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Philosophy of the Human Person

Professor:

Jules van Schaijik, Ph.D.

When:

8 sessions, 7:30-9:30 p.m. on Tuesday Sep. 14, 28, Oct. 12, 26, Nov. 9, 23, Dec. 7, 21

Where:

519 N. High St., West Chester, PA

Cost:

$250.00 ($200 for members)

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Course description:

At the very foundation of the civilization of love called for by John Paul II, lies the great “ethical datum” of the dignity of the human person.  What is this dignity? What does it mean to be a human person? How must we treat others and ourselves to respect our personhood? What must we do in order to thrive as persons? This course is designed to address these fundamental questions. It will be in deliberate and essential continuity with the perennial philosophy (i.e. thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas) but our readings will be drawn mainly from more recent thinkers such as John Henry Newman, Josef Pieper, Karol Wojtyla, Dietrich von Hildebrand and John F. Crosby. One important reason for this is that these thinkers are profoundly attuned to the particular concerns and questions of contemporary man.

Per session topics:

  • The Unique Selfhood and Inner Life of the Human Person
  • The Person’s Capacity for Truth
  • The Challenge to be Good
  • Recovering the Heart
  • Body and Soul
  • Immortality
  • Person and Community
  • The Human Person in Relation to God

Reading material:

  • Selections from John F. Crosby, The Selfhood of the Human Person
  • C.S Lewis, Abolition of Man
  • Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture
  • Selection from Karol Wojtyla, Love and Responsibility
  • Selection from Dietrich von Hildebrand, The Heart
  • Various handouts with passages from Romano Guardini, John Henry Newman, Plato, and others

Jules van Schaijik was born and raised in The Netherlands. Originally planning a career in business, his interest in philosophy was awakened at Franciscan University through the discovery of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s thought in the areas of love, marriage and ethics. His MA and PhD are from the International Academy of Philosophy in Liechtenstein. He has taught in the Netherlands, Austria and the U.S. He and his wife, Katie, are co-founders of the Personalist Project.

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I devote my very rare free moments to a work that is close to my heart and devoted to the metaphysical sense and mystery of the person. It seems to me that the debate today is being played out on that level. The evil of our times consists in the first place in a kind of degradation, indeed in a pulverization, of the fundamental uniqueness of each human person. This evil is even more of the metaphysical order than of the moral order. To this disintegration planned at times by atheistic ideologies we must oppose, rather than sterile polemics, a kind of “recapitulation” of the inviolable mystery of the person.

Karol Wojtyla, Letter to Henri de Lubac