The age of structuralism

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Bernard Reardon

This book is a survey of French Catholic thought - theological, philosophical and political - during a period of marked spiritual and intellectual revival, delimited roughly by the Napoleonic Concordat with the Vatican in 1802 and the Separation Law of 1905. The thinkers and scholars studied include such diverse figures as Maistre, Lamennais, Lacordaire, Bautin, Gratry, Olle-Laprune, Maurice Blondel and Alfred Loisy. The authors studies these writers, and many others, in detail and analyses in characteristically lucid manner the distinctive contribution of each to French intellectual life in this 'second grand siècle'. Dr. Reardon examines too the major trends in French Catholic thought and concludes that in the nineteenth century there was a recurring tension between liberalism and tradition, between the poles of a secular and even agnostic humanism, and a rigid ultramontanism. The century saw a profound and many-sided reaction to traditional scholasticism, and Dr. Reardon explores this reaction in its various expressions, in theology and philosophy, in political and social thought. The approach is non-technical, and this book will be of considerable interest to a wide variety of readers, both general and specialist. It is the first book in English to cover the development of Catholic thought in France though the whole of the nineteenth century and it will be indispensable for all those who wish for a comprehensive and reliable background to one of the major currents of French intellectual thought in this century. -- from dust cover.

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Guglielmo Ferrero

"The third volume of a trilogy. The first two volumes--The gamble and The reconstruction of Europe--were originally published in Paris. The principles of power is appearing in New York because it could not be published in Europe on account of the greatly increased censorship."--Pref.

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Jitendra Nath Mohanty

"In this book, Professor Mohanty develops a new interpretation of the nature of Indian philosophical thinking. Using the original Sanskrit sources, he examines the concepts of consciousness and subjectivity, and the theories of meaning and truth, and explicates the concept of theoretical rationality which underlies the Indian philosophies. The author brings to bear insights from modern Western analytical and phenomenological philosophies, not with a view to instituting direct comparisons, but in order to interpret Indian thinking. In doing so, he highlights some of its very distinctive features."--BOOK JACKET.

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Anthony Levi

"In this new survey of the development of European intellectual culture between about 1300 and 1535, Anthony Levi offers a fresh view of the Renaissance and the Reformation, calling for a reassessment of the nature of both. Through a radical and detailed examination of the significant intellectual, spiritual, and ideological developments across Europe during this period, Levi disputes the discontinuities commonly understood to explain and defend the events we term the "Renaissance" and the "Reformation." He argues that the renewed cult of the literary, visual, and educational norms of classical antiquity were a consequence - not the essence or cause - of the Renaissance. Further, the Reformation emerged from a cultural movement that neither constituted a historical break nor led to the catastrophic religious clashes of the sixteenth century. He offers a revisionist account of the collapse of scholastic intellectual systems and traces its course."--BOOK JACKET.