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PURCELL, Brendan M. The Drama of Humanity: Towards a Philosophy of Humanity in History. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996. x + 295 pp. Paper, $57.95-Purcell proposes "a small step in the direction of expanding the notion of persons in communion, as a hermeneutic constant for understanding universal humanity in history" (p. 251). The human-person-ascommunional is his heuristic device for exploring both humanity as a communion of persons, and the drama of humanity "as the unfolding and contraction of human persons in social and historical communion and excommunication with one another and their transcendent personal source" (p. 268).
The proximate philosophical context for his undertaking is Voegelin's discussion of universal humanity, however Purcell adopts an expanded Aristotelian approach that attempts to "do justice to all levels of human existence, material, biological, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, in their personal, social and historical dimensions" (p. 7). The Drama is "the history of humanity in its less or more articulate self-awareness of itself through the major changes of experience it has undergone" (p. 9). The Humanity is Lonergan's notion of "a philosophical anthropology which articulates the basic pattern of...