The Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University

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Author QuotedJacques Maritain
Title QuotedIntroduction to Philosophy / Translated by E. I. Watkin - Foreword by Ralph McInerny
Date (Year/Month/Day)1940/02/13
Imprint[S.l.] : Sheed & Ward. 1931I
QuotationReading Maritain's Introduction to Philosophy and finding it very exciting, stimulating, entertaining, clear, forceful. It must make anyone but Aristotelians or Catholics terribly angry, but why not? It is necessary for the truth to be defended without compromise and without a lot of polite philosophical doubletalk. The thing for the other side to do is write something a little more forceful than Edman's Candle in the Dark or a little more coherent and less impotently raging than Communist pamphlets. Maritain can be high-handed because he is completely competent and sure of himself and right. And it is right that people should start philosophy from something as good and clear as this.
Quotation SourceRun to the mountain: The Story of a Vocation. The journals of Thomas Merton, Volume 1, 1939-1941.; Edited by Patrick Hart, O.C.S.O. / San Francisco : Harper Collins. 1995, p. 150
Letter to 
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