CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY: BACK TO THE FUTURE

In its many interwoven traditions, continental philosophy has a distinctive focus on what escapes the concept—experience, change, agency, responsibility, the future, the Other. The challenges that face us in the future are many: reaffirming and renewing what has already been thought and needs repeating, responding to emergent questions. None could be more urgent than the question of the animal and the fate of the planet. Addressing each of these requires that we suspend our normal conceptual assurances and think anew.     

TOWARDS A NON‐POSSESSIVE CONCEPT OF KNOWLEDGE: ON THE RELATION BETWEEN REASON AND LOVE IN AQUINAS AND BALTHASAR1

Because of the consistent emphasis he places on the supremacy of love, Hans Urs von Balthasar has occasionally been thought to incline toward a problematic irrationalism. This essay addresses this charge through a comparison of Aquinas and Balthasar on the question of the relationship between intellect and will. It is argued that the superiority of intellect over will generally attributed to Aquinas itself leads paradoxically to irrationalism whenever the object exceeds the soul, and that Balthasar's insistence on the supremacy of love—precisely because it integrates will and intellect and thereby makes the intellectual act structurally ecstatic—in fact allows us to avoid such an irrationalism.