Edward Baring is Associate Professor of Modern European History at Drew University and was a Guggenheim Fellow. He is author of The Young Derrida and French Philosophy, 1945–1968, which won the Morris D. Forkosch Prize from the Journal of the History of Ideas.
Baring has achieved something very significant…Not just a story of
ideas…but a story of how ideas spread across the boundaries between
national communities or between secular and Catholic thought.
*Commonweal*
An important book that should appear on the shelves of every
serious scholar committed to the study of either of its chosen
fields.
*Theological Studies*
Brilliantly conceived…By showing how Catholicism nourished the
roots of modern European philosophy, Baring sheds invaluable light
on ongoing discussions of the persistence of Christianity in a
not-so-secular age.
*Church History*
A story of thought as an inter-personal, inter-institutional
happening, where events of thinking take place between works,
between thinkers…Baring tells continental philosophy’s church
history.
*Phenomenological Reviews*
An impressive work that combines a broad scope and fluent,
accessible style with the kind of deep detail usually confined to
specialist studies.
*Times Literary Supplement*
Socrates modestly described himself as a midwife, helping others to
give birth to a wisdom that was their own. The analogy springs to
mind when reading this fascinating, well-researched and imaginative
book by Edward Baring. His aim is to show something both striking
and unexpected: that Catholicism is ‘the single most important
explanation’ for the international success of phenomenology.
*The Tablet*
[A] very rich book…It is both profound and sweeping in its scope;
it is almost a history of twentieth-century philosophy.
*Review of Metaphysics*
Baring’s history of phenomenology is itself phenomenological in its
attention to hundreds of dramas of belief, the outcomes of
which—contextualized but not determined by the Catholic
Church—helped imprint the continental philosophy of the twentieth
century with the strangeness of their unforeseen patterns…[A] rich,
deeply researched book.
*Hedgehog Review*
An exemplary model of the scholarship that is so needed in
continental philosophy of religion: historically and
philosophically learned, attuned as much to archives as to
arguments. It is accessible without being simplistic, driven by
narrative without sacrificing detail.
*Journal of the American Academy of Religion*
A scholarly achievement of the highest order…a profoundly original
and painstakingly detailed history of the shared conceptual spaces
of phenomenology and Catholic thought…Successfully lay[s] out a
genealogy of continental philosophy that spans (and indeed, calls
into question) the separation of sacred and secular…As much a
normative attempt to resolve a host of philosophical and
theological disputes as it is a work of transnational intellectual
history…Converts to the Real is a work of great erudition.
*Journal of Modern History*
Well-written and direct, Converts to the Real is bold and well
worth reading by all interested in philosophy or Catholicism.
*Law & Liberty*
Excellent and exhaustively researched…A major contribution to the
history of European philosophy in the 20th century, and of
phenomenology more particularly.
*Choice*
Through archival research and an analysis of philosophical
affinities, Baring traces the influence of neo-scholasticism on
continental philosophy…A detailed study of the tight but often
awkward relationship between Catholicism and continental philosophy
in the first half of the twentieth-century and its philosophical
and political implications.
*Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal*
Converts to the Real tells an intriguing, valuable, and timely
story about the religious leanings of European phenomenology,
especially with respect to its associations with Neo-Scholasticism
and the Catholic Church. Baring has done impressive archival
research to create a narrative with considerable detail. An
excellent book.
*Kevin Hart, University of Virginia*
The virtues of Edward Baring’s superb book are many. Converts to
the Real demonstrates the importance of phenomenology—typically
viewed as a philosopher’s philosophy—not only for twentieth-century
European intellectual life but for key social and political trends
as well. Its great achievement is to merge two contemporary
histories by showing how transformations in modern Catholic thought
turned phenomenology into the continental philosophy.
*Michael Gubser, author of The Far Reaches: Phenomenology,
Ethics, and Social Renewal in Central Europe*
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