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Last September Spode House sponsored yet another of the Catholic gatherings for which it is rapidly gaining a reputation. This time it was the philosophers who met. As Fr Columba Ryan remarked, in introducing the conference, the philosophers had an advantage over the artists, writers and musicians who had held weekends already: they could not only discuss their calling, but practise it at the same time. And practise it they did. During the weekend there were two lectures, two symposia and three open discussions; and in addition the debate could be heard continuing in every available moment, at the tea-tables and floating across the park during the afternoons.
The conference was called as a first move towards meeting what is a grave danger at the moment for the Church: the growing gap between the language of the traditional philosophy in the Church and that of contemporary thinkers. It was intended to provide an opportunity for discussion between philosophers of both kinds, so that they might learn a little of each other’s languages; and in this it was extraordinarily successful. The weekend started, one might say, in the shadow of the controversy that had for weeks been filling the correspondence columns of The Tablet. The opposite sides in that monumental discussion might be expected to be at each other’s throats from the beginning. And indeed at the beginning it seemed that this would continue. But it is a measure of the success of the conference that the philosophers quickly shed their official ‘isms’ as they got down to the business of arguing particular questions.
