On one reading, twentieth century Christian personalists such as Max Scheler, Dietrich von Hildebrand, or Edith Stein merely translate into Christian terms a set of modern concerns that arise apart from and are at odds with the historical Christian tradition. According to this reading, modern philosophy makes a fundamental break with previous thinking when it turns inward to examine the interior, personal dimension of existence. A person who favors this inward turn will see the Christian personalists as vainly attempting to (...) salvage traditional Christian categories while trying to keep up with the times. For example, someone who favors twentieth century existentialism or psychoanalysis may sympathize with a Christian personalist account of the interiority and irreplaceable uniqueness of each person but despise the larger religious framework of grace and salvation. Someone who favors traditional metaphysics, by contrast, may see these personalists as falling prey to modern errors when they should have kept the faith. Such a traditionalist may think, for example, that an emphasis on the personal is an infiltration into Christianity from secular political philosophies of individualism and that this has been thinly covered over with traditional Christian language. -/- Both perspectives, however, ignore the historical roots of personalism much further back in the history of philosophy than Descartes and Kant. Central to this history is the idea that each person uniquely realizes an incommunicable dimension of his existence, irreducible to the category of nature or essence. While we are in nature and while we *are* a nature, our nature as nature remains purely general, describing *what* we are in common with every other member of our species. As particular persons exercising our freedom and spiritual existence, however, each of us concretizes that purely general nature in a unique, personal way. For many centuries, Christians have called the dimension that concretizes nature ὑπόστασις: each ὑπόστασις is a distinct realization of a general nature. When this notion is first introduced into Christian discourse during the second half of the fourth century, the uniqueness of persons as opposed to the uniqueness of individual pebbles or horses does not come fully into focus. Nevertheless, a thick conception of ὑπόστασις develops in order to speak precisely about Trinitarian and Christological theology, and this context gives it a distinctly personalist character, especially when it is translated into Latin as *persona*. In order to speak of God as three ὑποστάσεις or *personae* in one essence and to speak of Christ as one ὑπόστασις or *persona* in two natures, the category of ὑπόστασις must be irreducible to the category of nature. Along this irreducible dimension persons are irreplaceable *someones* in relationship with other someones rather than merely *somethings*, specimens of a kind more or less interchangeable with any other such specimen. (shrink)

This paper looks at a recent exchange concerning the human nature of Christ and the Christological anthropology of Thomas F. Torrance. In this exchange, Oliver Crisp and Christopher Woznicki offer competing readings of Torrance’s Christological anthropology. Crisp argues for a concretist understanding of Christ’s human nature while Woznicki offers an abstractist metaphysic. This paper will look at this exchange in conversation with Torrance’s work and recent work in group ontology, offering a third way forward between the impasse of Crisp’s concretism (...) and Woznicki’s abstractism which I call communal participation and argue is more in line with Torrance’s own understanding. Keywords: Christological anthropology; human nature; group ontology; participation; vicarious humanity; T. F. Torrance. (shrink)

Routledge is now re-issuing this prestigious series of 204 volumes originally published between 1910 and 1965. The titles include works by key figures such as C.G. Jung, Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, Otto Rank, James Hillman, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney and Susan Isaacs. Each volume is available on its own, as part of a themed mini-set, or as part of a specially-priced 204-volume set.

In this paper, I argue for an extension of relational accounts of the imago Dei which includes a kind of priestly relation to the created order. In this relation, humanity is intended to ensure the independent flourishing of creation in a way reflective of the kind of communion we ought to have with one another. Through an analysis of the brokenness of these relationships, I argue human oppression of other humans and ravaging of creation are born of the same brokenness (...) in such a way that they contribute to one another as distortions of human teleological communion. By drawing on Social Identity Approach in group psychology, I can offer an account of shared human identity out of which humanity acts in distorted ways as a group. By describing oppression and ravaging in terms of broken communal telos and group action, I offer a way forward for relating humanity to the created order in a way that neither instrumentalizes creation, nor flattens the distinctiveness of human creation in the image of God. (shrink)

Pain may appear to undermine the radically intentionalist view that the phenomenal character of any experience is entirely constituted by its representational content. That appearance is illusory. After categorizing versions of pain intentionalism along two dimensions, I argue that an 'objectivist' and 'non-mentalist' version is the most promising, if it can withstand two objections concerning what we say when in pain, and the distinctiveness of pain. I rebut these objections, in a way available to both opponents of and adherents to (...) the view that experiential content is entirely conceptual. (shrink)

This paper is a brief discussion of the famous 'Third Man Argument' as it appears in Plato's dialogue Parmenides . I mention, criticise and refine the most influential analytic approach to the argument; show that the actual conclusion of the argument is different from the one attributed to it by the majority of scholars; and elaborate two responses to the argument, both of which shed interesting light on the Theory of Forms.

In a recent article in Philosophy Professor Knox makes a plea for a philosophic treatment of economic activity by way of contrast to either the specialized study of economic history or of economic science. The conclusion which was reached was embodied in the statement that “the historical and scientific methods of the study of economic activity leave incompletely satisfied the curiosity of students , and reach results which need special interpretation before they can be useful to politicians, let alone to (...) business men” . Each of these methods is said to involve unreal abstractions which detract from the usefulness of the study. A philosophic. (shrink)