Joseph Hunter Guthrie SJ (January 8, 1901 – November 11, 1974) was an American academic philosopher, writer, Jesuit, and Catholic priest.

For twenty years, he promoted the belief that intellectuals must play a central role in combatting the ideologies that led to World War II.

To that end, he was a member of the drafting committee of the UNESCO charter, was a co-founder of an American academy of Catholic intellectuals, and travelled the world with the U.S. State Department, for which he received honors from several countries and organizations.

[2] He spent the following year studying ascetical theology at the Drongen Abbey and at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium.

[1] On August 15, 1934, he professed his final vows in the Chapel of Saint Denis on Montmartre in Paris, which were received by Anthony Joseph Schuler, the Bishop of El Paso, Texas.

He then returned to the University of Paris to defend his dissertation on phenomenology, for which he was awarded a docteur de l'université with highest honors in 1937.

[1] During his time in Europe, Guthrie studied under Martin Heidegger, Werner Jaeger, and Emile Brédier, and was closely acquainted with Edith Stein, Simone Weil, Jacques Maritain, and Étienne Gilson.

[1] As a result, his philosophical interests were German existentialism, logical positivism, and analytic philosophy, the latter of which he studied a decade before it become prominent in American universities.

[a] The president of the university, Lawrence C. Gorman, described this action as initially experimental and as a "wartime concession" that proved successful.

[8] Guthrie sought to revitalize the graduate school, and recruited prominent faculty who fled Europe during World War II,[5] especially those in the fields of philosophy and political science.

[11] This occurred in the context of many American think tanks and intellectual organizations, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, reevaluating their purposes and missions, so as to ensure that another world war would never happen again.

[12] The body's twofold mission would be "reconstructing Catholic intellectual life" in the aftermath of the war, and maintaining a "presence in the total work of the United Nations Educational and Scientific Organization.

[17] One of Guthrie's first actions was the revival of the board of regents in April 1949, whose purpose was to advise the president and participate in fundraising and promotion of the university.

At the time he took office, the schools of medicine, law, and foreign service operated close to autonomously in their governance, finances, and academics.

[1] He wrote against the modern conception of academic freedom as a "false liberty to license" that deprived students of the "divine dimension of reality".

He submitted his resignation to the university board of directors the following October, and it was announced that the Jesuit authorities in Rome had selected Edward B. Bunn as his successor.

They vigorously opposed his attempts to centralize the administration of the university, and when Guthrie tried to invoke the authorities in Rome to support his effort, he felt that he did not have their backing.

[21] "Into football goes a stupendous outlay of time, money, and manpower, accompanied by the raw passions of greed and slavish devotion, the ignoble emotions of spite, bitterness, and sly cunning."