finally, following upon the logic of the foregoing distinction, and in response to Scheler’s language about the ethical and ideal “oughts,” I wish to introduce a new distinction between the “normative” as such, and the “moral” as a species of the normative. Thus I wish to allow for and to acknowledge the sense of “oughtness” or obligation attendant to the realization of various non-moral values, without following what I consider the reductionistic logic that would have us regard every sort of normativity (whether mathematical, logical, economic, aesthetic) as moral normativity. The worthiness of praise or blame attendant to a particular performance of athletic exhertion, mathematical calculation, or interior decoration, may be analogous to that found and experienced within the realm of moral activity, but is not reducible to it.
This article was first presented as a paper at the Third International Symposium of the Max Schel... more This article was first presented as a paper at the Third International Symposium of the Max Scheler Gesselschaft in Jena, Germany, May 22-24, 1997, and subsequently published in Denken des Ursprungs/Ursprungs des Denkens: Scheler's Philosophie und ihre Anfänge in Jena, ed. Christian Bermes, et al. Kritisches Jahrbuch der Philosophie 3 (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1998), pp.160-171. It argues that as invaluable and insightful a defense as Scheler’s “ordo amoris” provides against reductionist impulses in intellectual history, it was not sufficiently worked out by him so as to achieve adequate clarity. Specifically, the conception needs to be worked out more carefully in order to achieve an adequate analysis of the distinctions between the various subjective faculties of value-apprehension, whether the apprehended values are emotional or logical or mathematical; and in order to achieve a clear analysis of the objective interrelationships among both logical and nonlogical values, and moral and nonmoral values.
This article was first presented as a paper at a conference on “Japanese and Western Phenomenolo... more This article was first presented as a paper at a conference on “Japanese and Western Phenomenology” sponsored by the Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and the Japanese Society for Phenomenology in Osaka, Japan, 24-27 October, 1989, and subsequently published in Philosophy Today 34, No. 3 (Fall 1990), pp. 195-205. It compares and contrasts the notion of the "a priori" in the traditions of logical empiricism and phenomenology.
This article was first published in Philosophia Reformata, Vol. 58 (1993), pp. 192-209. It exami... more This article was first published in Philosophia Reformata, Vol. 58 (1993), pp. 192-209. It examines Dooyeweerd's philosophical anthropology and identifies several problems in it related to Kant, Dooyeweerd's conception of time, and discrepancies between his philosophical conception of man and his affirmations of Biblical language about man. The work of G.C. Berkouwer and Peter Steen are frequenly referenced.
This article was first published in The New Oxford Review (April 2002), pp. 18-25, and subsequent... more This article was first published in The New Oxford Review (April 2002), pp. 18-25, and subsequently translated into Russian by Oleg-Michael Martynov in Una Fides (Fall, 2003). It takes as its starting point a debate over ecclesiology in the pages of the Jesuit America magazine between Walter Cardinal Kasper and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger in 2001, and uses this as a foil to examine the conflict between orthodoxy and dissent among modern Catholics and the state of the post-Vatican II Church.
This review was first published under the title of "God Among the Philosophers" in the New Oxford... more This review was first published under the title of "God Among the Philosophers" in the New Oxford Review, Vol. 66, No. 9 (October, 1999), pp. 39-42. Alvin Plantinga, an analytic philosopher of religion from the Dutch Reformed tradition, has been twice president of the American Philosophical Association, a founding member of the Society of Christian Philosophers, Gifford Lecturer in Scotland in 1987, and feted in a *Time* magazine article in the spring of 1980 as one of a small number of philosophers responsible for a quiet revolution in which "God is making a comeback" in philosophical circles. The name usually associated with Plantinga's school of religious philosophy is "Reformed Epistemology."
This article was published in Mosaic (Winter, 2008), pp. 2-5. It explores the West's vulnerabili... more This article was published in Mosaic (Winter, 2008), pp. 2-5. It explores the West's vulnerability to irrationalism following its ironic revolt against reason in the wake of the Age of Reason's revolt against faith -- an irony briefly touched upon in Albert Camus' *The Rebel*. This turns on its head the usual conceit that it was the Enlightenment that saved us from the authoritarian irrationalism of the Middle Ages. The irony, again, is that nearly the opposite is true, and as Peter Kreeft points out, Medieval philosophers were rational to a fault, while modern philosophies since the Enlightenment have attacked reason in dozens of ways and dogmatically exalted instead the authority of ideology, politics, the passions, or power, or pragmatism, or positivism, or Deconstructionism, or Marxism, or Freudianism, or Romanticism, or Existentialism, so that nearly the whole of Western philosophy since the Enlightenment has been a sustained attack on reason. Yet another irony is that a representative of the historic bastions of authoritarian dogmatism, Pope John Paul II, should be seen in this context as coming to the defense not of blind faith, but of reason, in his encyclical *Fides et Ratio*, in which he shows how "faith becomes the certain and persuasive advocate of reason."
