Introduction to Focus on Jan Olof Bengtsson's The Worldview of Personalism

Randall E. Auxier, Southern Illinois University Carbondale

Once in a great while a book comes along that is so crucial to an area of study as to be assured of setting the tone in that domain of scholarship for many decades to come. The field of philosophical personalism has long awaited such a book. Rufus Burrow, Jr. provided a much needed service by including in Personalism: A Critical Introduction (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 1999) the first comprehensive introduction to personalism to appear in half a century. Burrow updated the developments in American personalism since its academic heyday, between 1890 and 1970. But the only truly comprehensive scholarly work in English on the historical emergence of personalism was Albert C. Knudson's The Philosophy of Personalism (1927), which, for all its many virtues, tells only part of the story. Now that has changed.