In the course of his polemic against Kant’s moral philosophy, Scheler was led to depreciate moral obligation and its place in the existence of persons. This depreciation is part of a larger anti-authoritarian strain in his personalism. I attempt to retrieve certain truths about moral obligation that tend to get lost in Scheler: moral obligation is not merely “medicinal” but has a place at the highest levels of moral life; the freedom of persons is lived in an incomparable way in responding to moral obligation; obligation and obedience even have an indispensable place in the existence of Christians. Drawing on the studies of Scheler by Rudolf Otto, Karol Wojtyla, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Dietrich von Hildebrand, I show how Scheler’s personalism is corrected and enhanced once we distance ourselves from his anti-authoritarian animus against obligation and restore obligation to its place in the existence of persons.

I dispute Scheler’s view that good and evil cannot be willed as such; that moral value is always an inevitable and indirect by-product of willing other ends; that every act of willing yields a moral value; and that moral value attaches only to persons. I argue that moral value attaches to a variety of objects of willing (including one’s own moral worth), and that, although all acts have moral implications, not all acts are typologically moral. Those that are, I suggest, typically involve a transactional categoriality where we take another’s good or bad as our own. Those that are not may yield various values of personal willing whose positive or negative value is typologically non-moral. I also deny that obligation is diminished by value-insight or that all norms are categorially moral.

Scheler’s theory of the person is at the center of his philosophy and one of the most celebrated of his achievements. It is somewhat surprising, then, that a straightforward and sufficient account of the person is missing from his works, an omission felt most keenly in that work which is in large measure dedicated to forging a new personalism: The Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. In his explicit accounts of what a person is, Scheler stresses its spirituality and claims that it lives and has its being wholly in the execution of its acts. But in forging his personalism, Scheler makes a number of claims which require an account of the person that reaches deeper than its executed acts. In this essay, I focus on the accounts of the person given in the Formalism and use Scheler toimprove Scheler’s theory of the person.

There is a latent distinction in Scheler’s middle-period philosophical anthropology between personal uniqueness as divinely determined and as self-determined. The first dimension is more explicit; the second, a logical conclusion from Scheler’s notion of person as pure spirit. In the following study I will first thematize these two aspects of personal uniqueness. Then, I will explore Scheler’sidea that one gains knowledge of these aspects of a person through love. Here Scheler’s differentiation between love as intuitive and love as participative serves to justify and further explain the above distinction in personal uniqueness. Through intuitive love one is especially able to grasp the divinely determined dimension of another, her ideal and individual value essence. Through participative love one is especially able to grasp that dimension of another’s uniqueness which she herself forms through her own freedom.

The author studies Scheler’s essay, “Repentance and Rebirth,” gathering together and interpreting all the insights of Scheler on repentance, and often reading them in the light of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s work in the philosophy of religion. The author examines Scheler’s critique of the reductionist accounts of repentance as well as Scheler’s own account. He gives particular attention to one basic problem in Scheler’s account of repentance, namely, a tendency to let forgiveness arise in the repentant person simply by the force of the act of repenting and not to give due weight to the divine initiative without which there is no forgiveness.

This article is a review of the recently published book Max Scheler’s Acting Persons, edited by Stephen Schneck. It considers some issues regarding the relation between Scheler’s phenomenological personalism and his later metaphysics by way of a discussion of the articles contained in this volume. The review explores the various and varied discussions of the relation between Scheler’s phenomenological notions of person and spirit. It suggests that Scheler’s turn from a phenomenological anthropology to metaphysics has its roots not only in this notion of spirit, which is distinguished both from Husserl’s absolute consciousness and from Heidegger’sDasein, but also in the ontology of values that is embedded in Scheler’s phenomenological axiology.

Max Scheler’s essay on virtue, first published under a pseudonym in 1913, begins with some reflection upon the decline in his era of a concern for virtue. Its central theme is a phenomenological exhibition of the Christian experience of humility, reverence, and related concepts, together with an exploration of their historical and social embodiments in Western culture. The core of humility is a spiritual readiness to serve, related to love, that produces in its possessor a liberation from the ego. The core of reverence is its sense of what surpasses our vision. It has the power to reveal to us the deeper value and being in all things. The paper contains elements of a polemic directed against scientific naturalism.

