on the unitive end of sexual intercourse—also helped prepare for many aspects of the Second Vatican Council's teachings, and Hildebrand always advocated reading the council's texts in continuity with the Catholic Church's tradition. Hildebrand died in New Rochelle, New York in 1977, after a long struggle with a heart condition. Career Von Hildebrand's academic career spanned several decades, during which he held positions at various institutions, including the University of Munich, Fordham University, and the Jesuit Gregorian University in Rome. He was a prolific author, with over 30 books to his name, covering a range of topics including ethics, aesthetics, philosophy, and theology. Von Hildebrand was particularly known for his opposition to Nazi ideology, and he left Germany in 1933 after he was banned from teaching by the Nazi government. Key philosophical ideas Realist Phenomenology Like Reinach, Scheler, Roman Ingarden, and many Munich phenomenologists, Hildebrand reacted against Edmund Husserl's transcendental idealist turn in phenomenology, on which the meaning of all objects is constituted by conscious subjects. Rather, Hildebrand endorsed a realist version of phenomenology. On this phenomenological method, we set out to focus attention on explanatory, causal, or abstract theories regarding the things we experience, so as to attain "existential contact with reality" and a "living plenitude and full flavor of being" and to do "justice to the qualitative nature of the object." The goal of this method is a direct, intuitive perception of real beings. Hildebrand focuses especially on experiences of essences, that is, of necessary unities of content, like what it is to be a triangle or what it is to be justice. But he also uses this method to show how we can directly analyze all sorts of real phenomena, including human persons, organisms, artworks, and communities. Unlike in Husserl's idealist phenomenology, Hildebrand's philosophical psychology focuses on how real beings appear as intrinsically meaningful, and as giving their content to our perceptual acts, rather than our acts bestowing meaning upon them. Rather than seeing knowledge primarily in terms of its utility, Hildebrand emphasizes how we as knowing subjects can be fulfilled by a contemplative, perceptual union with various beings. Contemplation, which is intrinsically enjoyable and done for its own sake, can occur in relation to beautiful artworks and natural beings, friends and loved ones, essential and necessary truths, and God. Human persons not only experience themselves subjectively, and experience certain phenomena as subjective in the sense of