It is the purpose of these essays to commemorate the one hundredth birthday of the philosopher Max Scheler. On this centennial occasion it may be appropriate to recall the first two major works of the philosopher's life. Scheler is known mostly as the author of a monumental work on ethics, entitled: Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik (Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values), which is the only existing foundation of ethics written by a European philosopher in this century. Although its two parts were published separately (1913/1916) because of circumstances during World War I, all manuscripts had been finished by Scheler prior to the outbreak of the war. His ethics has been translated into various languages, including a recent translation in English. In the same year (1913) Scheler also published another major work which dealt with the phenomenology of sympathetic feelings, and which is translated into English under the title of the enlarged second and following editions: The Nature of Sympathy.

Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann developed ethics upon a phenomenological basis. This volume demonstrates that their contributions to a material ethics of value are complementary: by supplementing the work of one with that of the other, we obtain a comprehensive and defensible axiological and moral theory. By “phenomenology,” we refer to an intuitive procedure that attempts to describe thematically the insights into essences, or the meaning-elements of judgments, that underlie and make possible our conscious awareness of a world and the evaluative judgments we make of the objects and persons we encounter in the world.

This book shows how, on the basis of a phenomenological account of knowledge, values, and intersubjectivity, Max Scheler defends the objective structure of being and value and the distinctiveness of the Other against mechanistic attempts to deny them.

FOUNDATIONALISM IN PHILOSOPHY n his autobiographical work, The Education of Henry Adams, this I brooding and disillusioned offspring of American presidents confronted, at age sixty, his own perplexity concerning the new scientific world-view that was emerging at the end of the century. He noted that the unity of things, long guaranteed morally by the teachings of Christianity and scientifically by the Newtonian world-view, was being challenged by a newer vision of things that found only incomprehensible multiplicity at the root of the world: What happened if one dropped the sounder into the ab yss-let it go-frankly gave up Unity altogether? What was Unity? Why was one to be forced to affirm it? Here every body flatly refused help. . . . [Adams] got out his Descartes again; dipped into his Hume and Berkeley; wrestled anew with his Kant; pondered solemnly over his Hegel and Scho penhauer and Hartmann; strayed gaily away with his Greeks-all merely to ask what Unity meant, and what happened when one denied it. Apparently one never denied it. Every philosopher, whether sane or insane, naturally af firmed it. I Adams, then approaching with heavy pessimism a new century, felt instinc tively that, were one to attack the notion of unity, the entire edifice of human knowledge would quickly collapse. For understanding requires the unification of apparently different phenomena.