 This video is a little bit different. In it, I'm going to tell the story. A story that has to do with the library. It has to do with this book. But it also has to do with the research, the scholarship, the philosophical detective work, or quite frankly the obsession that resulted in this book. It resulted in a lot more. This is just the tip of the iceberg, you might say. In my first encounter with the Christian philosophy debates that took place in France in the 1930s, I had no idea that they comprised something that might turn into a book like this. I'd heard something about them because I had done my dissertation on Maurice Blondel, who was one of the major players in these debates. One of the players who actually has been very much left out in the English-speaking literature on the Christian philosophy debates. So my book, I provided translation of quite a few of the documents that he had. Actually, not all of them, though. Only about two-thirds of his pieces. I knew that there were some other French Catholic figures who played a role in it, but I didn't really know that much about it. I knew I wanted to translate Maurice Blondel, in part because only a few of his works, mostly early works, have been translated. As a matter of fact, that's still a project that I'm interested in. I'd run into a young guy named Adrian Papst. He was involved in the radical orthodoxy movement. He was studying at the Institut Catalique de Paris, and he had an interest in Maurice Blondel as well. I ran into him at a conference on Continental Philosophy of Religion at the University Lancaster in 2000. Well, he sent me through the mail some pieces, including this one, the account of the session of the Société Française de Philosophie, when they talked about the notion of Christian philosophy, when that was the key issue. He also sent me another piece. You can see his fancy writing, the Revue Neoscholastique de Philosophie. This is by Blondel, and it's called Pour la Philosophie Antigrale. I didn't know about this piece at the time, and I didn't know about Blondel's intervention in this. I got these in 2003. I read the Blondel parts through. I wasn't that interested in everybody else at first. After a while, I started looking at it more carefully. What I realized was that there was a really complex debate going on, where there were a number of different positions being staked out. They didn't all agree with each other. I knew about some of the figures, like I knew about Etienne Jeunceau. I knew him from this book, which I've read before. I knew him as a scholar of medieval philosophy. This is his book on Bonaventure. I also knew about Jacques Morintin. I didn't know much about Emile Brahier, although he had written a history of philosophy, because I tended not to rely on secondary sources. I didn't know about Léon Brunschvig very much other than he had been somewhere involved with Blondel, and so I started doing research on this, and then it just started spiraling. I found reference after reference, shooting off in different directions, and I realized there was really something here that was well worth investigating. I myself became captivated by it, and I thought, you know, nobody seems to know much about this. Why not? Well, it's because a lot of these things haven't been translated into English. If they're not in English, people assume they're not important, and if people assume they're not important, they don't get translated into English. So then my next stop was the library. Around 2004, I started carrying on more research, and I found myself hitting the library, which is where you see me now, obviously. This is not exactly the same library because most of my research was carried out at the University of Notre Dame's Heschburg Library. At that time, I was living in Indiana, and I was only about an hour and a half from the Notre Dame Library, which is an excellent library for the sort of research I was carrying on. And the more that I went, and the more that I started researching, and the more journals and books and databases and bibliographies I started going through, the more threads there were to work out, the more I had to follow up with things. And I had no idea just how vast the literature that comprised the Christian philosophy debates actually was. I still don't actually have all of it in hand. I don't think anybody does. One of my great goals is to someday accumulate all of it, at least in photocopier digitized form. So, at this stage in the story, what happened was, I knew that Blondel and Brunchfig and Jilson, Moritone, these people were involved. And I would keep on going to the same floor, the 13th floor on the Heschburg Library, and I would just take out an entire decade of journals. I started with the Revue de Metaphysique, Edith Moral, and the Revue Néos Galastique. And I would just take out the entire section and just pour through it, and go really from about 1925 all the way through 1940, and look for any sort of reference to Christian philosophy. After a while, I started to realize I saw patterns. There were certain authors who were publishing in certain journals. There were certain dialogues that were taking place back and forth through different journal articles. And sometimes it would actually switch. It would go from the Revue de Metaphysique, Edith Moral, to the Revue Tomiest, or from those to the Revue Néos Galastique, or it would spill over into Etude Philosophique. And I started just going through, like I said, and looking through journal after journal after journal, article after article, and at first I was only looking at titles, then I actually started reading through them. And after I had exhausted the French philosophical journals, I started looking for references in Italian, and German, and Spanish, and even, you know, in the English-speaking journals. And I found some here and there. And then I came upon a bibliography that really helped me out. And there's a whole long story there. In 2006, I had been going back and forth to these libraries, and by that time I'd actually expanded it, so I was no longer just looking in philosophy areas. I'd actually found the area of the library that had all the theology and the popular religious journals. And I was going through those as well. That's how I found a lot of interesting pieces in things like Vientilexuel and La Nouvelle Revue des Jeunes. And I actually found a lot of unsuspected works that are not actually part of a bibliography by some of the major authors in these Christian philosophy debates that just hadn't been compiled by digging through these. Anyway, back to the story. So in 2006, in the summer, I had actually been selected to be part of the Erasmus Institute Faculty Summer Fellowship with Alistair McIntyre, which was focused on practical rationality. And I was by far the most junior and, you might say, least decorated when it comes to publications. A member of the fellowship group, there were ten of us. I think that I was in primarily because McIntyre was intrigued by the fact that I had done prison teaching, but that's an entire different story. While I was there, I got to stay at Notre Dame for the period of the fellowship, and we were housed and fed. I had access to the library, and so every night, instead of drinking or playing the banjo that I had brought along, I did some of that as well, or just convincing with the other participants, I was spending after dinner probably a good three to four hours in the library every single night just digging through the journals, the books, anything I could find that had to do with Christian philosophy and especially with these debates. One of the participants, Tobias Hoffman, who was at Catholic University of America, he found a book by an Italian scholar that had a really good bibliography for at least part of the debates, and he found it, gave it to me, I started looking through it, and now I really hit paydirt, and I started, you know, finding more and more. I was photocopying piece after piece after piece, but even still with that, Boliolo didn't have, that's the Italian scholar, he didn't have all the references in there. I kept finding more and more and more. I would sit down and just go through year after year of Revue Tomiest. I would go into a section of the library where I thought there might be something, sort of like a prospector digging for gold, and you sift through a lot of things. You find a lot of other interesting things on the way too, by the way. If you have a photocopy card, it can get very expensive as you find things that tie in with other projects, but the key thing was I kept finding pieces that I could use that needed to become part of the compiled materials for the Christian philosophy debates, and so my collection grew and grew and grew, and every time that I came back from the library, back to my home in Indiana, I had another two, three, if it was a very good day, maybe four or five articles that I could add to my growing hoard, almost, you might say. I still haven't actually read all of them. I've skimmed all of them and read through most of them, but I haven't actually had the time to sit down and go through each of them line by line. Oftentimes, when I would read through a piece, I would find interesting bibliographical references, which then would have to be tracked down. I'm showing you this just to give you an impression about how much literature we're actually talking about, and this does not actually comprise all of it. These are all dossiers that I have prepared. For instance, here's Brunschwig's contributions. Louis-Paul Couchette's contributions. Later writings like Germain Grise, people who were involved tangentially in the debates, much later scholars like Thilette, correspondence between Jules So and Mauritain and other people. These are all photocopies. These are all the things that I found in the libraries carried down to the seventh floor or to the twelfth floor or the eleventh floor or the second floor of Notre Dame's Hesburgh Library and photocopied bit by bit by bit over years. That gives you an idea of the extent of my obsession, but it also gives you an idea of the extent of the sheer subject by itself.