Search results for ""St Augustine's Press""

James Rhodes’ Plato is a playwright. And a mystic. In his famous “Seventh Letter” Plato had stated that the essence of his thought couldn’t be put into writing and hence he hadn’t done so. This is the self-interpretation of a mystic, Rhodes concludes. But then, two eminent questions arise: Why, then, did Plato write at all? And, how have his writings—his dialogues—to be understood, that is to be read? Plato intended, Rhodes argues, to direct the souls of those who entered into his dialogues toward the Good, the sun of truth. As “truth” cannot be taught but only experienced (the mystic dimension), Plato makes the readers of his dialogues enter into the dramas—or “plays” (according to Rhodes)—that are formed by the dialogues in the mode of a most sophisticated philosophic artistry. You encounter one aporia after another, doubts heaped upon doubts, hypotheses searchingly tested. It’s a purifying experience to which you are submitted in following the play, and the hope is, as Rhodes formulates. “that our souls will bring forth beautiful things by the end of the process.” As befits a political philosopher, James Rhodes focuses his study on the question of political leadership. That is to say: true political leadership. The highly original response he provides is very practical. And at the same deeply congenial to the “mystical” art of Plato, the playwright. This book will be a landmark in the field of studies on Plato.

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The Knower and the Known deals with some of the most controversial subjects in philosophy today: the relation of the mind and the body, the fundamental nature of the physical world, the existence of abstract entities, and the nature of knowledge and its relationship to human consciousness. In doing so, it draws on insights from both contemporary analytic philosophy of mind and phenomenology. The book argues that the fact that reality is understandable and is explicable by the proposition that consciousness is ontologically more fundamental than the physical. It argues at length that no physicalist theory of the mind can succeed. Although body and consciousness are intimately woven together, for knowledge to be possible, consciousness must be founded on immaterial selves. Abstracta such as universals are real, but are best understood not as independent entities but as ideal objects in the mind of God. The Knower and the Known argues at length that no physicalist theory of the mind can succeed. Parrish challenges the sometimes quite surprising theories of the physicalists with rigorous logic, concluding his masterpiece with the only explanation left to us. In the end, what makes most sense, what is most logical, is classical theism – The Knower, who knows it all – because, after all, He made it. The Knower and the Known concludes by bringing the different parts of reality together. External reality is understandable because it is the product of the God’s mind, and human beings can grasp that intelligibility, both in physical reality and abstractly, because our minds are finite analogs of the divine mind.

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In addition to “On Liberty” and “On Representative Government,” this new selection of Mill’s writings includes, among others, a number of less known of his writings, such as: “Civilization,” “Perfectibility,” “The Negro Question,” “On Education,” “On Aristocracy,” “On Marriage,” “On Free Press,” “Socialism,” Mill’s review of Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” his letters to Tocqueville, and several other writings. If one can use a somewhat exaggerated language, Mill’s writings are to liberal-democracy what Marx and Engels’ writings were to Communism. Both systems gave expression to 19th century man’s longing for equality and justice, both promised to liberate him from the shackles of oppression, authority and tradition. Instead of liberating man, Communism created the most brutal system in human history, and its spectacular fall in 1989 is one of history’s greatest events. Western world today shows that liberal-democracy is no longer a benign doctrine, which advocates free market, minimum state and individual liberties, but, like Communism, is an all-encompassing ideology which forces an individual to abdicate his freedom and soul in favor of a Communist-like collective. As many critics of real Socialism could see the seeds of totalitarianism in the writings of Marx and Engels, so one can see the seeds of liberal totalitarianism in Mill’s writings. This new edition is intended to help readers to understand why democratic-liberalism came so close to its 19th century ideological rival.

