Recent Philosophy, Volume 1

By Étienne Gilson, Thomas Langan, and Armand Maurer, C.S.B.

Philosophy contends with the ultimate questions the human mind can ask. In Recent Philosophy, Étienne Gilson, Thomas Langan, and Armand Maurer, C.S.B., present the approaches and answers to those questions by the foremost philosophers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like its published companions in the History of Philosophy series (Medieval Philosophy and Modern Philosophy), Recent Philosophy avoids the trap of becoming an encyclopedia of names and dates, producing instead an emphatically doctrinal chronicle of post-modern philosophical activity.

Much more important than knowledge about philosophy is a true notion of what it is to philosophize. And what better way is there to learn to philosophize than to observe the great philosophers of the past? (Étienne Gilson)

Volume One comprises (1) Langan’s study of German philosophy, covering the post-Kantian background of Hegel and Fichte; the rise of existentialism with Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and its development under Marcel, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty; and the origin of phenomenology with Husserl and Scheler; and (2) Gilson’s study of French and Italian philosophy, which covers the post-revolutionary thought of Cabanis and Soave and de Bonald and de Maistre; the geneses of Christian philosophy and neo-Scholasticism and of ontologism and positivism; and the intellectual posterity of the critical, Augustinian, and theosophical movements.

Étienne Gilson (1884–1978) was a French philosopher and historian of philosophy. One of the premier Catholic intellectuals of the twentieth century, he was founder of the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, member of the Académie française, and author of more than one hundred seventy books.

Thomas Langan (1929–2012) was an American philosopher and staunch proponent of the Catholic intellectual tradition. His writings include numerous books on existentialism and phenomenology.

Armand A. Maurer, C.S.B. (1915–2008), was an American philosopher and a Roman Catholic priest in the Congregation of Saint Basil. Appointed to the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies in 1949, he spent the remainder of his career and life there, devoted to both teaching and scholarship.

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Paperback: 626pp.

ISBN: 978-1685952075

Also available: Volume 2