Looking at the Sun: New Writings in Modern Personalism

Preface

This volume of essays began life in the summer of 2016. The venue was York St. John University; the occasion, an international conference, the third in fact, organised by the British Personalist Forum. There were many exceptional papers delivered during that week; those selected for this collection were judged to be among the very best. Having witnessed our authors hone their insight and perspicacity to a razor’s edge, we are delighted to present their work here. Our conference coincided, by no accident whatsoever, with the twentieth anniversary of the British Personalist Forum and its journal Appraisal. The Forum originally grew out of a society dedicated to the work of Michael Polanyi, the Hungarian-British scientist, philosopher, sociologist, and economist. In 1996, this society opened its arms to welcome others interested in the personalist tradition. Since then, it has remained a bastion of personalist thought in the UK. It exists, not only to promote the works of its local representatives – Michael Polanyi, Austin Farrer, and John Macmurray, to name but three – but also to defend personalism as a way of doing philosophy, a way that champions the creative and constructive over the reductive and destructive. In short, the Forum seeks to remind the scholarly world of an important intellectual movement and a valuable resource for philosophers and theologians of every cast and kind. It seeks, moreover, to forge international links between those working within the tradition and those new to it; perhaps most importantly, to encourage young scholars from all corners of the globe to join the conversation. In this last aspiration, the conference at York St. John was a great success. We were joined by new friends and old, fledgling philosophers and venerable sages, from Western and Eastern Europe, from America, and from as far away as Tasmania. The principle aim of this gathering, and therefore to a great extent, of this collection, was to encourage the participants to consider new applications of person-concepts. We sought, as far as possible, to put personalism itself to work in fields as wide-ranging as the moral and the metaphysical, the practical and the political, the cultural and the cosmological. Whether we have been successful in this, too, let the reader judge.

Looking at the Sun

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