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The Soul of the Person: A Contemporary Philosophical Psychology by Adrian J. Reimers

2007; Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception; Volume: 71; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/tho.2007.0039

2473-3725

Philip Blosser,

Catholicism, Bioethics, Media, Education

BOOK REVIEWS The Soul ofthe Person: A Contemporary Philosophical Psychology. By ADRIANJ. REIMERS. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006. Pp. xvi+ 301. $59.95 (cloth). ISBN 0-8132-1453-X. Adrian]. Reimers is adjunct assistant professor of philosophy atthe University of Notre Dame, where he teaches philosophical anthropology. The present volume, he says, is the product not only of several years of writing, but also of a life of thinking. In his youth, Reimers had ambitions of becoming a priest and scientist, and after graduating from the University of Notre Dame with a B.S. in mathematics, he entered a Catholic seminary for a time. Eventually, he went on to complete his master's and doctorate in philosophy, in the course of which Rocco Buttiglione led him into the rich philosophy of Karol Wojtyla Qohn Paul II). This exposure led to the publication of his bookAn Analysis ofthe Concepts of Self-Fulfillment and Self-Realization in the Thought of Karol Wojtyla, Pope John Paul II (2001) and to his offering of courses in Wojtyla's "Philosophy and Theology of the Body" at the University of Notre Dame. One of the curious things about Wojtyla's writings, Reimers observes, is how little he speaks of the soul. Reimers suggests that the term 'soul' has been rendered nearly toxic by our current philosophical climate, in which it suggests Cartesian dualism-a view Wojtyla regarded as seriously problematic. Instead of speaking about the soul, Wojtyla focuses on the person's transcendence toward truth and goodness, which he identifies as the basis for calling the human person a spiritual being. Reimers leans heavily upon Wojtyla's work in his own analysis, but considers its phenomenological approach inaccessibly difficult and alien to most Anglo-American readers. He therefore borrows a number of concepts from Charles Peirce. Peirce's theories of signs and of habits, Reimers believes, provide an especially helpful framework to support an analysis of Wojtyla's account of the person's self-realization, self-fulfillment, and transcendence in act. In his essay "Some Consequences of Four Incapacities," Peirce writes: "The mind is a sign, developing according to the laws of inference." Reimers considers this a particularly felicitous expression of the traditional notion that human beings are rational animals. In other words, all human acts and habits signify that the human mind interprets the world and is an ideal reality formed and governed by ideas according to the laws of reason-and is therefore irreducible to its material substrate. One of the underlying concerns animating the writing of this book is the challenge posed by the pervasive contemporary agnosticism concerning the 143 144 BOOK REVIEWS existence of the soul. Many students today, including Catholics, consider the soul to be a purely religious matter, a mere tenet of personal faith. Reimers is sensitive to this challenge, and The Soul ofthe Person is his answer. While parts of the book are technical and obviously intended for philosophers, most of it should be accessible to any educated and attentive reader. From one point of view, the book may be regarded as a contemporary re-reading of St. Thomas Aquinas's account of the human soul. In this respect, probably not since David Braine's The Human Person: Animal and Spirit (1992) has there been such a thoroughgoing analysis of philosophical anthropology based on such a thoroughgoing synthesis of the contemporary literature. Braine's work aimed at a retrieval of the Aristotelian-Thomistic conception from the perspective of Anglo-American philosophy of mind, while combining insights of analytic thinkers like Wittgenstein, Ryle, and Austin with those of Continental thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. Reimers, on the other hand, makes extensive use of Wojtyla's phenomenological analysis of the human person in The Acting Person and draws on Peirce's theory of habits and signs as a heuristic tool. But the book is also distinguished by Reimers's impressive gift for providing numerous helpful illustrations and sometimes humorous examples ("The knife on the floor may moan and secrete blood by the gallon"), and his extensive discussion of various scientific, mathematical, and logical cases. One gets the sense that Reimers is most likely an...