31 Facts About Jacques Maritain

Jacques Maritain was a French Catholic philosopher.

Jacques Maritain was born in Paris, the son of Paul Jacques Maritain, who was a lawyer, and his wife Genevieve Favre, the daughter of philosopher and educator Julie Favre and statesman and lawyer Jules Favre.

Jacques Maritain's niece was librarian and Resistance member Eveline Garnier, who he later made his principal legatee and introduced to her life partner Andree Jacob.

Jacques Maritain read them with enthusiasm and, in turn, exhorted her husband to examine the saint's writings.

In Thomas, Jacques Maritain found a number of insights and ideas that he had believed all along.

Jacques Maritain later moved to the Institut Catholique de Paris.

Jacques Maritain taught at Columbia University; at the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago; at the University of Notre Dame, and at Princeton University.

From 1961, Jacques Maritain lived with the Little Brothers of Jesus in Toulouse, France.

Jacques Maritain had an influence on the order since its foundation in 1933 and became a Little Brother in 1970.

Jacques Maritain was an oblate for the Order of Saint Benedict.

Jacques and Raissa Maritain are buried in the cemetery of Kolbsheim, a little French village in Alsace where he had spent many summers at the estate of his friends, Antoinette and Alexander Grunelius.

The foundation of Jacques Maritain's thought is Aristotle, Aquinas, and the Thomistic commentators, especially John of St Thomas.

Jacques Maritain is eclectic in his use of these sources.

Jacques Maritain's philosophy is based on evidence accrued by the senses and acquired by an understanding of first principles.

Jacques Maritain defended philosophy as a science against those who would degrade it, and promoted philosophy as the "queen of sciences".

In 1910, Jacques Maritain completed his first contribution to modern philosophy, a 28-page article titled, "Reason and Modern Science" published in Revue de Philosophie.

In 1917, a committee of French bishops commissioned Jacques Maritain to write a series of textbooks to be used in Catholic colleges and seminaries.

Jacques Maritain wrote and completed only one of these projects, titled Elements de Philosophie in 1920.

The purpose of these centers is to encourage study and research of Jacques Maritain's thought and expand upon them.

Jacques Maritain's philosophy is based on the view that metaphysics is prior to epistemology.

For Jacques Maritain this is the point of departure for metaphysics; without the intuition of being one cannot be a metaphysician at all.

Jacques Maritain's epistemology is not "critical" in Kant's sense, which held that one could only know anything after undertaking a thorough critique of one's cognitive abilities.

Against Kant's critical project Jacques Maritain argues that epistemology is reflexive; you can only defend a theory of knowledge in light of knowledge you have already attained.

Jacques Maritain's metaphysics ascends from this account of being to a critique of the philosophical aspects of modern science, through analogy to an account of the existence and nature of God as it is known philosophically and through mystical experience.

Jacques Maritain was a strong defender of a natural law ethics.

Jacques Maritain viewed ethical norms as being rooted in human nature.

Jacques Maritain corresponded with, and was a friend of the American radical community organizer Saul Alinsky and French Prime Minister Robert Schuman.

Accordingly, in 1958 Jacques Maritain arranged for a series of meetings between Alinsky and Archbishop Montini in Milan.

Jacques Maritain advocated what he called "Integral Humanism".

Jacques Maritain argued that secular forms of humanism were inevitably anti-human in that they refused to recognize the whole person.

Jacques Maritain's political theory was extremely influential, and was a primary source behind the Christian Democratic movement.