10 Facts About Gabriel Marcel

Gabriel Honore Marcel was a French philosopher, playwright, music critic and leading Christian existentialist.

Gabriel Marcel was born on 7 December 1889 in Paris, France.

Gabriel Marcel completed his DES thesis and obtained the agregation in philosophy from the Sorbonne in 1910, at the unusually young age of 20.

Gabriel Marcel taught in secondary schools, was a drama critic for various literary journals, and worked as an editor for Plon, the major French Catholic publisher.

Gabriel Marcel was the son of an agnostic, and was himself not a member of any organized religion until his conversion to Catholicism in 1929.

Gabriel Marcel was opposed to anti-Semitism and supported reaching out to non-Catholics.

Gabriel Marcel is often classified as one of the earliest existentialists, although he dreaded being placed in the same category as Jean-Paul Sartre; Marcel came to prefer the label neo-Socratic.

Gabriel Marcel has set himself up as the champion of traditional monarchy and has just achieved a great success in the city council where he has attacked the secularism of public schools.

Gabriel Marcel was puzzled and disappointed that his reputation was almost entirely based on his philosophical treatises and not on his plays, which he wrote in the hope of appealing to a wider lay audience.

Gabriel Marcel influenced phenomenologist and Thomistic philosopher Karol Wojtyla, who drew on Marcel's distinction between "being" and "having" in his critique of technological change.