This article was originally presented as a paper at a meeting of the North Carolina Philosophy So... more This article was originally presented as a paper at a meeting of the North Carolina Philosophy Society at Queens College, in Charlotte, North Carolina, on February 23, 1991, and was subsequently published by the journal, Lyceum, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Fall, 1991), pp. 27-39. The article deals with the question whether the affective faculty of feeling of respect for the moral law fits consistently within Kant's noumenal realm of pure practical moral reasoning.
In this post I raise a number of questions about the "charism of healing" alleged by Mary Healy a... more In this post I raise a number of questions about the "charism of healing" alleged by Mary Healy and the Catholic Charismatic Renewal to be gifts latently possessed by all Christians by virtue of their baptism, requiring only "activation" to be realized. They are not questions unique to me, but questions of the sort being raised widely by non-charismatic Catholics concerned about the influence of Protestant Pentecostal assumptions and behaviours finding their way into Catholic circles.
This is a review by Professor Sander Griffioen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) of Hendrik G. Stoke... more This is a review by Professor Sander Griffioen (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) of Hendrik G. Stoker's *Conscience: Phenomena and Theories,* translated by Philip E. Blosser (University of Notre Dame Press, 2018). Stoker's book, originally titled *Das Gewissen: Erscheinungsformen und Theorien,* is probably the most comprehensive treatment of the subject of CONSCIENCE in any western language. It was originally written as a dissertation under Max Scheler and takes a phenomenological perspective.
This article was first presented as a paper as part of the "St. Paul and the Natural Law" lecture... more This article was first presented as a paper as part of the "St. Paul and the Natural Law" lecture series at Ave Maria Law School, Ann Arbor, MI, March 20, 2009. It was subsequently published in a slightly revised form in St. Paul, The Natural Law, and Contemporary Legal Theory, ed. Jane Adolphe, Robert Fastiggi, and Michael Vacca (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012), pp. 121-130.
It used to be said that there are four sources of law: legislation (or rule), precedent, equity (or justice), and custom (or policy). These sources are differently weighted by different legal theories. An exclusively political and analytical jurisprudence may focus on legislation (or rule), an exclusively historical and socio-economic jurisprudence may focus on precedent and custom (or policy), and both may neglect the sources of equity (or justice) in natural law, which dominated the philosophical and moral jurisprudence of Catholic and classical tradition. The “analytical-positivist” jurisprudence dominant today largely regards law as a matter of technical expertise and practical expediency, generally disregarding as a private, personal affair those moral and religious beliefs and postulates that historically have always been presupposed by legal systems in Western history. The problem is that those beliefs and postulates are disappearing, not only from the minds of lawmakers, but from the consciousness of the people as a whole. Some suggest that this puts us in the midst of an unprecedented crisis of legal thought, in which not only the so-called liberal concepts of recent centuries, but the foundations of our entire legal tradition are being challenged. What would St. Paul say about our legal systems and theories today?
This review was first published in The Thomist, 55, No. 3 (July, 1991), 522-526, and subsequently... more This review was first published in The Thomist, 55, No. 3 (July, 1991), 522-526, and subsequently published in revised form in the Christian Scholar’s Review, XXII, No. 2 (Dec. 1992), 210-213.
This review was first published under the title of “Retouching the Egregious Distortions of the C... more This review was first published under the title of “Retouching the Egregious Distortions of the Crusades,” in New Oxford Review (November, 2007), 39-42.
This review was first published in New Oxford Review (July-August 2010), pp. 44-47. The book is... more This review was first published in New Oxford Review (July-August 2010), pp. 44-47. The book is by a former Sunni Muslim with years of experience in an Islamic culture, but (unlike many Muslims) was thoroughly educated by Muslims in the esoteric aspects of Islam. Second, the arguments he uses to expose Islam – honed by long experience of debating Muslim peers after his Christian conversion – are drawn from the extensive literature of Islam itself – not merely the Qur'an, but Islamic history, Seerah (the life of Muhammad), Sunnah (specific words, actions and practices of Muhammad) and Hadith (narrations based on the words Muhammad shedding light on the Qur'an and matters of jurisprudence), and Fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). The purpose of his book, he says, is to help both Muslims and non-Muslims seeking answers about the true nature of Islam.
