James Collins' "Louis Lavelle on Human Participation" (1947), and Walter J. Ong's Thought

Abstract

In my 1,650-word review essay "James Collins' 'Louis Lavelle on Human Participation' (1947), and Walter J. Ong's Thought," I highlight, on the one hand, the work of the American Jesuit Renaissance specialist and cultural historian Walter Jackson Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955), and, on the other hand, the work of the American Catholic philosopher James Daniel Collins (1917-1985; Ph.D. in philosophy, Catholic University of America, 1944). In Ong's massively researched 1958 book Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Harvard University Press), which Collins reviewed, Ong works with the aural-to-visual shift in Western cultural history. Ong based his account of the aural-to-visual shift of the French Christian existentialist philosopher Louis Lavelle's 1942 book. In 1947, Collins published his article "Louis Lavelle on Human Participation."