Maurice Blondel

"The work of French philosopher Maurice Blondel lies behind most of the controversies in twentieth-century French Catholic thought, and bore its fruit in the Second Vatican Council. Recognized in Europe as one of the outstanding figures in the Catholic revival that began at the turn of the century, Blondel was described by Pope John Paul II as "one of the first to discern what was at stake in the Modernist crisis." Published together here are two of Blondel's most significant texts. The Letter on Apologetics (1896) is a key statement on the possibility and meaning of Christian philosophy. History and Dogma (1904), written in response to the Modernist crisis, is an important contribution to the notion of tradition, seeing it neither in terms of historicism nor as something mechanical, but as a living synthesis. Introductory essays by Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan provide essential historical and biographical background as well as an account of the philosophical and theological principles of Blondel's thought." -- Back cover.

"This book presents three of Blondel's most important articles, which have not yet appeared in English. These are The Idealist Illusion (1898), The Elementary Principle of a Logic of the Moral Life (1903) and The Starting Point of Philosophy (1906). These essays became significant in Blondel's transition from the early Action (1893) to his later works on Thinking (1934), Being and Beings (1935) and Action (1936-7). They offer evidence for and explain the nature of the pragmatism in Blondel's thought, which developed as he began to articulate the logic of action in response to the criticism that he was an idealist. The Introduction argues that Blondel's measured response to this charge led to the development of a metaphysics of the concrete life and allied him closely to the common sense school of Reid. These articles should interest anyone who studies philosophy and theology and wants to explore the theme of concrete experience."--Jacket.

In L'Action, Blondel developed a "philosophy of action" in which he applies the method of phenomenology. This leads him to the first order issue of "action", critiquing the Enlightenment enshrinement of thought, which he subsumes under the category of action. This leads him to discover the distinction between the willing will and the willed will. This distinction shows a real insufficiency between the two elements of the will. The problem of connaturility - that man cannot desire something which cannot be fulfilled - leads to investigating how the willing will can be fulfilled in the willed will. This insufficiency leads him to eventually hypothesize the supernatural as the only real possibility. He insists that this is as far as a philosopher can go, that the supernatural is the real end of man, and that the content of the supernatural is left to the realm of theology. (Source: [Wikipedia](