This review was first published under the title of “Undone by the ‘Permanent Workshop‘” in the Ne... more This review was first published under the title of “Undone by the ‘Permanent Workshop‘” in the New Oxford Review (June, 2012), pp. 42-48; and subsequently republished by Christian Order, October, 2012.
This review was first published in The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly (Spring, 2010), pp. ... more This review was first published in The National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly (Spring, 2010), pp. 192-195.
This review was first published in International Studies in Philosophy (Leon J. Goldstein memoria... more This review was first published in International Studies in Philosophy (Leon J. Goldstein memorial issue) Vol. 35, No. 4 (2003), pp. 313-314.
This review was first published in Dialogue: A Journal of Theology, Vol. 52, Issue 4 (December 20... more This review was first published in Dialogue: A Journal of Theology, Vol. 52, Issue 4 (December 2013), pp. 373-375. A different, much shorter version was published in CHOICE Current Review for Academic Libraries (February 2013).
This informal paper was first presented at Benedictine College, Atchison, Kansas, on March 4, 200... more This informal paper was first presented at Benedictine College, Atchison, Kansas, on March 4, 2009. Many today, like Kierkegaard’s "aesthete," would probably see a disjunct -- sex or marriage -- and would insist that, no, we don’t lose ourselves in recreational sex; but yes, we surely would lose ourselves in the bondage of marriage!
Immanuel Kant and Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) have superficially similar views, but views that are radically different when one probes beneath the surface. Kant fears that sexual partners lose themselves to one another by each "using" the other's sexual organs for his or her own pleasure. Wojtyla argues that we actually find ourselves only through an act of total self-donation to another.
This paper was presented for the Oxford Round Table at Harris Manchester College, Oxford Universi... more This paper was presented for the Oxford Round Table at Harris Manchester College, Oxford University, UK, on August 1, 2006. An earlier form of the paper was presented at a colloquium of the Center for Theology at Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, NC, on February 2, 2006. The following is from the "Abstract":
The disengagement of church-related schools from their founding religious traditions over the last century has often led, ironically, to the exclusion of specifically Christian values in the name of secular pluralism. A common sentiment today is that religious affiliations are not only anachronistic, but also incompatible with free inquiry. Against this, I want to argue that: (1) there is no value-free education without some sort of historical bias. A university does not become a more authentic university by shedding its religious affiliation, but a different kind of university. (2) Pluralism does not mean becoming nondescript and homogeneous, like everybody else. Pluralism is about differences and robust assertions of one’s distinctive background and beliefs, which enrich society and education. (3) Religiously affiliated universities have several advantages, such as their sense of identity, tradition, the unity of truth, and offer unique resources for defending the freedom of liberal education against market driven consumerism and other external threats to its integrity.
This article was first published in the Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, ... more This article was first published in the Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy, ed. Michael L. Coulter, Stephen M. Krason, Richard S. Myers, and Joseph A. Varacalli. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, Scarecrow Press, 2007).
This article was first published in Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and ... more This article was first published in Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy, ed. Michael L. Coulter, Stephen M. Krason, Richard S. Myers, and Joseph A. Varacalli. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, Scarecrow Press, 2007).
This article was first published [without the brackted date of Fring's death] in the Dictionary o... more This article was first published [without the brackted date of Fring's death] in the Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers, 1860-1960 (Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 2005).
This article was first published in the in Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Scienc... more This article was first published in the in Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy, ed. Michael L. Coulter, Stephen M. Krason, Richard S. Myers, and Joseph A. Varacalli. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, Scarecrow Press, 2007).
This article was first published in the New Catholic Encyclopedia Supplement 2012-13: Ethics and ... more This article was first published in the New Catholic Encyclopedia Supplement 2012-13: Ethics and Philosophy, edited by Robert L. Fastiggi, 4 vols. (Detroit: Gale, 2013), pp. 1241-1242.
This article was first published in The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed. Lester Embree (Dordrec... more This article was first published in The Encyclopedia of Phenomenology, ed. Lester Embree (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997).
This article was first published in the in Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Scienc... more This article was first published in the in Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy, ed. Michael L. Coulter, Stephen M. Krason, Richard S. Myers, and Joseph A. Varacalli. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, Scarecrow Press, 2007).
This article was first published in ,” Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, a... more This article was first published in ,” Encyclopedia of Catholic Social Thought, Social Science, and Social Policy, ed. Michael L. Coulter, Stephen M. Krason, Richard S. Myers, and Joseph A. Varacalli. (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, Scarecrow Press, 2007).
