Catholic Philosophy

Edith Stein Edith Stein was born in Breslau (today Wrocław) on 12 October 1891 into a Jewish family and died in Auschwitz-Birkenau on 9 August 1942. She studied in Göttingen from 1913, where she joined the circle of Edmund Husserl, and took her doctorate with him at Freiburg in 1916 with the thesis Zum Problem der Einfühlung (published in 1917). She served as Husserl’s assistant and prepared manuscripts for publication, among them the lectures on the inner consciousness of time. Baptized into the Catholic Church on 1 January 1922, she taught at Speyer and then at the Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in Münster, until the Nazi racial laws ended her teaching in 1933. In October of that year she entered the Carmel of Cologne, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, and in 1938 she was transferred to the convent at Echt in the Netherlands. Arrested by the Gestapo on 2 August 1942, after the Dutch bishops’ condemnation of Nazi antisemitism, she was deported with her sister Rosa and died in Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was beatified on 1 May 1987 and canonized by John Paul II on 11 October 1998; the decision prompted debate over how her death should be understood, whether as Christian martyrdom or as that of a Jewish victim of Nazi persecution. ...

Emmanuel Mounier Emmanuel Mounier was born in Grenoble on 1 April 1905 and died in Châtenay-Malabry, near Paris, on 22 March 1950. He studied philosophy in Grenoble, where he was a student of Jacques Chevalier, and in Paris. In 1932 he founded, with Georges Izard and other collaborators, the journal Esprit, which he edited until his death and which became the main vehicle of personalism in France. In August 1941 the Vichy regime banned the journal; Mounier was arrested in 1942 and later released and acquitted. The journal resumed publication after the war. He died at 44, in the midst of intellectual activity, leaving a body of work aimed less at building a system than at guiding a movement of ideas and commitment. ...

Étienne Gilson Étienne Gilson was born in Paris on 13 June 1884 and died in Cravant, in Burgundy, on 19 September 1978. Trained at the Sorbonne, where the sociologist Lucien Lévy-Bruhl was among his teachers, he defended in 1913 a thesis on freedom in Descartes and its relation to scholastic theology, which led him to study closely the medieval sources of modern thought. He taught at Lille, Strasbourg and the Sorbonne and, from 1932, held the chair of medieval philosophy at the Collège de France, which he left in 1951. He delivered the Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen in 1931–1932, published as L’Esprit de la philosophie médiévale (1932). In 1929 he helped found the Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto (later the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies), where he taught for long periods. He was elected to the Académie française in 1946. ...

Gabriel Marcel Gabriel Marcel was born in Paris on 7 December 1889 and died in the same city on 8 October 1973. A philosopher, playwright, drama critic and musician, he converted to Catholicism in 1929. He did not pursue a conventional academic career: he taught for a time in secondary schools, worked as a critic and editor, and wrote some thirty plays, which he regarded as an inseparable part of his philosophical work. He delivered the Gifford Lectures at Aberdeen (1949–1950), published as Le Mystère de l’être (1951), and the William James Lectures at Harvard (1961–1962). His philosophy, generally unsystematic, proceeds by meditations on concrete experience, and Journal métaphysique (1927), written in diary form, is his first major text. ...

Jacques Maritain Jacques Maritain was born in Paris on 18 November 1882 and died in Toulouse on 28 April 1973. Raised in a liberal Protestant, republican household, he studied at the Sorbonne, where he met Raïssa Oumançoff, whom he later married, and attended the lectures of Henri Bergson at the Collège de France; he also studied biology in Germany under Hans Driesch. In 1906, under the influence of Léon Bloy, he converted to Catholicism and went on to study Thomas Aquinas, whose thought he defended as a “perennial philosophy” able to engage with modernity. He taught at the Institut Catholique de Paris and later in the United States and Canada, served as French ambassador to the Holy See (1945–1948), and held a professorship at Princeton. In his last years he lived in Toulouse with the Little Brothers of Jesus, whom he joined in 1970. ...

Josef Pieper Josef Pieper was born in Elte, in Westphalia, on 4 May 1904 and died in Münster on 6 November 1997. He studied philosophy, law and sociology at Münster and Berlin and took his doctorate in 1928. He worked first in sociological research and as an independent writer and, from 1959/1960, was full professor of philosophical anthropology at the University of Münster, where he taught for many years. In 1981 he received the Balzan Prize for Philosophy. His work, written in a deliberately clear style averse to academic jargon, draws chiefly on Thomas Aquinas, read in dialogue with Plato and Aristotle, and addresses questions of everyday life: work, free time, the virtues, hope, language. ...

Romano Guardini Romano Guardini was born in Verona on 17 February 1885 and died in Munich on 1 October 1968. The son of Italian parents, he grew up in Mainz, Germany, and became a German citizen. He studied chemistry, economics and theology, was ordained a priest in 1910, and obtained his habilitation in 1922 with a work on Bonaventure’s doctrine of redemption. In 1923 he received in Berlin a chair of philosophy of religion and Catholic worldview, which he held until 1939, when the National Socialist regime removed him from teaching. After the war he taught at Tübingen (1945–1948) and, from 1948, at Munich, until 1962. He was also an important figure in the Catholic youth movement, especially at Burg Rothenfels, and in the German liturgical movement. ...