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John Paul II in his personalist approach to moral questions reaffirmed that as sin offends that which is good, if we truly know what human love is––and that it is good––we would thereby see how certain acts can never be acceptable insofar as they in all cases wound this love. Yet in moral debates surrounding love, sex and contraception Adrian Reimers observes that we are not using this approach and these debates are not advancing the cause of real love. Reimers draws upon the encyclical Humanae Vitae and John Paul II’s catechesis known as the theology of the body to respond to the stalled development of moral theology on the issues most crucial to human love and intimacy. “It is time, we are told, for a ‘paradigm shift’ in the Catholic Church’s moral teaching, such shift representing a more pastoral and less dogmatic approach to moral issues,” writes Reimers. His claim that “a paradigm shift in moral theology and philosophy may be valuable––perhaps vital––to scholars who think and write about these sciences and to teachers who communicate moral truth” is not an exhortation to redefine moral truths. Rather, he argues that an approach to contraception, for example, that relies exclusively on natural law is a hackneyed one and often “tedious.” John Paul II’s series of catechetical addresses known as the theology of the body was originally composed in the 1970s after Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae. Albeit derived from the writing of an archbishop and not yet pope, Reimers identifies John Paul II’s perspectives on love, sex and contraception as an essential force behind this so-called paradigm shift in continuity with the profound and unchanging truths set forth in Humanae Vitae. As Reimers states, “Moral truths do not change, even if our ways to understand them improve.” How, then, is our sense of the goodness or badness of contraception meant to be helped by such a development of thought? Ethics grounded philosophically tends to lean toward legalism in the context of moral actions, says Reimers, as it emphasizes conformity to God’s law and largely overlooks “the relationship between moral behavior and the human person’s ultimate end of beatitude with God.” The important principle of the necessarily two-fold description that natural law gives to sex––namely, as unitive and procreative––must not be the authoritative end of the discussion regarding the moral nature of contraception. In an age where technology has given human beings new power it seems there must be new rules as well, and the conquest of procreative acts changes the human perception of the limitations once associated with harmful acts. Herein lies the importance of John Paul II’s catechesis––the goodness or badness of acts is not just concerned with end of a particular act. As Reimers writes, “If we are to understand the complex relationships among love, marriage, and their sexual expression, we must situate these within the context of the end of the human being.” A position on contraception and human sexuality cannot be comprehensive without a concept of love properly understood. Human acts must bring us closer to sanctity, not to comfort or possession. Holiness is the perfection of love, and its pursuit aims at ultimate beatitude. This end, the truest love human can know, is the end which ultimately condemns contraception once and for all, as “contracepted sex is contrary to holiness.” Reimers unpacks this sometimes difficult truth in eight chapters, which begin with love and conclude with faithfulness to moral norms and a spirituality of marriage. The arguments surrounding contraception and “good sex” seem to have set the grounds for coherently choosing a side rather than to have succeeded in presenting certain human acts as definitively immoral. As Reimers notes, a natural law position on contraception often fails to employ its greatest ally: the reality of authentic human love and “victory” of the individual in one’s sanctity as achieved through that love. This work will reorient the objectives and claims of the moral debate, as well as influence the popular notion of what love is and what it cannot be. It is an aid to scholars, students and study groups, humanists, and those who seek to deepen the sense of love’s highest physical expression.

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John Paul II in his personalist approach to moral questions reaffirmed that as sin offends that which is good, if we truly know what human love is––and that it is good––we would thereby see how certain acts can never be acceptable insofar as they in all cases wound this love. Yet in moral debates surrounding love, sex and contraception Adrian Reimers observes that we are not using this approach and these debates are not advancing the cause of real love. Reimers draws upon the encyclical Humanae Vitae and John Paul II’s catechesis known as the theology of the body to respond to the stalled development of moral theology on the issues most crucial to human love and intimacy. “It is time, we are told, for a ‘paradigm shift’ in the Catholic Church’s moral teaching, such shift representing a more pastoral and less dogmatic approach to moral issues,” writes Reimers. His claim that “a paradigm shift in moral theology and philosophy may be valuable––perhaps vital––to scholars who think and write about these sciences and to teachers who communicate moral truth” is not an exhortation to redefine moral truths. Rather, he argues that an approach to contraception, for example, that relies exclusively on natural law is a hackneyed one and often “tedious.” John Paul II’s series of catechetical addresses known as the theology of the body was originally composed in the 1970s after Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae. Albeit derived from the writing of an archbishop and not yet pope, Reimers identifies John Paul II’s perspectives on love, sex and contraception as an essential force behind this so-called paradigm shift in continuity with the profound and unchanging truths set forth in Humanae Vitae. As Reimers states, “Moral truths do not change, even if our ways to understand them improve.” How, then, is our sense of the goodness or badness of contraception meant to be helped by such a development of thought? Ethics grounded philosophically tends to lean toward legalism in the context of moral actions, says Reimers, as it emphasizes conformity to God’s law and largely overlooks “the relationship between moral behavior and the human person’s ultimate end of beatitude with God.” The important principle of the necessarily two-fold description that natural law gives to sex––namely, as unitive and procreative––must not be the authoritative end of the discussion regarding the moral nature of contraception. In an age where technology has given human beings new power it seems there must be new rules as well, and the conquest of procreative acts changes the human perception of the limitations once associated with harmful acts. Herein lies the importance of John Paul II’s catechesis––the goodness or badness of acts is not just concerned with end of a particular act. As Reimers writes, “If we are to understand the complex relationships among love, marriage, and their sexual expression, we must situate these within the context of the end of the human being.” A position on contraception and human sexuality cannot be comprehensive without a concept of love properly understood. Human acts must bring us closer to sanctity, not to comfort or possession. Holiness is the perfection of love, and its pursuit aims at ultimate beatitude. This end, the truest love human can know, is the end which ultimately condemns contraception once and for all, as “contracepted sex is contrary to holiness.” Reimers unpacks this sometimes difficult truth in eight chapters, which begin with love and conclude with faithfulness to moral norms and a spirituality of marriage. The arguments surrounding contraception and “good sex” seem to have set the grounds for coherently choosing a side rather than to have succeeded in presenting certain human acts as definitively immoral. As Reimers notes, a natural law position on contraception often fails to employ its greatest ally: the reality of authentic human love and “victory” of the individual in one’s sanctity as achieved through that love. This work will reorient the objectives and claims of the moral debate, as well as influence the popular notion of what love is and what it cannot be. It is an aid to scholars, students and study groups, humanists, and those who seek to deepen the sense of love’s highest physical expression.