This is my English translation of H. G. Stoker's doctoral dissertation written under Max Scheler ... more This is my English translation of H. G. Stoker's doctoral dissertation written under Max Scheler in 1925 (Das Gewissen: Erscheinungsformen und Theorien), quite possibly the most exhaustive study of conscience in any language. It was received with acclaim by Scheler, Heidegger and others in its day, but never promoted as an independent publication. Now I'm happy to help make it available to a much wider audience in English translation.
It has sections exploring (1) various historical theories conscience (Jerome, Origen, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Cardinal Newman, Butler, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and many others); (2) the various terms used for conscience in Greek, Latin, and other European languages; (3) different types of theories -- those that identify conscience with the intellect, intuition, will, feelings, etc.; (4) the development of conscience; and (5) the reliability of conscience.
The book is not highly technical, but reasonably accessible, and promises to be of interest to those interested in moral and religious psychology, ethics, and religion, as well as Schelerian phenomenology.
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Papers by Philip Blosser
Like Eugene Kelly’s *Structure and Diversity: Studies in the Phenomenological Philosophy of Max Scheler*, Peter Spader’s *Scheler’s Ethical Personalism: It’s Logic, Development, and Promise* offers some helpful observations in defense of Scheler’s ethics in response to particular criticisms and questions I have tendered over the past decade. For example, in response to hypothetical moral quandaries that I posed in order to question whether Scheler’s hierarchy of material values is in fact able to offer practical moral guidance, Spader notes the importance of discerning the hierarchy of bearers of material values that Scheler differentiates from the hierarchy of material values as such. (p. 278) Accordingly, in response to my persistent suggestion that a tacit reductionism underlies Scheler’s view that the realization (or intended realization) of all material values has moral implications (viz., involves the realization of moral values), Spader again points out the importance of discerning the bearers of various sorts of values. For example, while conceding the relative autonomy of “aesthetic” from “moral” values, Spader notes that the bearers of moral values, in contrast to aesthetic values, are always persons, never mere objects, as in the case of aesthetic values. (p. 284f.) Thus the Schelerian claim that the realization of material values, because it necessarily involves personal agency, inevitably bears a moral significance (involving the realization of moral values) seems securely preserved.
This, however, is where I wish to interject and develop several further distinctions in my line of questioning against the Schelerian legacy. First, I wish to refine the received claim that persons are necessarily and always the bearers of moral values by distinguishing between the person as “subject” and “object” and insisting that the person functions as bearer of values (in the sense of agent) only subjectively. This allows us to concede that non-personal entities may also function as bearers of moral values, if not subjectively as agents, then objectively as things bearing a moral significance or imputation. This shows that the distinction between moral and non-moral values is capable of being analyzed in more careful, considered and helpful detail than hitherto observed, and may need to be so analyzed in order to avoid perpetuating various persistent (if inadvertent) distortions and misunderstanding of the phenomena in question.
Second, I wish to persist in my audacious line of questioning against the received claim that the realization of every good (such as aesthetic good) involves a moral good. Kant’s distinction between the moral and the legal (good, though not morally good) may be a case in point. Here I want to try to refine my distinction between moral and non-moral goods (both in the sense of values and their bearers), and to show that there are many species of good that are irreducible to moral good.
Thirdly and finally, following upon the logic of the foregoing distinction, and in response to Scheler’s language about the ethical and ideal “oughts,” I wish to introduce a new distinction between the “normative” as such, and the “moral” as a species of the normative. Thus I wish to allow for and to acknowledge the sense of “oughtness” or obligation attendant to the realization of various non-moral values, without following what I consider the reductionistic logic that would have us regard every sort of normativity (whether mathematical, logical, economic, aesthetic) as moral normativity. The worthiness of praise or blame attendant to a particular performance of athletic exhertion, mathematical calculation, or interior decoration, may be analogous to that found and experienced within the realm of moral activity, but is not reducible to it.
Like Eugene Kelly’s *Structure and Diversity: Studies in the Phenomenological Philosophy of Max Scheler*, Peter Spader’s *Scheler’s Ethical Personalism: It’s Logic, Development, and Promise* offers some helpful observations in defense of Scheler’s ethics in response to particular criticisms and questions I have tendered over the past decade. For example, in response to hypothetical moral quandaries that I posed in order to question whether Scheler’s hierarchy of material values is in fact able to offer practical moral guidance, Spader notes the importance of discerning the hierarchy of bearers of material values that Scheler differentiates from the hierarchy of material values as such. (p. 278) Accordingly, in response to my persistent suggestion that a tacit reductionism underlies Scheler’s view that the realization (or intended realization) of all material values has moral implications (viz., involves the realization of moral values), Spader again points out the importance of discerning the bearers of various sorts of values. For example, while conceding the relative autonomy of “aesthetic” from “moral” values, Spader notes that the bearers of moral values, in contrast to aesthetic values, are always persons, never mere objects, as in the case of aesthetic values. (p. 284f.) Thus the Schelerian claim that the realization of material values, because it necessarily involves personal agency, inevitably bears a moral significance (involving the realization of moral values) seems securely preserved.
