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Robert Johann—an Ontological Basis for an Ethics of Responsibility
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Abstract
This article places Robert Johann's ethics of responsibility within the context of his evolved philosophical position which is decisively influenced by the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas and John Dewey. Building on a perspective that he called “ontological pragmatism,” Johann began to explore the ethic of responsibility developed by H. Richard Niebuhr in The Responsible Self. However, Johann's version is significantly different from that of Niebuhr. After describing Johann's ethics of responsibility, I conclude by criticizing his moral methodology as insufficiently developed and by charging that his anthropology fails to account for certain crucial dimensions of human experience.
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- Copyright © The College Theology Society 1977
References
1 Johann, Robert, The Meaning of Love (Glen Rock, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1954)Google Scholar.
2 Johann, Robert, “Subjectivity,” The Review of Metaphysics 12 (1958), pp. 200–234Google Scholar.
3 Ibid., p. 232.
4 “My indebtedness in what follows to Dewey's concept of “experience” will be manifest to anyone familiar with his work. (See, for example, his opening chapter in Experience and Nature). The fundamental personalism, however, of my interpretation (as opposed to his biologism) sets us finally apart.” Johann, Robert, “The Return to Experience,” The Review of Metaphysics 17 (March, 1964), pp. 324–325Google Scholar, footnote 5.
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13 Ibid., p. 13.
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