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The writings of Pope Pius VI, head of the Catholic Church during the most destructive period of the French Revolution, were compiled in two volumes by M.N.S. Guillon and published in 1798 and 1800. But during the Revolution, the reign of Napoleon, and the various revolutionary movements of the 19th century, there were extraordinary efforts to destroy writings that critiqued the revolutionary ideology. Many books and treatises, if they survived the revolution or the sacking from Napoleon’s armies. To this day, no public copy of Guillon’s work exists in Paris. Now, for the first time in English, these works comprising the letters, briefs, and other writings of Pius VI on the French Revolution are available. Volume I treats the first shock of the Revolution and the efforts of the Pope in 1790 and 1791 to oppose the Civil Constitution of the Clergy (which famous revolutionary and shrewd diplomat Talleyrand referred to as “the greatest fault of the National Assembly”). Volume II will be published later, and deals with the aftermath of the Civil Constitution through Pius’s death in exile). Editor and translator Jeffrey Langan presents the materials leading up to and directly connected with these decrees, in which the National Assembly attempted to set up a Catholic Church that would be completely submissive to the demands of the Assembly. Volume I also covers Pius’s efforts to deal with the immediate aftermath of the Constitution after the National Assembly implemented it, including his encyclical, Quod Aliquantum. The letters will show how Pius chose to oppose the Civil Constitution. He did so not by a public campaign, for he had no real temporal power to oppose the violence, but by attempting to work personally with Louis XVI and various archbishops in France to articulate what were the points on which he could concede (matters dealing with the political structures of France) and what were the essential points in which he could not concede (matters dealing with the organization of dioceses and appointment of bishops). Since the 1980s, with the writings and school that developed around François Furet, as well as Simon Schama’s Citizens, a new debate over the French Revolution has ensued, bringing forth a more objective account of the Revolution, one that avoids an excessively Marxist lens and that brings to light some of its defects and more gruesome parts – the destruction and theft of Church property, and the sadistic methods of torture and killing of priests, nuns, aristocrats, and fellow-revolutionaries. An examination of the writings of Pius VI will not only help set the historical record straight for English-speaking students of the Revolution, it will also aid them to better understand the principles that the Catholic Church employs when confronted with chaotic political change. They will see that the Church has a principled approach to distinguishing, while not separating, the power of the Church and the power of the state. They will also see, as Talleyrand himself also saw, that one of the essential elements that makes the Church the Church is the right to appoint bishops and to discipline its own bishops. The Church herself recognizes that she cannot long survive without this principle that guarantees her unity. Pius VI’s efforts were able to keep the Catholic Church intact (though badly bruised) so that she could reconstitute herself and build up a vibrant life in 19th-century France. (He did this in the face of the Church’s prestige having sunk to historic lows; some elites in Europe thought there would be no successor to Pius and jokingly referred to him as “Pius the Last.”) He began a process that led to the restoration of the prestige of the Papacy throughout the world, and he initiated a two-century process that led to the Church finally being able to select bishops without any interference from secular authorities. This had been at least a 1,000-year problem in the history of the Church. By 1990, only two countries of the world, China and Vietnam, were interfering in any significant way in the process that the Church used to select bishops. Pius VI’s papacy, especially during the years of the French Revolution, was a pivotal point for the French Revolution and for the interaction between Church and state in Western history. All freedom-loving people will be happy to read his distinc-tions between the secular power and the spiritual power. His papacy also was important for the internal developments that the Church would make over the next 200 years with respect to its self-understanding of the Papacy and the role of the bishop.