This, however, is where I wish to interject and develop several further distinctions in my line of questioning against the Schelerian legacy. First, I wish to refine the received claim that persons are necessarily and always the bearers of moral values by distinguishing between the person as “subject” and “object” and insisting that the person functions as bearer of values (in the sense of agent) only subjectively. This allows us to concede that non-personal entities may also function as bearers of moral values, if not subjectively as agents, then objectively as things bearing a moral significance or imputation. This shows that the distinction between moral and non-moral values is capable of being analyzed in more careful, considered and helpful detail than hitherto observed, and may need to be so analyzed in order to avoid perpetuating various persistent (if inadvertent) distortions and misunderstanding of the phenomena in question.
Second, I wish to persist in my audacious line of questioning against the received claim that the realization of every good (such as aesthetic good) involves a moral good. Kant’s distinction between the moral and the legal (good, though not morally good) may be a case in point. Here I want to try to refine my distinction between moral and non-moral goods (both in the sense of values and their bearers), and to show that there are many species of good that are irreducible to moral good.
Thirdly and finally, following upon the logic of the foregoing distinction, and in response to Scheler’s language about the ethical and ideal “oughts,” I wish to introduce a new distinction between the “normative” as such, and the “moral” as a species of the normative. Thus I wish to allow for and to acknowledge the sense of “oughtness” or obligation attendant to the realization of various non-moral values, without following what I consider the reductionistic logic that would have us regard every sort of normativity (whether mathematical, logical, economic, aesthetic) as moral normativity. The worthiness of praise or blame attendant to a particular performance of athletic exhertion, mathematical calculation, or interior decoration, may be analogous to that found and experienced within the realm of moral activity, but is not reducible to it.
It used to be said that there are four sources of law: legislation (or rule), precedent, equity (or justice), and custom (or policy). These sources are differently weighted by different legal theories. An exclusively political and analytical jurisprudence may focus on legislation (or rule), an exclusively historical and socio-economic jurisprudence may focus on precedent and custom (or policy), and both may neglect the sources of equity (or justice) in natural law, which dominated the philosophical and moral jurisprudence of Catholic and classical tradition. The “analytical-positivist” jurisprudence dominant today largely regards law as a matter of technical expertise and practical expediency, generally disregarding as a private, personal affair those moral and religious beliefs and postulates that historically have always been presupposed by legal systems in Western history. The problem is that those beliefs and postulates are disappearing, not only from the minds of lawmakers, but from the consciousness of the people as a whole. Some suggest that this puts us in the midst of an unprecedented crisis of legal thought, in which not only the so-called liberal concepts of recent centuries, but the foundations of our entire legal tradition are being challenged. What would St. Paul say about our legal systems and theories today?
Immanuel Kant and Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II) have superficially similar views, but views that are radically different when one probes beneath the surface. Kant fears that sexual partners lose themselves to one another by each "using" the other's sexual organs for his or her own pleasure. Wojtyla argues that we actually find ourselves only through an act of total self-donation to another.
The disengagement of church-related schools from their founding religious traditions over the last century has often led, ironically, to the exclusion of specifically Christian values in the name of secular pluralism. A common sentiment today is that religious affiliations are not only anachronistic, but also incompatible with free inquiry. Against this, I want to argue that: (1) there is no value-free education without some sort of historical bias. A university does not become a more authentic university by shedding its religious affiliation, but a different kind of university. (2) Pluralism does not mean becoming nondescript and homogeneous, like everybody else. Pluralism is about differences and robust assertions of one’s distinctive background and beliefs, which enrich society and education. (3) Religiously affiliated universities have several advantages, such as their sense of identity, tradition, the unity of truth, and offer unique resources for defending the freedom of liberal education against market driven consumerism and other external threats to its integrity.
It has sections exploring (1) various historical theories conscience (Jerome, Origen, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Cardinal Newman, Butler, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud, and many others); (2) the various terms used for conscience in Greek, Latin, and other European languages; (3) different types of theories -- those that identify conscience with the intellect, intuition, will, feelings, etc.; (4) the development of conscience; and (5) the reliability of conscience.
The book is not highly technical, but reasonably accessible, and promises to be of interest to those interested in moral and religious psychology, ethics, and religion, as well as Schelerian phenomenology.
The book will go on sale the end of March.