Neo-Thomism

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. ...

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. ...