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This title, which at first sight seems curious, shows Pieper’s philosophical work as rooted in the basics. He takes his inspiration from Plato – and his Socrates – and Thomas Aquinas. With them, he is interested in philosophy as pure theory, the theoretical being precisely the non-practical. The philosophizer wants to know what all existence is fundamentally about, what “reality” “really” means. With Plato, Pieper eschews the use of language to convince an audience of anything which is not the truth. If Plato was opposed to the sophists – amongst them the politicians –, Pieper is likewise opposed to discourse that leads to the “use” of philosophy to bolster a totalitarian regime or any political or economic system. A fundamental issue for Pieper is “createdness.” He sees this as the fundamental truth of our being – all being – and the fundamental virtue we can practise is the striving to live according to our perception of real truth in any given situation. The strength and attraction of Pieper’s writing is its direct and intuitive character which is independent of abstract systematization. He advocates staying in touch with the “real” as we experience it deep within ourselves. Openness to the totality of being – in no matter what context being reveals itself – and the affirmation of all that is founded in this totality are central pillars of all his thinking. Given the “simplicity” of this stance, it is no surprise that much of it is communicated – and successfully – through his gift for illustration by anecdote. Like Plato, this philosopher is a story-teller and, like him, very readable.

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Consciousness and Politics deals with some of the same texts discussed in two earlier books on Voegelin, Eric Voegelin and the Foundations of Modern Political Science (1999) and Beginning the Quest: Law and Politics in the Early Work of Eric Voegelin (2009). Given the appearance of so many useful discussions, especially by scholars who wrote the introductions to the several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin that have appeared over the past decade or so, certain revisions in detail should come as no surprise. That is how science, even political science, improves. Consciousness and Politics begins with an analysis of the problem of the historicity of truth as it was formulated shortly before Voegelin abandoned his eight-volume History of Political Ideas. The analysis then follows a more or less chronological path, discussing the arguments developed in The New Science of Politics, Voegelin’s most famous book, the differentiation of consciousness and the problems of myth and nature as presented in the early volumes of Order and History. Starting in the 1960s, Voegelin began a lengthy argument in several volumes that resumed his concern with the philosophy of consciousness, which he had outlined in his early writings, and its connection to what we conventionally call philosophy of history. Voegelin’s late and often difficult essays, lectures, and the final volume of Order and History, many scholars have noticed, emphasize the meditative origins of his political science and, more broadly, of philosophy. The concluding chapters analyze this subject-matter and a perennial question that so many of Voegelin’s readers have raised: what is the relation of his political science or philosophy to Christianity?

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“Contraceptive sex,” wrote social science researcher Mary Eberstadt in 2012, “is the fundamental social fact of our time.” In this important and pointed book, Charles E. Rice, of the Notre Dame Law School, makes the novel claim that the acceptance of contraception is a prelude to persecution. He makes the striking point that contraception is not essentially about sex. It is a First Commandment issue: Who is God? It was at the Anglican Lambeth Conference of 1930 when for the first time a Christian denomination said that contraception could ever be a moral choice. The advent of the Pill in the 1960s made the practice of contraception practically universal. This involved a massive displacement of the Divine Law as a normative measure of conduct, not only on sex but across the board. Nature abhors a vacuum. The State moved in to occupy the place formerly held by God as the ultimate moral Lawgiver. The State put itself on a collision course with religious groups and especially with the Catholic Church, which continues to insist on that traditional teacher. A case in point is the Obama Regime’s Health Care Mandate, coercing employees to provide, contrary to conscience, abortifacients and contraceptives to their employees. The first chapter describes that Mandate, which the Catholic bishops have vowed not to obey. Rice goes on to show that the duty to disobey an unjust law that would compel you to violate the Divine Law does not confer a general right to pick and choose what laws you will obey. The third chapter describes the “main event,” which is the bout to determine whether the United States will conform its law and culture to the homosexual (LGBTQ) lifestyle in all its respects. “The main event is well underway and LGBTQ is well ahead on points.” Professor Rice follows with a clear analysis of the 2013 Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage. Part II presents some “underlying causes” of the accelerating persecution of the Catholic Church. The four chapter headings in this part outline the picture: The Dictatorship of Relativism; Conscience Redefined; The Constitution: Moral Neutrality; and The Constitution: Still Taken Seriously? The answer to the last question, as you might expect, is: No. Part III, the controversial heart of the book, presents contraception as “an unacknowledged cause” of persecution. The first chapter argues that contraception is not just a “Catholic issue.” The next chapter describes the “consequences” of contraception and the treatment of women as objects. The third chapter spells out in detail the reality that contraception is a First Commandment issue and that its displacement of God as the ultimate moral authority opened the door for the State to assume that role, bringing on a persecution of the Church. The last chapter, “A Teaching Untaught,” details the admitted failure of the American Catholic bishops to teach Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical, Humanae Vitae. But Rice offers hope that the bishops are now getting their act together Part IV offers as a “response” to the persecution of the Church three remedies: Speak the Truth with clarity and charity; Trust God; and, most important, Pray. As the last sentence in the book puts it: “John Paul II wrote in a letter to U.S. bishops in 1993: ‘America needs much prayer – lest it lose its soul.’” This readable and provocative book is abundantly documented with a detailed index of names and subjects.

