| Soon after his famous Gifford Lectures in 1955, a steady stream of articles, books and dissertations appeared on virtually every aspect of Gabriel Marcel's thought. Surprisingly little attention, however, has been paid to his thought on ethics. Yet ethical themes pervade his work, and he is a significant figure in the emergence of the contemporary school of ethics, known as personalist or dialogical ethics.; This dissertation is an attempt to fill this lacuna in present-day scholarship. It is composed of five essays that deal with different aspects of Marcel's ethical thought. The first essay explores the central place of the encounter with the other in Marcel's ethical thought. The relation between Marcel and Emmanuel Levinas is considered here in detail. The second essay takes up the link between love and justice in Marcel's thought. Only a justice that is based on authentic love, he argues, can lead to a true peace in which the person is no longer at war with himself and no longer at war with others. The third essay delves into the distinctive notion of virtue that emerges in Marcel's thought, and the fourth investigates the relation between ethics and the spiritual life. For Marcel, all three of the theological virtues---faith, hope and love---act as essential conditions or grounds for ethical action. The fifth essay turns to consider the many insights, peppered throughout his work, into the connection between ethics and human flourishing. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the relation between Marcel's ethical thought and that of a contemporary personalist philosopher, Robert Spaemann. |
