In Personalist Papers, John F. Crosby continues the discussion of Christian personalism begun in his highly acclaimed book, The Selfhood of the Human Person.

This book presents selected addresses presented before the Personalist Discussion Group meetings held in conjunction with the annual meetings of The American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division. It includes the central ideas of American Personalistic Idealism developed during the twentieth century, its major criticisms, and recent developments by philosophers who are either Personalistic Idealists or sympathetic to the position.

It has been said that John Henry Newman stands at the threshold of the new age as a Christian Socrates, the pioneer of a new philosophy of the individual Person and Personal Life. Newman's personalism is found in the way he contrasts the theological intellect and the religious imagination. Newman pleads for the latter when he famously says, in words that John F. Crosby takes as the motto of his book, I am far from denying the real force of the arguments in proof of a God ...but these do not warm me or enlighten me; they do not take away the winter of my desolation, or make the buds unfold and the leaves grow within me, and my moral being rejoice. In The Personalism of John Henry Newman, Crosby shows the reader how Newman finds the life-giving religious knowledge that he seeks. He explores the heart in Newman and explains what Newman was saying when he chose as his cardinal's motto, cor ad cor loquitur (heart speaks to heart). He explains what Newman means in saying that religious truth is transmitted not by argument but by personal influence.Crosby also examines Newman's personalist account of what it is to think; he explains what it is for a person to think not just by rule but by his spontaneous living intelligence. Crosby examines the subjectivity of Newman, and shows how the modern turn to the subject is enacted in Newman. But these personalist aspects of Newman's mind, which connect him with many streams of contemporary thought, are not the whole of Newman; they stand in relation to something else in Newman, something that Crosby calls Newman's radically theocentric religion. Newman is a modern thinker, but not the modernist he is sometimes mistaken for. The inexhaustible plenitude of Newman derives from theunion of apparent opposites in him: the union of his teaching on the heart with his theocentric teaching, of the subjectivity of experience with the objectivity of revealed truth. Crosby writes for a broad non-specialist public just as Newman did.

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.

Every kind of exploration is touched in some way by a philosophy of persons; touched and often vitally enhanced. This collection sets out to mine this rich seam of influence, bringing together authors keen to strike new developments and applications. Together, they have put their philosophy of persons to work in fields as wide-ranging as the moral and the metaphysical, the practical and the political, the cultural and the cosmological. In doing so, they have drawn on and illustrated the depth and breadth of modern Personalist thought, demonstrating its crucial relevance to debates across the entire philosophical spectrum. Whether they are familiar with the Personalist tradition or no, readers from every corner of the philosophical world will find much here to challenge and stimulate them. Most importantly, they will find a new and badly needed philosophical perspective.

Ethical Personalism proposes to reflect on the person from at least three levels: ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Articulating from various philosophical and religious angles and traditions the ontological and inalienable value of the human person, i.e., her dignity, the contributors to this volume show not just what it means to be a human person, but also what it takes to live accordingly. Hence, beyond the purely theoretical elaboration on ethical personalism that reposes the crucial debates between relativism and realism on the one hand, and consequentialism and deontology on the other hand, this volume offers a range of insights useful for addressing concrete and practical matters that we, as humans, are confronted in our everyday life. With the call “back to the person!” which takes roots from a deep conviction to bring into light the value of the person, Ethical Personalism unequivocally affirms the necessity of (re)placing the person in the centre of our project of society, economic plans, political settings, and environment policies.