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The anthropology that supports marriage perceives justice to be a particular reality, and for this reason marriage will always be a subject of law and of great interest to jurists and sociologists alike. With respect to the realization of justice in marriage, understood as the moment the bond is created, Catholic ecclesiology and canon law articulate an original legal category––namely, the consensual incapacity to marry. In the last fifty years, however, and despite the juridical innovations provided by the current Code of Canon Law promulgated in 1983, American canonical practice in the sphere of marriage law has lost its foundation. The consequences of this include mechanisms of judgment that are rendered incoherent although not inactive, particularly in local tribunals reviewing claims of marriage nullity. In other words, the application of law in the Catholic Church moves forward without a clear indication of its anthropological basis. Canon law, then, on the issue of marriage is perceived to be purposefully oppressive or absolutely meaningless. Jurists, scholars, and members of the Roman Curia acknowledge that, more than a general response to this crisis of law and marriage, what might be needed most is greater scrutiny of the canon in which the formula for consensual incapacity appears. It is furthermore acknowledged that American canonical practice is perhaps the most influential in the world, and is responsible for shaping and sustaining the global attention given to this issue. To fully grasp the crisis and the best way forward, a profile of this canon in American jurisprudence is fundamental and demanded presently. The new course charted by canonical studies and formation of jurists, as well as the new developments in ecclesiastical legislation, will find guidance in this study provided by Catherine Godfrey-Howell, and further insight in the foreword given by the American Cardinal prelate and former Prefect of the Apostolic Signatura, Raymond Leo Cardinal Burke.

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China’s Quest for Liberty is a personal story of a young man fully engaged in understanding the world he was born into and working toward making that world into a better and freer place to life. It is about an unexpected journey a Chinese journalist has taken to pursue freedom, involving such diverse fields or disciplines as politics, business, humanities, science and technology, government agencies and non-governmental organizations. Some took place as daily life, and some occurred in detentions or disasters. It is about a world whose dimensions have been basically obscured not only in China but also in the global public square, and walk with this young journalist, step by step, to find, paradoxically, the hope in the depth of hopelessness, the strength in acknowledging weakness, the change in substance by, among other things, keeping the form unchanged for at least a while, the youth in growing up despite growing old, the invisible in the visible, the imperishable in the perishable, the reality in the shadow of numerous fake realities, and the freedom gained not mainly through human efforts but as mercy and grace from the one who created humans and other beings. As well as digging out the overlooked Christian background in the rise of the sanctity of human life, creative culture, constitutionalism, work as a vocation, modern management, servant leadership, and catchphrases like “the global village” and “The medium is the message”, the author tells of insider observations about the rise of Christianity in China generally and about Shouwang Church in particular. Through sharing these findings, this book aims to show how the one who made the universe rules the world and how this creator sets his creatures free by himself.China’s Quest for Liberty is a fascinating work of nuance and surprise.

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A. J. Conyers was an evangelical, Baptist theologian who helped found Truett Seminary at Baylor university. Conyers’s theology drank deeply from the wells of the Christian tradition. In this volume, he provides what he found to be the most basic elements of Christian theology and demonstrates a methodology that is biblically informed, traditionally grounded, and contextually aware. this revised edition makes this excellent work available again, with some modified study questions, additional unpublished material from Conyers’s archives, and helpful reflection and tributes from two of Conyers’s best students—Brian Brewer and Brad green—who carry on his legacy

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This book presents a theory of aesthetic judgment and appreciation in the spirit of modern empiricism. There are three parts: the first deals with questions of philosophical logic, the second with questions in the philosophy of mind, and the third with questions in the philosophy of art. Thus the argument advances from a theory of aesthetic judgment (and in particularly of “aesthetic description”) to a theory of aesthetic appreciation, and thence to an account of the nature and value of art. Scruton examines and rejects various attempts made by recent philosophers to demarcate the realm of aesthetic judgment. He argues that the logic of aesthetic judgment does not suffice to distinguish what is “aesthetic” from what is not, for aesthetic judgments must be explained in terms of the conditions for their acceptance rather than the conditions for their truth. These “acceptance conditions” can be understood only if we first know what is meant by aesthetic experience. This theory attempts to show how aesthetic experience can be regarded as autonomous, even though it is intimately connected with ordinary experience, and is indeed dependent on ordinary experience for its full description.

