The following correspondence between Charles De Koninck (1906-1965) and the Rev. Charles N.R. McCoy (1911-1984) took place in the years 1945-1946, when McCoy was working on his doctoral dissertation in philosophy at the University of Laval under De Koninck’s direction.[1] The correspondence is preserved, in an apparently incomplete form, in the Charles De Koninck Archive (Folder 31, part 1 in the Charles de Koninck’s scanned version; Box 12, file 22 in the Jacques Maritain Center’s version; a scan of the correspondence itself can be found here). The following transcription (lightly edited) was made by Dan Whitehead.
In 1943 De Koninck had published his brilliant and controversial work On the Primacy of the Common Good: Against the Personalists, and the correspondence begins with a letter of McCoy (incomplete) in which he refers to the bitter controversy that had followed the publication of that work, criticizing the Rev. I. Th. Eschmann’s attack on De Koninck. The second letter, also from McCoy, sketches an article that McCoy had in mind on the theory of democracy, and raising some questions about political philosophy. De Koninck responds to that letter, giving some highly provocative answers to the questions that McCoy raises. De Koninck’s letter is incomplete (presumably a draft). The last item is a number of notes that De Koninck made on McCoy’s dissertation as it stood at the time. These notes contain some remarks on the relation of the logical to the real order, whose influence can be clearly seen in McCoy’s later book The Structure of Political Thought. — The Editors
College of St. Thomas
St. Paul, Minnesota
August 22, 1945
Dear Charles,
I am sorry to have been forced to delay so long answering your letter of three weeks ago. My stay at Benincasa was abruptly interrupted by a call home when my aunt became critically ill; she recovered from the illness and I returned almost directly to St. Paul.
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