Consent to Being

Aimé Forest (1898–1983) was a French metaphysical philosopher and historian of medieval philosophy who taught at the universities of Grenoble and then Montpellier. Consent to Being, published in 1936, was his first book, and it, along with the ones that followed, such as Consentement et Création (1943), La vocation de l’Esprit (1953), and L’avènement de l’âme (1973), established him as a leading figure among the twentieth-century French Catholic “philosophers of the spirit.” In this book he is concerned with bringing to light the spiritual significance of what he calls the philosophical method of consent to being. His insistence on the profound connection between the spirit and being underlies his ambitious project of resurrecting metaphysical thought in the modern day by rescuing it from the abstractions of the scientific understanding. This first English translation of any of Forest’s books introduces a Christian philosopher of great significance and originality to the anglophone intellectual world.