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Three Quests in Philosophy by Etienne Gilson Foreword [by  James K. Farge] This slim volume contains seven previously unpublished lectures by Etienne Gilson. [1] He delivered the first of them, “The Education of a Philosopher,” in Montréal in 1963. The next three, grouped under the title “In Quest of Species,” were delivered in Toronto in January 1972. Gilson composed the last three, which he titled “In Quest of Matter,” at his home in Cravant (Yonne), France ; but his advanced age and declining health prevented his travelling to Canada . He therefore sent them to Laurence K. Shook in Toronto with the hope that they might eventually be published. “That is why I am anxious to do the job,” wrote the late Father Armand Maurer, Gilson’s student and disciple, in 2006. [2] The first lecture was prompted when a group of students in philosophy at the Université de Montréal invited Gilson to speak at their inaugural “Semaine de Philosophie” on Tuesday, 19 March 1963. ...

Lyrical and Critical Essays by  Albert Camus Preface 1958 [by Albert Camus] The essays collected in this volume were written in 1935 and 1936 (I was then twenty-two) and published a year later in Algeria in a very limited edition. This edition has been unobtainable for a long time and I have always refused to have   The Wrong Side and the Right Side   reprinted. There are no mysterious reasons for my stubbornness. I reject nothing of what these writings express, but their form has always seemed clumsy to me. The prejudices on art I cherish in spite of myself (I shall explain them further on) kept me for a long time from considering their republication. A great vanity, it would seem, leading one to suppose that my other writings satisfy every standard. Need I say this isn’t so? I am only more aware of the inadequacies in   The Wrong Side and the Right Side   than of those in my other work. How can I explain this except by admitting that the...

Lyrical and Critical Essays by Albert Camus Introduction [by editor, Philip Thody] A LTHOUGH   Camus’s greatest achievements as a creative writer are undoubtedly to be found in his novels and his plays, his literary career nevertheless both began and ended with the publication of a volume of essays. Between the appearance of   L’Envers et l’Endroit   in 1937 and the publication of his Nobel Prize speeches in 1958, he developed and extended his use of the essay form to express both his personal attitude toward life and certain artistic values. He also wrote articles on political topics, and a selection of these, under the title   Actuelles , takes up three volumes of his complete works. But these articles, however perfect their style, did not really fall under Camus’s definition of the essay. For him, it was first and foremost what its etymology suggests: an attempt to express something, a trying out of ideas and forms, an experiment. It was not a polemi...

The Testament of Cresseid & Seven Fables by Robert Henryson Introduction [by translator, Seamus Heaney] Little enough is known about Robert Henryson, ‘a schoolmaster of Dunfermline ’ and master poet in the Scots language: born perhaps in the 1420s, he was dead by 1505, the year his younger contemporary William Dunbar mourned his passing in ‘Lament for the Makars.’ In a couplet where the rhyme tolls very sweetly and solemnly, Dunbar says that death ‘In Dunfermelyne…has done roun [whispered]/ To Maister Robert Henrisoun’, although here the title ‘Maister’ has more to do with the deceased man’s status as a university graduate than with his profession as a teacher or his reputation as the author of three major narrative poems— The Testament of Cresseid , The Moral Fables and Orpheus and Eurydice —as well as a number of shorter lyrics including the incomparable (and probably untranslatable) ‘Robyn and Makene’.           The hon...

Introduction to Christianity by Joseph Ratzinger Preface Since this work was first published, more than thirty years have passed, in which world history has moved along at a brisk pace. In retrospect, two years seem to be particularly important milestones in the final decades of the millennium that has just come to an end: 1968 and 1989. The year 1968 marked the rebellion of a new generation, which not only considered post-war reconstruction in Europe as inadequate, full of injustice, full of selfishness and greed, but also viewed the entire course of history since the triumph of Christianity as a mistake and a failure. These young people wanted to improve things at last, to bring about freedom, equality, and justice, and they were convinced that they had found the way to this better world in the mainstream of Marxist thought. The year 1989 brought the surprising collapse of the socialist regimes in Europe, which left behind a sorry legacy of ruined land and ruined souls. Any...