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This book tells a story, a story about America’s spiritual capital. Spiritual capital is the fund of beliefs, examples, and commitments that are transmitted from generation to generation through a religious tradition, and which attach people to the transcendent source of fulfillment and happiness. America has created the greatest civilization the world has ever know, and it has done this because of its spiritual capital, the values and beliefs by which individual Americans have interpreted and transformed the world. The Judeo-Christian heritage has historically served as the spiritual capital of America. It is not only the spiritual quest of modernity, but that quest has evolved into globalization, and America, because of its spiritual capital, has been able to provide leadership for that quest. The larger thesis is that America is by virtue of its specific spiritual capital heritage not only the beneficiary of its advantages but also the leading exemplar of the spiritual quest of modernity. It is because is engaged in a spiritual quest that it can exercise world leadership as opposed to domination and oppression. The authors examine the extent to which economic development, growth, and entrepreneurship depend on spiritual capital. They argue that there is a symbiotic relation between America’s spiritual capital and our political institutions and freedoms. The argument here is that the substantive spiritual vision supports the political and economic procedural norms of a free society. Like any form of capital, spiritual capital may lie dormant or be wasted, it may be used productively, it may be augmented, and it may be diminished or eroded. In the final chapter, we point out how the heritage is under assault from a variety of sources and what happens when scientific, technological, economic, and political institutions are detached from their spiritual roots. The result is a natural progression from governmental bureaucratic centralization to secularism to reductive materialism and ultimately to a social-collectivist conception of human welfare. Within the story there is an argument, namely, that these achievements will not be sustained without that heritage, and for all of the above reasons the heritage needs to be reaffirmed. The authors argue that the future of modernity, globalization, and America depend on the extent to which there is a reaffirmation of America’s spiritual capital.

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The importance of Juliusz Slowacki (1809–1849) as Poland’s second greatest Romantic poet, after Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1856), is a platitude. Yet, in the English-speaking world, Slowacki receives little more than honorable mention even among students of Slavic literature. The intention of the authors of Agamemnon’s Tomb: A Polish Oresteia is to focus on Slowacki’s use of Antiquity in his most famous lyric, Agamemnon’s Tomb, written in 1839 Since Antiquity is an essential part of the fabric of Romantic poetry, of all works of Polish Romanticism, Agamemnon’s Tomb fits best into the larger framework of European Romanticism. It is grounded in the ancient and therefore universal language of the epoch probably more than any other European Romantic poem. “If I am a poet, the air of Greece has made me one,” Lord Byron once remarked. What is true of Byron is equally true of Slowacki and his literary output, where antique themes and elements flow like a torrent through virtually all his works. What makes Agamemnon’s Tomb unique, however, even when compared to the British or German Romantic literature, so saturated with ancient themes, is that it harnesses Antiquity as an interpretative mirror for Slowacki’s understanding of the history of Poland and the Polish national character. This is the first book in English that offers the American reader a chance to encounter one of Poland’s greatest poets and a work of European Romanticism at its best. It provides the Polish text with the first new full translation of the text and a stanza-by-stanza commentary that emphasizes Slowacki’s debt to Greek and Roman authors.

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Can there be universal moral principles in a culturally and religiously diverse world? Are such principles provided by a theory of natural law? Jacques response to both questions is 'yes.' These essays, selected from the writings of one of the most influential philosophers of the past hundred years, provide a clear statement of Maritain's theory of natural law and natural rights. Maritain's ethics and political philosophy occupies a middle ground between the extremes of individualism and collectivism. Written during a period when cultural diversity and pluralism were beginning to have an impact on ethics and politics, these essays provide a defense of natural law and natural right that continues to be timely. The first essay introduces Maritain's theory of connatural knowledge - knowledge by inclination - that lies at the basis of his distinctive views on moral philosophy, aesthetics, and mystical belief. The secondgives Maritain's principal metaphysical arguments for natural law as well as his account of how that law can be naturally known and universally held. The third explains the roots of the natural law and shows how it provides a rational foundation for other kinds of law and for human rights. In the fourth essay, reflecting his personalism and integral humanism, Maritain indicates how he extends his understanding of human rights to include the rights of the civic and of the social or working person.

