The Personalist

Pittsburgh Theological Monograph Series General Editor - Dikran Y. Hadidian

This book reviews South Korea’s experiences of kŭndaehwa (modernization), or catching up with the West, with a focus on three major historical projects, namely, expansion of new (Western) education, industrialization and democratization. The kŭndaehwa efforts that began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century have now fully transformed South Korea into an urban industrial society. In this book we will explore the three major issues arising from the kundaehwa process in Korea: How was the historical transformation made possible in the personalistic environment?; How personalistic is modern Korea?; And how difficult is it to build an orderly public domain in the pesonalistic modern Korea and how do Koreans respond to this dilemma of modernization? As an examination of modernization as well as Korea, this book will appeal to students and scholars of Korean studies, sociology, politics and history.

Much has been written about the great personalist philosophers of the 20th century, but few books cover the personalist movement as a whole. An Introduction to Personalism fills that gap, and presents an engaging anthropological vision capable of taking the lead in the debate about the meaning of human existence and of winning hearts and minds for the cause of the dignity of every person.

Philosophical personalism has generated a very powerful field of study in the twentieth and twenty first centuries but has not produced a systematic exposition. This book fills this big gap by offering for the first time a full systematic personalistic vision of the human person. This ambitious volume offers a pedagogical and integrated exposition of philosophical personalism, answering vital questions about human identity and existence in a way that the reader (or student) can achieve an integrated view of the person. The book points to the real life of each person so that, by partially unraveling the mystery of the personal being, it becomes a philosophical guide for life. For these reasons, the book can be used both for academic purposes, as a manual of philosophy of man or for personal enlightenment. Divided in five parts, the first part of the book works as an introduction, offering an overview of the human person and of the notion of person. The second part describes the internal structure of the human being addressing topics as corporeity as a personal fact; sensibility and the senses; affectivity; intelligence; freedom understood as choice and self-determination and, finally, the personal self. The third part analyses the person in action and some special types of action such as work and language. The fourth part deals with interpersonal relationships beginning with I-You relationship (friendship, love) and following with the family and the social structure. Finally, part five deals with the so-called ultimate questions, that is, those that decide the final meaning of each person’s life, namely, time, death, immortality, and religion.

This work provides a clear guide to Karol Wojtyla's principal philosophical work, Person and Act, rigorously analyzing the meaning that the author intended in his exposition. An important feature of the work is that the authors rely on the original Polish text, Osoba i czyn, as well as the best translations into Italian and Spanish, rather than on a flawed and sometimes misleading English edition of the work.