Robert Spaemann

Robert Spaemann (5 May 1927 – 10 December 2018) was a German Catholic philosopher.

Although not yet widely translated into languages other than his native German, Spaemann was internationally known, and his work was highly regarded by Pope Benedict XVI[2][citation needed] He was also a personal advisor of Pope John Paul II and a friend of Joseph Ratzinger.

In Happiness and Benevolence, Spaemann sets forth a thesis that happiness is derived from benevolent acting and that we are created by God as social beings to help one another find truth and meaning in an often confused and disordered world: The paradigm of acting from benevolence is any action by which we come to the help of human life which requires this help...only when we are helped do we learn to help ourselves, that is, to enter into that indirect relationship with ourselves which is constitutive of for all rationality which is not strictly instrumental, [and instead] constitutive for all ethical practice.

[6] In 2005, Spaemann published an article for the German newspaper Die Welt, arguing for the existence of God using the future perfect.

The argument was: He concludes: To preserve the reality of the present, there must be an absolute consciousness in which everything that happens is stored.