American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly

Volume 79, Issue 1, Winter 2005

Max Scheler

John J. Drummond
Pages 203-212

Personalism and the Metaphysical
Comments on Max Scheler’s Acting Persons

This article is a review of the recently published book Max Scheler’s Acting Persons, edited by Stephen Schneck. It considers some issues regarding the relation between Scheler’s phenomenological personalism and his later metaphysics by way of a discussion of the articles contained in this volume. The review explores the various and varied discussions of the relation between Scheler’s phenomenological notions of person and spirit. It suggests that Scheler’s turn from a phenomenological anthropology to metaphysics has its roots not only in this notion of spirit, which is distinguished both from Husserl’s absolute consciousness and from Heidegger’s Dasein, but also in the ontology of values that is embedded in Scheler’s phenomenological axiology.