This volume is the third of Pierre Rousselot's Philosophical Works. It includes seven essays written between 1908 and1914, one year before his death (Two were published posthumously: "A Theory of Concepts by Functional Unity" and "Idealism and Thomism"). These essays offer a complement to Rousselot's views on epistemology, which he presented in Intelligence and constitute the core of his Neo-thomist philosophy. However, besides making his views more clear and specific, these essays also go further than what we had in Intelligence. It is an effort to offer a systematic view on knowledge as the fusion of the knower and the known. These views go significantly beyond St Thomas's doctrine and some of them are rather daring, like Rousselot's notion of an Angel-humanity. The common thread of these essays is the role of love in knowledge. Rousselot's expands St. Thomas's view on knowledge, on the mode of nature (per modum naturae) or connaturality, and understands love both as an attitude of the knower, who must be in a certain disposition toward the object, and a characterization of the relationship between knower and known. — From the introduction by Pol Vandevelde.
Contents
Foreword (Andrew Tallon)
Introduction (Pol Vandevelde)
1. Idealism and Thomism
2. A Theory of Concepts by Functional Unity
3. Spiritual Love and Apperceptive Synthesis
4. Being and Spirit
5. Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowledge
6. Remarks of the History of the Notion of Natural Faith
7. Intellectualism
Appendix: Sample of Rousselot’s Manuscripts
Index of Names and Subject
Pierre Rousselot (1878-1915), Jesuit priest, philosopher, theologian, and professor in Paris, served as medic in WWI and was killed in action. Author of L’Intellectualisme de S. Thomas (English trans. Intelligence: Sense of Being, Faculty of God, by Andrew Tallon, Marquette University Press), Pour l’histoire du problème de l’amour au Moyen Age (English trans. The Problem of Love in the Middle Ages, by Alan Vincelette, Marquette University Press).