Converts to the Real: Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy
EDWARD BARING
(HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 504 PP, £39.95)
Tablet bookshop price £35.95 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Socrates modestly described himself as a midwife, helping others to give birth to a wisdom that was their own. The analogy springs to mind when reading this fascinating, well-researched and imaginative book by Edward Baring. His aim is to show something both striking and unexpected: that Catholicism is “the single most important explanation” for the international success of phenomenology.

This is a striking claim because ­phenomenology was the dominant form of philosophy as practised on the continent through the middle years of the twentieth century. It is a way of doing philosophy that uses radically new methods of achieving the philosopher’s oldest goal, of “getting back to the things themselves”. It came to prominence in Germany with the pioneering work of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. It spread to France where it eventually animated the prose and fiction of Jean-Paul Sartre, spawning a version of itself which spread around the world under the more familiar name of ‘existentialism’. If it can be shown that Catholicism is the single most important explanation for this success, then that is quite something.