Alfred Freddoso has argued that Cartesian dualism cannot serve as the model for a philosophical anthropology that will be consistent with the plain sense of Church teachings. I disagree. Although the interpretation of Cartesian dualism to which Freddoso objects is not unwarranted by the Cartesian texts, a close reading of those texts suggests a diff erent interpretation. I shall defend a reading of Cartesian dualism that departs from the one which Freddoso discusses. I shall then demonstrate that this alternative reading is consonant with the teachings of the Church.

The core thesis of Malebranche’s doctrine of occasionalism is that God is the sole true cause, where a true cause is one that has the power to initiate change and for which the mind perceives a necessary connection between it and its effects. Malebranche gives two separate arguments for his core thesis, T, based on necessary connection and on divine power respectively. The standard view is that these two arguments are necessary to establish T. I argue for a reinterpretation of Malebranche’s strategy, according to which the Necessary Connection Argument alone is sufficient to establish T. The Divine Power Argument, which is anyway weaker, is needed not to support T but to bridge the gap between T and full-fledged occasionalism. Specifically, it is needed to rule out the existence of causal powers in nature, a scenario which is consistent with T but inconsistent with occasionalism.

The early Freiburg lectures have shown us the degree to which Heidegger is influenced by Luther. In Being and Time, Heidegger designs a philosophy that can co-exist with a radical Lutheran theology of revelation. Heidegger’s hermeneutics of facticity constitutes a polemic with the Scholastic idea of a natural desire for God and an accommodation of a theology of revelation. However, Heidegger’s implicit assent to the Lutheran concept of God-forsakenness is philosophically problematic. To be God-forsaken is not to be ignorant of God; it is to be abandoned by God, to have a history of dealing with God that has resulted in a decisive rupture and distance. But if this is a theological position, as Luther would be the first to argue, it can be justified only theologically.

Scholarly convention holds that logos and muthos are in Plato’s mind fundamentally opposed, the former being the medium of philosophy and the latter of poetry. I argue that muthos in the broad sense of story or narrative in fact plays an indispensable philosophical role in the Republic. In particular, any account of the nature and power of justice and injustice must begin with powers of the soul that can come to light only through the telling and interpretation of stories. This is implicit in Glaucon’s Gygean tale. Read in connection with the earlier tale of Gyges in Herodotus, Glaucon’s muthos shows itself to be a story about storytelling and interpretation, knowledge of self and others, and the discovery of the roots of justice and injustice.

Using Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, I advocate a theory of interpretation as a conversation with the dead, of the same sort Kierkegaard was practicing in the last discourse of his book. I do not mean reading the works of dead white European males, but looking at things from the perspective of the grave where, as Kierkegaard says, we are all equal before God. I will maintain that the creative conflict of interpretations arises from the ambiguity of this conversation, from the difficulty we have in making out just what the dead are saying, which I will relate to what Derrida calls the absolute “secret.” Whence the Derridean idea that only as “hauntology” is hermeneutics possible. I insert the interpretation of religious faith within this hauntological hermeneutical framework.

While denying that God has moral obligations, William Alston defends divine moral goodness based on God’s performance of supererogatory acts. The present article argues that an agent without obligations cannot perform supererogatory acts. Hence, divine moral goodness cannot be established on that basis. Defenses of divine moral obligation by Eleonore Stump and Nicholas Wolterstorff are also questioned. Against Stump, it is argued (among other things) that the temptations of Jesus do not establish the existence of a tendency to sin in a divine being. Hence, Stump’s Christological objection to Alston’s denial of divine moral obligation fails. Some counterexamples to that denial offered by Wolterstorff also fail. It is concluded that claims of divine moral goodness remain problematic.

The aim of this paper is to explore the perplexity of the notion of sincerity, chiefly by examining Lionel Thrilling’s account in his Sincerity and Authenticity. I will show that his account is problematic if interpreted as a “truthfulness account.” However, I will also show that his basic insight can be preserved in my own account of sincerity as a kind of congruence between the agent’s avowal and those beliefs, feelings, and dispositions that constitute the agent’s “true self.” The latter include a set of minimally morally acceptable beliefs, feelings, and dispositions that constitute the agent’s moral integrity. Further, the context of sincerity is one in which the agent realizes that his or her integrity, particularly the moral part, is vulnerable.