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Looking at Jesus as a complete human being and philosopher, explores the most radical revolution in the history of philosophy--the differences Jesus made to metaphysics, epistemology, anthropology, and philosophical ethics and politics.

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For Notre Dame gathers together the important contributions of a devoted Holy Cross priest to the continuing debate over the mission and identity of the University of Notre Dame. Read together, these essays and addresses by one of the most consistent and committed participants in this ongoing discussion serve to cast vital light on many of the major issues that Notre Dame has confronted in the past two decades. Fr. Bill Miscamble’s spirited essays in For Notre Dame cover a range of topics and reflect his multiple roles at Notre Dame, where he has taught for a quarter century. An award-winning scholar and a noted teacher Miscamble writes thoughtfully of the place of teaching and research in Catholic universities. Crucially, he also is unafraid to explore more contentious subjects like the composition of the faculty and the responsibilities of faculty members who serve in a Catholic university like Notre Dame. Nor has he backed away from the controversies that have beset Notre Dame in recent years. In this volume a reader can learn how he courageously addressed such matters as academic freedom and The Vagina Monologues and, of course, how he protested the Notre Dame decision to honor President Barack Obama at its 2009 Commencement. Throughout this engaging volume, Miscamble’s distinctive voice rings clear. His passion for Notre Dame’s Catholic mission is evident on every page. Also evident is his deep concern for the moral and spiritual well-being of Notre Dame’s students and his deep commitment to the priesthood and to the Congregation of Holy Cross. For Notre Dame is essential reading for all those who love Notre Dame and who are interested in its past, present, and future. It is a book that asks its readers to reflect deeply about the ongoing struggle to determine the university’s present mission and its future course. Readers – including faculty, students, administrators, trustees and alumni – will surely discover through its pages how they too might stand more truly for Notre Dame.

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In this book, a group of prominent scholar-teachers meditate on how to read, in the context of a specifically Christian university or college education, some of the greatest texts of the Western tradition. Each author devotes himself or herself to a single text. In many cases, the authors have been reading, rereading, marking, ruminating, inwardly digesting, teaching, and discussing their text for several decades, so that they offer here a distillation of years of familiarity and reflection. The texts span nearly 3,000 years. They are pre-Christian, Christian, and post-Christian. Each kind of text – indeed, each individual text – offers its own special opportunities and challenges for Christian interpretation. From these diverse readings emerges a sense that these texts all belong to a single great tradition, one to which Christianity made and continues to make enormous contributions. Medieval Christian writers exploit and transform pagan texts, and post-Christian writers like Nietzsche and Joyce are often preoccupied with Christian themes. In one way or another all the texts are about what it is to be a human being and what a good human life might look like. Thus “common threads” bind one text to the next, creating countless resonances among them. The authors of the essays in this book all address the question, “How shall we read these texts from the vantage point of faith in God and Jesus Christ? Moreover, how shall we read them as members of a community with a common vision of the human good, aiming to nurture our students in that vision by reading with them some of the profoundest and most delightful things the human hand has penned?” As the Introduction suggests, the volume hopes to contribute to a renewal of the original intention of university education: to cultivate minds and hearts formed and informed by wisdom, the highest of intellectual goods.

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Contemporary scholarship tends to view Albert Camus as a modern, but he himself was conscious of the past and called the transition from Hellenism to Christianity “the true and only turning point in history.” For Camus, modernity was not fully comprehensible without an examination of the aspirations that were first articulated in antiquity and that later received their clearest expression in Christianity. These aspirations amounted to a fundamental reorientation of human life in politics, religious, science, and philosophy. Understanding the nature and achievement of that reorientation became the central task of Christian Metaphysics and Neoplatonism. Primarily known through its inclusion in a French omnibus edition, it has remained one of Camus’s least-read works, yet it marks his first attempt to understand the relationship between Greek philosophy and Christianity as he charted the movement from the Gospels through Gnosticism and Plotinus to what he calls Augustine’s “second revelation” of the Christian faith. Ronald Srigley’s translation of this seminal document helps illuminate these aspects of Camus’ work. His freestanding English edition exposes readers to an important part of Camus’ thought that is often overlooked by those concerned primarily with the book’s literary value and supersedes the extant McBride translation by retaining a greater degree of literalness. Srigley has fully annotated the book to include nearly all of Camus’ original citations and has tracked down many poorly identified sources. His introduction and new preface places the text in the context of Camus’ better-known later work, explicating its relationship to those mature writings and exploring how its themes were reworked in subsequent books. He included a new preface to highlight Camus’ relationship with Christianity, especially to St. Augustine. As the only stand-alone English version of this important work – and a long-overdue critical edition – Srigley’s fluent translation is an essential bench-mark in our understanding of Camus and his place in modern thought.

