Person in Analysis - Interpersonhood in Metaphysics and Analytic Theory (Paperback)

"This book", says Father O'Shea, "is about personhood. It will attempt to describe what it is to be a person, to relate as a person, and to act as a person. This theme is central to the retrieval of the metaphysics of St. Thomas Aquinas undertaken in recent years by William Norris Clarke, SJ. In a seminal intuition, Clarke has realized that in its supreme forms, being, the central object of metaphysics, is personal. He has shown that rationality, and action, are intrinsic to personal being. He has thus opened the way towards a phenomenology of metaphysical being as personal, relational, and active. In my previous book, Person in Cosmos, I attempted to correlate this metaphysics with cosmology. I saw an analogy between this description of personal being, and the descriptions of subpersonal being prevalent in the 'New Physics.' I contended that the one could be the source of insight for the other, and that they were very compatible partners in the quest to describe reality. ... In this book, I have continued in much the same endeavor, and try to correlate this metaphysics with psychology, and in particular, with certain forms of psychoanalytic theory that form part of the post-modern project of 'deconstruction.' This material needs a much more cautious handling. That, I have attempted to do thoroughly here".