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Document Details : Title: The Philosophical Relevance of Jogn Henry Newman Author(s): MARCHETTO, Michele Journal: Louvain Studies Volume: 35 Issue: 3-4 Date: 2011 Pages: 315-335 DOI: 10.2143/LS.35.3.2157500 Abstract : The aim of this paper is to show how John Henry Newman deals with the matter of God’s primacy in an age in which humanity’s primacy is affirmed. The question is: How can a philosopher be relevant if he commits humanity to God, the only Absolute, thereby saving him from such supposed absolutes as earthly ones? According to Newman, today’s 'buffered self' is abusing reason, both by exercising it in matters that are not in its sphere and by regarding this world as the measure of everything. Faced with a contemporary malaise of immanence, Newman assigns a central position to 'the living mind'. His way consists in the enlargement of the idea of reason, up to the involvement of the implicit antecedents which determine choices and actions; in identifying a tradition, or form of life, in whose historic character truth is realized and which supports individual persons and the community to which they belong; and in reflecting the only absolute truth in the several forms of personal existence. We shall show some interesting affinities between Newman and Meinong’s phenomenology, Guardini’s personalism, and Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Finally, we shall deal with the relationship between absolute truth and its contingent incarnation (as presented by the Italian philosopher Luigi Pareyson), and with the place which God and believers are allowed to occupy in the modern constitutional and democratic State, which is the last result of liberal tradition, according to John Rawls’ definition and its rethinking by Jürgen Habermas. |
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