Question to me:
In your estimation… what is the hottest and most urgent philosophical problem of the past fifty years, and which is still investigated with great urgency today?
I answered:
I don’t read enough and am not working in the academy. But, for me, the hot issue is the experiential knowledge of “to be” (esse) as tending to be infinite: A revisiting of the metaphysics of creation. Since God is a Triplicity of Esse, and I share in it, and esse is not “being” but act thereof – and like is known by like – I must become a self-transcendending act so I can become who I really am, and theefore to know God Who is persistently creating me. This knowledge is only accessible experientially ab intus from within – and not reducible to concepts, and yet is the most real as ontologically based of all knowing. We have direct access to the experience of the self without the mediation of sensible perception nor concepts intellectualy. We simply “know” the experience of praying to God, serving the poor and forgiving the neighbor. Such knowledge is consciousness and mystical. It cannot be submitted to the criterion of the clear and distinct idea – or any idea at all. It is the meaning of faith in St. John of the Cross, and #5 of Dei Verbum in Vatican II.
Concretely, this is why Brexit is happening. The Brits know that the EU is not “one” because it is not gift. Therefore, it’s not real, held together only by a phony monetary input of cash. But each is for self and therefore does not know self. They know it’s not real, and they want out. Esse as person [God and man] is not being experienced and the EU, which attempts to be image God and the true Man is not holding together. Read Ron Paul to see this in concrete terms. In 200? they took the word “God” out of the EU constitution/s because it had no place in it in the present Europe. Europe has no children. The Muslim invasion is divine gift to them, as the Latins are to us.
No one can find God because He cannot be found like a dollar bill or a neon sign. He can’t even be conceptualized. He can only be experience as Esse. To me this is hot. See BXVI in 2006-2008 on Broadening reason. This is theological, anthropological, but eminently philosophical. For me, red hot. Fr. Bob
Appendix: Consider the words of Romano Guardini: “To the man of the ancient world… the universe itself was the whole of reality. What could classical man have used then as his springboard into transcendence? One might answer: the experience of a Divine Being Who transcended the whole of the limited cosmos. Whose existence and very reality would alter the world outlook of anyone who beleived in HIm. But classical man never knew such a Being …
When he plkayed the role of philosopher the man of classical antiquity tried to conceive of a divine absolute stripped of all imperfection, but even this attempt did not transcend the universe. What is most revealing is the fact that classical man had no desire to transcend his world. Speaking mor accurately we must say that classical man could not even conceive of a desire to break the limits of his world. To do so those limits must hae already been broken. This was simply not the case. even the pure being of Parmenides which looks as though it sere separated from the concrete world, was itself a prinicpel to which the multiplicity of experience turned as to its ultimate source…
Classical man knew nothing of a being existing beyond the world: as a result he was neither able to view nor to shape his world from a vantage point which trnascended it. With his feelings and his imagination, in his actions and all his endavors, he lived within his cosmos. Every project that he undertook, even when he dared to go to the farthest bounds, ran its course within the arc of his world…
The Middle Ages transformed radically man’s sense of existence and his vision of the world. Mediaeval man centered his faith in Revelation as it had been enshrined in scripture, in that Revelation which affirmed the existence of a God Who holds His Being separate and beyond the world. Since He creates and sustains all things in being and fills them with His Presence God is in His world, but He does nto belong to the wrold becasueu He is its Sovereign. The indpendence Of God is fixed in the absoluteness of His Being and in the purity of His Personality. An irreducibly personal God can never by merged with any universe. HE exists solely in Himself., Lord of His Being. Loving the world He dependsin no sense uponit. The mythical deities ofclassical antiquity, however, had to stand or fall with their worldy kingdoms….
The doctrine of creation most decisively reveals the power of God, the Infinite Sovereign. The world was created out of nothing byt he freedom of the Alighty Whose commanidng Word gives to all things being and nataure; of itself that world lacks any trace of internal necessity or external possibility. This created unmvierse is found only in the Bible…
Enter the Drive of the German For Transcendence (Karl Adam and Guardini): to be continued)-
The Truth Will Make You Free 