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.

Person and Value: Karol Wojtyła’s Personalistic and Normative Theory of Man, Morality, and Love discusses the central themes of Karol Wojtyła’s personalistic teaching in a concise yet comprehensive manner. Grzegorz Ignatik presents a philosophical understanding of the human person and human action that conforms with the phenomenological and metaphysical methodologies used by Wojtyła himself. This book pays special attention to Wojtyła’s phenomenological insights concerning the significance of value for human life. Ignatik’s reflections are based on his extensive research of original texts—published and yet unpublished—written by Karol Wojtyła in his original tongue, Polish. By returning to and rediscovering the original sources, Person and Value provides a fresh and profound engagement with the anthropological and ethical thought of the future Pope John Paul II. Written for all who wish to encounter one of the most illustrious minds of the twentieth century, this book will be an indispensable key to reading his works.

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.

The book deals with the philosophy of the human person as worked out by Karol Wojtyła. It presents a number of fundamental issues necessary to understand Karol Wojtyła's personalism. Thus, first it undertakes Wojtyła's move from the philosophy of the human being to the philosophy of the human person; second, it presents Wojtyła's epistemological approach to the person against the background of other philosophies concerned with the human person; third, it describes the metaphysical structure of the person; four, it analyses the person's selected faculties (consciousness, emotions); five, it presents some aspects of the action of the person (a person's causation, or their role in dialogue); and finally, it tries to sketch the problem of personal dignity.

The Catholic University of America Press is honored to announce the publication of the first volume of the critical English edition of The Collected Works of Karol Wojtyła/John Paul II. In conjunction with an international editorial board, the English Critical Edition will comprise 20 volumes, covering all of his writings and correspondence both in the years before and during his papacy. What makes this collection so important is that access to his writings have been a significant challenge. Except for official papal addresses and documents preserved and disseminated by the Vatican, his works have been scattered and limited, or in need of a new translation. Finally, English-language audiences have faced the challenge, even in the case of published texts, of working across multiple languages and translations and of dealing with textual idiosyncrasies. The inaugural volume of this collection is Person and Act, together with related essays, which is in many respects constitutes Karol Wojtyła’s most profound and well-known philosophical work. Originally published in 1969 as Osoba I czyn, this work of metaphysics and philosophy is widely influential even though it is highly challenging intellectually and has heretofore posed difficulties for translators.

In The Problem of the Idea of Culture in John Paul II: Exposing the Disruptive Agency of the Philosophy of Karol Wojtyła, John Corrigan provides a new lens with which to view and understand the philosophy of Karol Wojtyła/John Paul II. He exposes Wojtyła as a major player in contemporary philosophical debates. The work reformulates the “problem of experience” in light of the questions surrounding our idea of culture. Corrigan argues that for Wojtyła the drama of the “problem of experience” manifests in the apparently divergent accounts of the meaning of human experience as presented by the philosophies of being and of consciousness. Solving this conundrum results in an idea of the person capable of explaining human experience in relation to human culture,unfolding the experiences of self-knowledge, conscience, and the ontic-causal relationship of the person to human culture. The first part of the book concerns formal considerations regarding the constitutive aspects of Wojtyła’s approach, while the second part deals with pragmatic considerations drawn from his comments on culture.