Reading in Exile

I've recently been asked to write two papers, one on Max Scheler's theory of value perception for a forthcoming volume from Oxford University Press on spiritual perception, and the other on Dietrich Von Hildebrand for a special issue of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly . This has led me, especially during the last week, to revisit a lot of material I haven't looked at closely in some time. While I've dealt with these thinkers in my  papers on personalism , I haven't concentrated on Hildebrand  since my undergraduate days at Franciscan University of Steubenville , and not on Scheler  since I was working on my dissertation. In my professional writing, I've focused more recently on Thomistic metaphysics, especially the Thomism of the 16th and 17th centuries, and on more contemporary French phenomenology. It's been quite a treat this week revisiting in a focused, daily way, this older, more realist, more German phenomenology. The fundamental idea...

We're coming to the end of lilactime here in The Cities. For the last few weeks, the lilacs have been a burst of purple on every corner, on the border of my garden, on the quad at school. There's one yard in particular that I pass walking from my car to my office that is rank with overgrown lilacs, its scent wafting far up the street, especially in the evening. The lilacs that emerge everywhere along with the first signs of the full, mature green of summer, after the early, impressionistic dusting of chartreuse on every branch, are for me the image of late spring. It is easy to believe in the love, the eros , that draws the sun and the other stars, when there are lilacs out. This time of Spring is, as everyone knows, the time of attraction. The German phenomenologist Max Scheler describes how many in the early twentieth century held that all life forms a single substance, driven by a single interior vital force, which we, who as Spirits rise above the pulsing stream of life,...