Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

The Mystery of Being contains the most systematic exposition of the philosophical thought of Gabriel Marcel, a convert to Catholicism and the most distinguished twentieth-century exponent of Christian existentialism. Its two volumes are the Gifford lectures which Marcel delivered in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1949 and 1950. Marcel's work fundamentally challenges most of the major positions of the atheistic existentialists (Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus), especially their belief in an absurd, meaningless, godless universe.

These volumes deal with almost all of the major themes of Marcel's thought: the nature of philosophy, our broken world, man's deep ontological need for being, i.e., for permanent eternal values, our incarnate bodily existence, primary and secondary reflection, participation, being in situation, the identity of the human self, intersubjectivity, mystery and problem, faith, hope, and the reality of God, and immortality.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

The central theme of this important book is that we are paying the price of an arrogance that refuses to recognize mystery. The author invites the reader to enter into the argument that he holds with himself on a great number of problems. Written in the early 1950s, Marcel’s discussion of these topics are remarkably contemporary, e.g.: * Our crisis is a metaphysical, not merely social, one. * What a man is depends partly on what he thinks he is, and a materialistic philosophy turns men into things. * Can a man be free except in a free country? * Stoicism is no longer a workable philosophy because today pressure can be put on the mind as well as on the body. * Technical progress is not evil in itself, but a technique is a means that, regarded as an end, can become either an idol or an excuse for self-idolatry. State control of scientific research, leading to a concentration on new means of destruction, is a calamity. * Fanaticism is an opinion that refuses to argue, and so the fanatic is an enemy of truth. * The kind of unification that science is bringing about today is really an ironing out of differences, but the only valuable kind of unity is one that implies a respect for differences. * We must beware of thinking in terms of great numbers and so blinding ourselves to the reality of individual suffering. Our philosophical approach to being is made possible only by our practical approach to our neighbor. * We must encourage the spirit of fraternity and distrust the kind of egalitarianism that is based on envy and resentment. * No man however humble should feel that he cannot spread the light among his friends. No easy solution is offered, but the author conveys his own faith that ultimately love and intelligence will triumph.

This edition of Marcel’s inspiring Homo Viator has been updated to includle fifty pages of new materials available for the first time in English, making this the first English-language edition to conform to the standard French edition. Here, Christianity’s foremost existentialist of the twentieth century gives us a prodigious personal insight on ‘man on the way’ that will reinforce and commend our own pilgrimages in hope. “Homo Viator – “Homo Viator – or as Marcel calls him, ‘itinerate man’ – is an outstanding example of the philosophy concerned, not with technical problems, but with the urgent problems of man. Marcel talks to our condition, emphasizing our urgent need of hope, thus discovering beyond the lack of stability the values on which we may depend.  “A subtle mind, a dramatist as well as a philosopher, close to the texture of human experience, he goes far beyond current platitudes to show that our Western tradition contains living truths that are as essential to our contemporary life as they were to our ancestors when they discovered them.� – Eliseo Vivas “The theme of Marcel’s Homo Viator is close to the center of all preoccupations: man in his pilgrim condition. With great virtuosity in the use of his own philosophical method, he probes into interpersonal relations and the threat to ethical values. Marcel excels here in his concrete analyses of the attitude of hope, the family community in its temporal and supratemporal aspects, and the forgotten virtue of personal fidelity.� – James Collins  

The Mystery of Being contains the most systematic exposition of the philosophical thought of Gabriel Marcel, a convert to Catholicism and the most distinguished twentieth-century exponent of Christian existentialism. Its two volumes are the Gifford lectures which Marcel delivered in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1949 and 1950. Marcel's work fundamentally challenges most of the major positions of the atheistic existentialists (Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus), especially their belief in an absurd, meaningless, godless universe.

These volumes deal with almost all of the major themes of Marcel's thought: the nature of philosophy, our broken world, man's deep ontological need for being, i.e., for permanent eternal values, our incarnate bodily existence, primary and secondary reflection, participation, being in situation, the identity of the human self, intersubjectivity, mystery and problem, faith, hope, and the reality of God, and immortality.

Music played a central role in the thought of existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973). One of the most tantalizing claims he made was in a set of conversations with Paul Ricoeur. Employing a geographic metaphor, he claimed that philosophy was the continent of his work while his plays formed the off-shore islands; but what was deepest was music as the water that conjoins the two. One who wishes to understand how he thought of music will find that his philosophical writings contain only a few, quasi-aphoristic, though significantly penetrating things about the nature of music and its relation to his thought. Disappointingly, neither his short "An Essay in Autobiography" of 1947 nor his larger autobiography of 1971, Awakenings, adds much to that beyond a few remarks. But the latter work makes reference to an article, "La musique dans mon vie et mon oeuvre," a lecture he delivered in Vienna in 1959, that turned out to be a significantly richer source. And if one turns to his bibliography, one discovers that, as a music critic, Marcel published over 100 items on music--including Musique dans mon vie"! None of them are available in English. Those of greater length and philosophical interest were gathered together, along with several shorter representative pieces, in the work entitled L'esthetique musicale de Gabriel Marcel that appeared in the Presence de Gabriel Marcel series. In order to enrich and deepen the appreciation of Marcel's thought in the English-speaking world by following up his understanding of the central role of music in his thought, but also to underscore the central role of music in his thought, but also to underscore the central importance of the aesthetic inhuman experience, we have selected the main articles that appeared in that work for translation here. Marcel complained that (as of 1959) commentators had not paid significant attention to the close connection between music and philosophy. The present text should remedy that.

This important collection of lectures and essays was regarded by Gabriel Marcel as the best introduction to his thought. Outstanding in the richness of its analyses and in its application of Marcel's "concrete approach" to philosophical problems, Creative Fidelity not only deals with the perennial Marcellian themes of faith, fidelity, belief, incarnate being, and participation, but includes chapters on religious tolerance and orthodoxy and an important critical essay on Karl Jaspers.

Known in this country as a Christian Existentialist, Marcel preferred to be called a "Neo-Socratic, " a label suggesting the dialogical, unfinished nature of his speculations. He may best be described as a Reflective Empiricist.

Born in Paris in 1889, the son of a French minister to Stockholm, Marcel frequented literary and political milieus, traveled extensively, and read widely in both German and Anglo-American philosophy. His best known books are Being and Having (1935), Man Against Mass Society (1952), and The Decline of Wisdom (1954).