For metaphysicians who have imbibed the sober and inebriating teachings of Thomas Aquinas, existence is an act, the act which makes all things actually to be. As the act of existence makes things to be, essence makes them to be what they are. Essence and the act of existence, in other words, are really distinct yet together they compose each of the things that are.Such an understanding involves a number of paradoxes, and Frederick D. Wilhelmsen's articulation of them reveals his philosophical genius. These paradoxes include the fact that the act of existence does not exist, that it can be thought but not conceived by the mind, and that truths about God can be known while He himself remains absolutely unknown. Wilhelmsen argues the notion that the Christian faith and philosophical reason harmonize while remaining completely distinct from each other.Writing in a captivating style, Wilhelmsen begins with a discussion of the development, strengths, and limitations of the ancient Greek philosophical accounts of being. Following that, he develops such key topics as the problem of existence, St. Thomas Aquinas' understanding of being, critical analyses of Hegel's and Heidegger's doctrines of being, existence as "towards God," and a metaphysical approach to the human person. The final two chapters develop the sense in which metaphysical thinking is and is not shaped by historical and social factors.

The study of being was one of the main preoccupations of Etienne Gilson's scholarly and intellectual life. Being and Some Philosophers is at once a testament to the persistence of those concerns and an important landmark in the history of the question of being. The book charts the ways in which being is translated across history, from unity in Plato and substance in Aristotle to essence in Avicenna and the act of existence in Aquinas. It examines the vicissitudes of essence and existence in Suarez and Christian Wolff, in Hegel and Kierkegaard, in order to uncover the metaphysical and existential foundations of modern thought. And yet Being and Some Philosophers remains not so much an historical investigation (although it could only have been written by a scholar steeped in the history of philosophy) but, in the words of its author, "a philosophical book, and a dogmatically philosophical one at that." Its passionate vigour has proven, over many years, at once fresh and provocative. Indeed, the appendix to this revised edition contains critiques of the book by two Thomists as well as Gilson's replies to their objections.

This book is an original philosophic exploration of the meaning of Kierkegaard’s life, his thought, and his works. It makes a bold case for Kierkegaard’s recognition of the concrete existence of the individual, including Kierkegaard himself, as crucial to the spiritual life. Written with delicate insight, and beautifully translated from Hebrew, this work offers valuable new turns to understanding the puzzling life-work of a modern giant of spiritual reflection.

Merleau-Ponty and the Paradoxes of Expression offers a comprehensive reading of the philosophical work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a central figure in 20th-century continental philosophy. By establishing that the paradoxical logic of expression is Merleau-Ponty's fundamental philosophical gesture, this book ties together his diverse work on perception, language, aesthetics, politics and history in order to establish the ontological position he was developing at the time of his sudden death in 1961. Donald A. Landes explores the paradoxical logic of expression as it appears in both Merleau-Ponty's explicit reflections on expression and his non-explicit uses of this logic in his philosophical reflection on other topics, and thus establishes a continuity and a trajectory of his thought that allows for his work to be placed into conversation with contemporary developments in continental philosophy. The book offers the reader a key to understanding Merleau-Ponty's subtle methodology and highlights the urgency and relevance of his research into the ontological significance of expression for today's work in art and cultural theory.

"This book presents a philosophical portrait of human persons that depicts each way in which we are irreducible, with the goal of guiding the reader to perceive, wonder at, and love all the unique features of human persons. It builds this portrait by showing how claims from many strands of the Catholic tradition can be synthesized. These strands include Thomism, Scotism, phenomenology, personalism, nouvelle théologie, analytic philosophy, and Greek and Russian thought. The book focuses on how these traditions' claims are grounded in experience and on how they help us to perceive irreducible features of persons. This book also explores irreducible features of our subjectivity, senses, intellect, freedom, and affections, and of our souls, bodies, and activities"--

Each chapter in Christianity and Political Philosophy addresses a philosophical problem generated by history. Frederick D. Wilhelmsen discusses the limits of natural law; Cicero and the politics of the public orthodoxy; the problem of political power and the forces of darkness; Sir John Fortescue and the English tradition; Donoso Cortes and the meaning of political power; the natural law tradition and the American political experience; Eric Voegelin and the Christian tradition; and Jaffa, the School of Strauss, and the Christian tradition. Wilhelmsen is convinced that mainstream philosophy's suppression of the Christian experience, or its reduction of Christianity to myths, deprives both Christianity and philosophy. He argues that Christianity opened up an entirely new range of philosophical questions and speculation that today are part and parcel of the intellectual tradition of the West. Wilhelmsen remains relevant because political philosophy in America today is following the historic cycle of political philosophy's importance: as things get worse for the nation because it is internally riven by ideological and spiritual conflicts, there is a greater need for the political philosopher to raise and explore profound questions and reassert forgotten truths about man and society, the soul and God, and good and evil, as well as the ground of political order. This is the latest book in Transaction's esteemed Library of Conservative Thought series.

This is a challenging critique of narrative theologies. Murphy argues that the widespread notion that the role of the theologian it so 'tell God's story' has not helped theology to advance the reality of its doctrines. She offers her own alternative approach, making use of cinema and film theory.

The discourse between nature and grace finds its linguistic and existential podium in the political condition of human beings. As Caitlin Smith Gilson shows, it is in this arena that the perennial territorial struggle of faith and reason, God and man, man and state, take place; and it is here that the understanding of the personal-as-political, as well as the political-as-personal, finds its meaning. And it is here, too, that the divine finds or is refused a home. Any discussion of ?post-secular society? has its origins in this political dialogue between nature and grace, the resolution of which might determine not only a future post-secular society but one in which awe is re-united to affection, solidarity and fraternity. Smith Gilson questions whether the idea of pure nature antecedently disregards the fact that grace enters existence and that this accomplishes a conversion in the metaphysical/existential region of man's action and being. This conversion alters how man acts as an affective, moral, intellectual, social, political and spiritual being. State of nature theories, transformed yet retained in the broader metaphysical and existential implications of the Hegelian Weltgeist, are shown to be indebted to the ideological restrictedness of pure nature (natura pura) as providing the foremost adversary to any meaningful type of divine presence within the polis, as well as inhibiting the phenomenological facticity of man as an open nature.

The Christian Humanist ideas of six Catholic scholars who were based in Munich during the first half of the 20th century are profiled in this volume. They were all interested in presenting and defending a Christian humanism in the aftermath of German Idealism and the anti-Christian humanism of Friedrich Nietzsche. They were seeking to offer hope to Christians during the darkest years of the Nazi regime and the post-Second World War era of shame, guilt and reconstruction.

Frederick D. Wilhelmsen's Being and Knowing, rooted in the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, rests on two basic assertions: first, metaphysics is the science of being in its first and ultimate act, existence (the act by which all things manifest themselves); second, that existence is known not through observing objects, but in affirming through judgments that these objects are subjects of existence. The chapters of this book explore these Thomistic doctrines. Some explain St. Thomas Aquinas's philosophy of being. Others probe his epistemology. The complexity and density of Aquinas's theory of judgment (that truth is realized in the judgment of man), emphasized throughout most of the book, point not only to a deeper understanding of the nature of metaphysics, but they open doors to the clarification of philosophical issues germane to contemporary thought. This work addresses a number of metaphysical philosophical paradoxes. Wilhelmsen's exploration of them demonstrates why he was the preeminent American scholar of the Thomistic tradition. This volume is part of Transaction's series, the Library of Conservative Thought.