Roman Ingarden (1893–1970) was a prominent Polish philosopher, phenomenologist, and student of Edmund Husserl. A characteristic feature of his works was the almost complete absence of analyzes from the history of philosophy. That is why it is so surprising that right after the end of World War II, the first text analyzed when Ingarden started working at the Jagiellonian University was Aristotle’s “Poetics.” Ingarden published the results of his research in Polish in 1948 in “Kwartalnik Filozoficzny” and in the early 1960s his essay was translated and published in the renowned American magazine “The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism” as “A Marginal Commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics.” As far as I know today, this text does not arouse much interest among the many commentators and followers of Ingarden’s philosophy. Perhaps this state of affairs is justified: Ingarden’s own ideas are only repeated here, and their usefulness in the meaning of “Poetics” remains far from obvious. However, I think that this relative obscurity is worth considering now, because it shows how modern reason tries to control ancient concepts. The main purpose of this article is therefore to recon­struct the strategy by which philosophy tames the text of “Poetics,” especially its concepts such as catharsis and mimesis. The discovery and presentation of these treatments would not have been possible were it not for the mimetic theory of René Girad, which provides anthropological foundations for a critique of philosophical discourse.

Christian philosophy provides the form and systematic theology the substance when the church turns its intellectual face toward the wider public. This united front is vital in the context of a global competition between worldviews, where naturalism in the form of aggressive scientism has declared war on all things religious. Through discourse clarification the philosopher should distinguish between genuine science and the naturalistic reductionism that attempts to co-opt it; and through worldview construction the theologian should then demonstrate how nature viewed by science belongs within a picture where all reality is oriented toward the one God of grace. In the battle between competing explanations of real­ity, the public Christian philosopher along with the public systematic theologian should offer a worldview with greater explanatory adequacy.

This paper focuses on one of the metaphysical problems facing theistic conceptions of evolution: namely, that of evolutionary transition from one specified substantial form to another. According to the evolutionary account, new substantial forms appear due to accidental changes in previously existing substances. However, accidental change may only lead to the production of new accidents, not entirely new and distinct substantial forms. The solutions proposed by modern Thomists go in two directions: reducing the number of substantial forms (species), and rejecting substantial form altogether. Both proposals deviate from classical metaphysics. The evolutionary account of the origin of species is ultimately obliged to challenge the real existence of species, and so leads to nominalism. As such it cannot be reconciled with classical metaphysics.

In this paper, I demarcate the three main stages of development of Étienne Gilson’s doctrine concerning Christian philosophy through an examination of some of his key works, treated in chronological order. Thus, I proceed to explicate how Gilson’s doctrine developed from its gestational stage in the 1920s, through the first Christian philosophy debate of the 1930s, into its second phase of birth and infancy from the 1930s through the early 1950s, ending with its third period, that of maturity, in the later 1950s and 1960s. Furthermore, I note that implicit throughout those three stages are conceptions of Christian philosophy as existing in two modes: one as the philosophical component present within theology, and the other as, properly speaking, outside of theology—though by no means outside of the influence of Christianity. Additionally, Gilson’s influence upon St. John Paul II’s treatment of Christian philosophy in Fides et Ratio is addressed. The paper culminates in a demonstration of how Gilson’s mature doctrine regarding Christian philosophy is relevant as a guide for the pursuit of Christian philosophy in this, our Third Christian Millennium.

It is a well-known fact that Husserl’s Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and phenomenological Philosophy I, published in 1913, was disappointingly received in the phenomenological circle around Husserl, and started a reinterpretation of Husserlian phenomenology. The problem of the constitution was a real dilemma for the studentship of Munich–Gottingen. More of Husserl’s students from his Gottingen years reflected in the 1930s on transcendental idealism, which they originated from the Ideas and found fulfilled in Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations and Formal and transcendental Logic. The remarkable similarity between these papers lies in how the question of being is incorporated into the problematic of the method in Husserlian phenomenology. But this parallelism in the problem reveals the origin of the religious phenomenon in Husserlian phenomenology as well. Adolf Reinach’s religious terms such as gratitude (Dankbarkeit), charity (Barmherzigkeit), etc. in his religious Notes, Heidegger’s notion of being as finiteness in Being and Time, Edith Stein’s concept of the finite and eternal being in Finite and Eternal Being are fundamental to the problem of constitution in transcendental phenomenology, but these two phenomena of being point at the constitution theologically. In my paper I would like to show the transition from the critique of Husserlian transcendental idealism to the roots of the experience of religious life through the phenomenological problem of being in Edith Stein.

