To mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Søren Kierkegaard, I review in this essay the relationship between Kierkegaard and the Catholic tradition. First, I look back to consider both Kierkegaard’s encounter with Catholicism and the influence of his work upon Catholics. Second, I look around to consider some of the recent work on Kierkegaard and Catholicism, especially Jack Mulder’s recent book, Kierkegaard and the Catholic Tradition, and the many articles that examine Kierkegaard’s relation to Catholicism in the multi-volume Kierkegaard Research series edited by Jon Stewart. Finally, I look ahead to consider possible directions in which the conversation between Catholics and Kierkegaardians might continue.

The volume, Theistic Evolution, brings together objections to an evolutionary account of life’s history, and especially to theistic evolution, developed by scientists, philosophers, and theologians who prefer the perspective afforded by Intelligent Design. I present the main themes of their critique, and also point out that the work done to date falls short of providing a genuine alternative to the prevalent evolutionary account.

This article offers a detailed review of Filosofi italiani contemporanei, a book that presents overviews of seven contemporary Italian philosophers and philosopher/theologians—Luigi Pareyson, Emanuele Severino, Italo Mancini, Gianni Vattimo, Vincenzo Vitiello, Massimo Cacciari, and theologian Bruno Forte. Not intended as a comprehensive survey of the contemporary Italian philosophical scene, the book presents thinkers influential during the last three decades who have focused on tradition, post-metaphysical conceptions of being, origin, and principle, and the openness of philosophy to religion. Although eccentric by Anglo-American standards, the selection does not misrepresent recent Italian philosophizing, which has been more thoroughgoingly shaped by neo-scholasticism, idealism, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and nihilism than most English-language work. Open to international philosophy as well as to its own traditions, Italian thinkers work within a complex ethos that has produced significant recent philosophizing and holds great promise for the future.

The last third of the twentieth century witnessed a burst of energy by philosophers sorting out the many-faceted claims of natural law theory. Natural law theory, rooted in the Nicomachean Ethics with some modifications by the Stoics, was studied in the twentieth century mainly through the writings of Thomas Aquinas, followed by those of the Salamanca school, which was central to the Second Scholasticism. The horrors of the Second World War and the trials following it, with their charges of “crimes against humanity,” prompted a renewed interested by English-speaking philosophers in natural law jurisprudence. Analytic philosophers followed Elizabeth Anscombe’s urging to venture beyond the limits of early twentieth-century moral philosophy; Alasdair MacIntyre’s writings buttressed the return to ethical naturalism; John Finnis’s “new natural law” theory also contributed to this renaissance. These many avenues form the conceptual backdrop to the eight books reviewed in this essay.

Dwelling in the homeland would become a signature theme for the later Heidegger, pervading his work on technology, poetry, language, art, and the meaning of thinking. This question concerning the home would come to serve as a way of posing the question about continuity within his work and its relation to the decisive shifts that helped to shape his philosophical path of thinking. This article attempts to situate Heidegger both within his own work and within the history of philosophy by looking at the topic of “homecoming.”After offering a brief sketch of how North American philosophers have read Heidegger over the last twenty years, this article offers a review of four recent books that take up the question of continuity over Heidegger’s thought path. By focusing on Heidegger’s relation to medieval philosophy, the Greeks, the problem of will, and Gelassenheit, it shows how we can find a sense of unity in Heideggerian thinking by considering it against the discourse of a “first” and an “other” beginning.

This review article explores in a critical spirit the differences between constituent and relational ontology as practiced by four contemporary Aristotelian philosophers, Michael J. Loux, E. J. Lowe, Lukáš Novák, and Stanislav Sousedík.