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Appraisal Volume 14, No. 1, Special Issue, Spring 2024ISSN 2514-5584
What is personalism? A dialogue on Juan Manuel Burgos’, An Introduction to PersonalismComment by Juan Manuel BurgosI would like to introduce this set of comments on my book An Introduction to Personalism (Washington: CUA Press, 2018) with some words of thanks. First, I would like to thank Richard Allen not only for initiating and undertaking the translation of An Introduction, but for giving it space and therefore an audience in Appraisal for a group of philosophers to comment on the book. I would also like to thank Jim Beauregard for his commitment and dedication in bringing this work to fruition, because Jim is the one who has done the tiresome work of writing to the commentators, soliciting their work, revising, and unifying it, etc. My most sincere thanks to both. And thank you also, of course, to all the scholars who have not only taken the trouble to read my book, but also to comment on it. I’m so very grateful to Josef Seifert, Alfred Wierbicki, James. A. Harold, Weronica Janczuk and Diana Prokofyeva. Finally, I would like to give special thanks to Abigail Klassen for her careful and intelligent work in editing the final version of this set of reflections, which has made its publication possible. This joint work of so many people has made possible an interesting reflection on the identity and characteristics of personalism that can contribute to this debate, still open today.
The reviews are varied in length, in depth and in assessment and in perspective. Many of the reviews have been written by friends or acquaintances. These are people with whom, over the years, I have had an academic and personal relationship. As I hope the reader will see, this has not prevented them to express their opinions freely. The reviews are praiseworthy at times and critical at others. In the same way, I have also expressed my own opinion freely. That is, I am sometimes praiseworthy and sometimes critical of their views I have not answered all the ratings because, first of all, some of the criticisms are repeated in different reviews, so answering them in each of them would be repetitive for the reader, and second, because I have preferred to focus on what I deem to be the most relevant and crucial objections to my work so as not to lengthen the discussion excessively. Juan Manuel Burgos |