{"product_id":"existence-and-the-existent","title":"Existence and the Existent","description":"149 pages. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: \"Jacques Maritain (18 November 1882–28 April 1973) was a French Catholic philosopher. Raised as a protestant, he converted to Catholicism in 1906. An author of more than 60 books, he is responsible for reviving St. Thomas Aquinas for modern times and is a prominent drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Pope Paul VI presented his 'Message to Men of Thought and of Science' at the close of Vatican II to Maritain, his long-time friend and mentor. The foundation of Maritain’s thought is Aristotle, St. Thomas and the Thomistic commentators, especially John of St. Thomas. He is eclectic in his use of these sources. Maritain’s philosophy is one based, like his champions, on evidence of being first by the senses and second that which is acquired by an understanding of first principles (metaphysics). Fundamentally, Maritain is a metaphysician who defended philosophy as a science against those who would degrade it. He promoted philosophy as the Queen of sciences. In 1910, Jacques Maritain’s completed his first contribution to modern philosophy, a 28 page article titled, 'Reason and Modern Science' published in Revue de Philosophie, (June issue). In it, he warned that science was becoming a divinity, its methodology usurping the role of reason and philosophy. Science was supplanting the humanities in importance. In 1917, a committee of French bishops commissioned Jacques to write a series of textbooks to be used in Catholic colleges and seminaries. He wrote and completed only one of these projects titled Elements de Philosophie (Introduction of Philosophy) in 1920. It has been a standard text ever since in many Catholic seminaries. Up to and during WWII, Jacques Maritain protested the policies of the Vichy government while teaching at the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies in Canada. 'Moving to New York, Maritain became deeply involved in rescue activities, seeking to bring persecuted and threatened academics, many of them Jews, to America. He was instrumental in founding the École Libre des Hautes Études, a kind of university in exile that was, at the same time, the center of Gaullist resistance in the United States'. After the war, he tried unsuccessfully to have the Pope speak on the issue of anti-semitism and the evils of the Holocaust. Many of his American papers are held by the University of Notre Dame, which established The Jacques Maritain Center in 1957. The Cercle d'Etudes Jacques \u0026amp; Raïssa Maritain is an association founded by the philosopher himself in 1962 in Kolbsheim (near Strasbourg, France), where the couple is also buried. The purpose of these centers is to encourage study and research of Maritain’s thought and expand upon them. It is also absorbed in translating and editing his writings. Maritain's philosophy is based on the view that metaphysics is prior to epistemology. Being is first apprehended implicitly in sense experience, and is known in two ways. First, being is known reflexively by abstraction from sense experience. One experiences a particular being, e.g. a cup, a dog, etc. and through reflexion ('bending back') on the judgement, e.g. 'this is a dog', one recognizes that the object in question is an existent. Second, in light of attaining being reflexively through apprehension of sense experience one may arrive at what Maritain calls 'an Intuition of Being'. For Maritian this is point of departure for metaphysics, without the intuition of being one cannot be a metaphysician at all. The intuition of being involves rising to the apprehension of ens secundum quod est ens (being insofar as it is a being). In view of this priority given to metaphysics, Maritain advocates an epistemology he calls 'Critical Realism'. Maritain's epistemology is not 'critical' in Kant's sense, which held that one could only know anything after undertaking a thorough critique of one's cognitive abilities. Rather, it is critical in the sense that it is not a naive or non-philosophical r","brand":"Vintage Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":40568224317510,"sku":"1504344","price":12.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"url":"https:\/\/ym-demo.myshopify.com\/products\/existence-and-the-existent","provider":"Yesterday's Muse","version":"1.0","type":"link"}