This book is not a set of introductory essays. It has been written with the more seasoned philosopher in mind. I follow Leslie Dewart’s general understanding of consciousness as a means of personal
adjustment based upon the unique experience of a human being. He notes that consciousness as “human adjustment differs from the animal kind in that man’s relations to his environment are mediated by a special
kind of experience: the sort, as we have seen, that endows him with a sense of selfhood and a sense of reality.” In this book, I contemplate consciousness, or the sense of selfhood and reality, as a philosophical
concept, not a psychological one. That is to say that I write each essay from a different perspective of Christian philosophical consciousness. The first essay revolves around certain philosophical insights that have become evident during Vatican II. The second explores some of the thought of Ludwig Feuerbach with respect to the specificity of human consciousness. This continues the philosophical exploration of the Feuerbachian thought. And the fourth examines the French notion of laïcité, as a positive
philosophical concept concerning religious belief as it relates to Gaudium et Spes, the “Pastoral Constitution of the Church in the Modern World.” The fifth essay is an application of the preceding essay
which deals with one aspect of laïcité abstracted from the notion of secularization current among Western Anglophone philosophers. Each essay pertains to the human existential experience in the 21st Century.