Action was once a prominent theme in philosophical reflection. It figured prominently in Aristotelian philosophy, and the medieval Scholastics built some of their key adages around it. But by the time Maurice Blondel came to focus on it for his own philosophical reflection, it had all but disappeared from the philosophical vocabulary. It is no longer possible or legitimate to ignore action in philosophy as it was in France when Blondel appeared on the scene in 1882, when at the age of 21 he first began to focus on action as a dissertation subject, and in 1893, when he defended and published...

I was very happy when in 1997 Fiachra Long came to spend part of his sabbatical leave at the Archives Maurice Blondel at Louvain-Ia-Neuve. This allowed him to bring together and complete his translation of three important articles from Maurice Blondel, known as the philosopher of Aix-en-Province. These three articles fonn a unity: they make explicit certain aspects of the method used in the great thesis of 1893, Action. This thesis, it is well known, aroused many polemic debates after its appearance. Thomist theologians accused Blondel of turning back towards Kantian idealism whereas the...

'The Letter on Apologetics' is a key statement on the possibility and meaning of Christian philosophy. 'History and Dogma, ' 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.

This book presents three of Blondel's most important articles, which have not yet appeared in English. These are 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...

"Blondel's masterwork, Action, here elegantly translated into English for the first time by Oliva Blanchette, remains a philosophical classic. It is a book that should be read by every mature philosopher and theologian." --International Philosophical Quarterly

"This translation of Blondel's critique of life, his] guide to living, is the best introduction to the man and his important kind of thinking, with a special eloquence and moving force in the reading of the whole." --Religious Studies Review

"This translation by Oliva Blanchette is very welcome and quite...