The article analyzes the concept of universal salvation—apokatastasis in the thought of Friedrich Schleiermacher especially with reference to his early Speeches on Religion and the later treatise The Christian Faith. It moves from Schleiermacher’s understanding of religion per se to his soteriological and escha­tological theories. He understands the nature of religion as the feeling-intuition of the Infinite and points to a certain aspect of mystery, which religion contains. He rejects in the Speeches on Religion the anthropomorphic understanding of God and speaks of God-Universum. In the treatise Christian Faith, he reinterprets the theological concept of original sin and depravation, and points to a natural process of development of humankind from Godless-consciousness to God-consciousness. From the Protestant-reformed tradition Schleiermacher adopts the concept of predestination. However, he rejects the so called “double predestination” of sal­vation and condemnation. According to him, all people are chosen to be saved “in Christ”. This way, Schleiermacher continues the Reformed tradition, however he understands the election in universal categories. He rejects God, who chooses for salvation only some people, but accepts God-Universum, who maintains the unity of creation and leads people to perfect communion. This drives the German thinker to universalistic beliefs. In the convictions pointing to the final unity of humankind, Schleiermacher exposes his deep humanism. He assumes that it is impossible to reconcile the traditional view of eternal hell with God’s love. Divine punishment can serve as an aspect of overall paidagogia, leading to the maturing of humanity. However, it cannot be understood as a retribution, based on God’s wrath and cruel lex talionis. Such an understanding of God is for Schleiermacher unacceptable. Understanding soteriology in these terms, Schleiermacher refers to the apokata­static tradition of the Church Fathers and the classical concept of apokatastasis. In the modern context he continues and develops the personal aspect of apokatastasis, but also—through his affinities to the thought of Spinoza—draws near to its macro-scale, cosmological form.

This paper investigates the notion of “distributed cognition”—the idea that entities external to one’s organic brain participate in one’s overall cognitive functioning—and the challenges it poses to the notion of personhood. Related to this is also a consideration of the ever-increasing ways in which neuroprostheses replace and functionally replicate organic parts of the brain. However, the litera­ture surrounding such issues has tended to take an almost exclusively physicalist approach. The common assumption is that, given that non-physicalist theories (chiefly, dualism, and hylomorphism) postulate some form of immaterial “soul,” then they are immune from the challenges that these advances in cognitive science pose. The first aim of this paper, therefore, is to argue that this is not the case. The second aim of this paper is to attempt to elucidate a route available for non-physicalists that will allow them to accept the notion of distributed cognition. By appealing to an Aristotelian framework, I propose that non-physicalists can accept the notion of distributed cognition by appealing to the notion of “unitary life” which I introduce, as well as to Aristotle’s dichotomy between active and passive mind.

The Epicureans are hedonists who believe that pleasure is the only intrin­sic good. Since pleasure is the only intrinsic good, other things are only worthwhile for the sake of pleasure. Tranquility is the final Epicurean telos, i.e., all of our actions should aim for freedom from bodily and mental pain. According to the Epicureans, tranquility is the limit of the magnitude of pleasures so that there is no pleasure beyond tranquility. Once we free ourselves from all pain, there are no further pleasures to pursue. This poses the following problem. Since hedonism is true and something is only worthwhile for the sake of pleasure, but there are no further pleasures for those who have achieved tranquility to pursue, then it seems that nothing is worthwhile to the tranquil. This poses a problem for Epicureans because they should reject this consequence and they seem to want to do so, but they cannot without contradicting themselves about the nature and limit of pleasure. I call this the Nothing is Worthwhile to the Tranquil Problem (NWP). This paper develops a strategy that Epicureans can adopt to solve NWP. I develop this strategy in three stages. First, I explain NWP: Epicurean claims about the limit and nature of pleasure suggest that nothing can be worthwhile to the tranquil. Second, I show that this problem is analogous to the Problem of Creation (PoC), which claims that an impassible God has no reasons to create. Third, I argue that a prominent solution to PoC can also solve NWP. That solution goes as follows. Some activities are worthwhile to the tranquil because these activities express tranquility, just as creating is worthwhile to God because it expresses God’s perfections. In the final section, I raise three objections to this solution. None of them is strong enough to defeat the solution for which I argue, and so I conclude that it merits consideration as a solution to NWP.

The purpose of this article is twofold. It first seeks to prove that the notion of facticity in Heidegger’s work saw a major change after Being and Time. While several studies did deal with facticity as it appeared before the magnus opus and show the influence it had on the latter’s development, hardly any have dealt with what happens to facticity after Sein und Zeit. This is mostly because facticity, as it imploded, took on different names which fall under the heading of ground-attunements. Secondly, I will show the ambivalent character of this new facticity, where many essential notions, such as thrownness, truth, attunement and guilt, shifted meanings, sometimes almost imperceptibly or surreptitiously. I will show that this ambivalence comes from the fact that the shift in question allowed for an opening of facticity while at the same time bringing in restrictive limits, and thus a closing-off of certain essential issues. This has left several adumbrated questions, such as responsibility, in abeyance.

It is well-known that the early Heidegger offers important reflec­tions on the Christian experience of life in his accounts of Saint Paul and Saint Augustine. Yet, what is the systematic meaning of Heidegger’s phenomenology of religion? This essay aims to discuss this question by connecting themes from Die Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens to Heidegger’s attempt to provide his own version of phenomenology in Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung. Heidegger’s position with respect to Husserl’s phenomenology becomes clearer, I argue, when his problematization of the onto-theological structures he discerns at the heart of the philosophers he discusses, such as Descartes and Augustine, is taken into account and when it is shown how the phenomenology of religion exceeds the boundaries of a phenomenology that studies consciousness alone. In fact, the explication of the (purified) Christian experience of life and the concep­tion of God at stake in this experience allows Heidegger to articulate a form of phenomenology purified from onto-theological tendencies.