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The collaboration between a future pope and young prelate is transformed into profound friendship when circumstances thrust Joseph Ratzinger into the Apostolic Palace, even as he expected to be released in retirement to his beloved Bavaria. Monsignor Georg Gänswein never left his side, and witnessed one of the most influential people of this century conduct his papacy on both sides of the curtain. From his appointment as private secretary in 2003, which was meant to be temporary, until the abdication of the pope in 2013 and subsequent years as emeritus, Monsignor Gänswein walked the same steps and weathered the same storms as his dear friend, the Roman Pontiff Benedict XVI. Here he offers the truth regarding the man and the papacy as a spiritual testament of a pope whose formidable legacy is often subject to unfounded characterizations of rigidity and secrecy. Written with the involvement of the regarded Vaticanista Saverio Gaeta, Mons. Gänswein offers an account of a particular decade in history and confronts false claims of intrigue and cover-up (Vatileaks, the Orlandi abduction case, the sexual abuse scandal, among other issues) to tell the real story of a pope who faced a changing landscape and a public who largely misunderstood him and his style of governance. Here we meet one of the most affable and intellectually formidable popes the Catholic Church has ever known, and a priest who might also be considered a prophet of the post-modern age. Gänswein brilliantly contextualizes many of Benedict's most poignant theological positions, and in giving us a sense of their origin reveals that Benedict seamlessly lived everything he promulgated. His faith was the single bulwark upon which his personality as both teacher and leader were built. No biography has yet to establish the integrity and heart of Joseph Ratzinger as well as his friend, Georg Gänswein, does here. As a spiritual testament more than just a journalistic exposé, Gänswein provides something only he can give––namely, the candid intelligence and sanctity witnessed up close. This is a remarkable and singular contribution to the history of the papacy and the record of the life of a saint. As Gänswein asserts, knowing this man is to encounter heroic virtue and an invitation to meet God, the greatest lover of mankind. Pope Benedict's own friendship with God will continue to provide warmth for as long as there are people on this earth who believe.

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Everyone must become a philosopher. The alternate is to forego living a human life, or as D. Q. McInerny illustrates, to run while choosing to be hamstrung. But not all philosophizing is equal, and it requires discipline and systematic study. In "creative impatience with ignorance" and "an unswerving commitment to the truth," one can be confident he is at least moving in the right direction toward genuine philosophy. But most importantly, philosophy requires teachers. To philosophize is, after all, to be an eternal student, a person who even while instructing others relies on the guidance found in the 'fertile' human wisdom cultivated throughout the ages. And the most fecund of all philosophy, according to McInerny, is that contained in Aristotelian-Thomism. His concise and thorough defense of the philosophical life and its lodestar, Thomism, must be read as deliberately as it was written. For McInerny makes a bold claim: if one is truly serious about philosophizing, an encounter with the essentials of Thomism is fundamental and indicates a path for the human mind unlike anything other systems or traditions of thought can offer. This book begins with logic and is followed by introductions to the philosophy of nature, philosophical psychology, epistemology, ethics, political philosophy, metaphysics and natural theology. It is a companion for students of all ages who have yet to spend quality time with Thomas Aquinas. And it is a real delight to do so in the company of McInerny, who in Being Ethical (2019) has already proven himself to be the affable and able teacher every thinking person longs to meet along the course of his search for truth.

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In What Happened to Notre Dame? (St. Augustine’s Press, 2009), Charles E. Rice, Professor Emeritus at Notre Dame Law School, traced that university’s loss of Catholic identity to the Land O’Lakes Declaration of 1967 in which Notre Dame and other “Catholic” universities declared their independence from the Church. In fact they substituted for the positive guidance of the Magisterium a counterfeit orthodoxy of political correctness, money, and secular prestige. This book, Right or Wrong, is a compilation of columns Professor Rice wrote for the campus newspaper, The Observer, from 1970 through 2010. Those bi-weekly columns are concise, readable, and practical. They offered the students an access to the authentic teachings of the Church that they might not otherwise get in the politically correct “Catholic” university of Land O’Lakes. Those columns present those teachings, not as abstractions, but as practical guides to real-life issues. Drawing upon his wide experience in constitutional law, jurisprudence, tort, and other areas, Professor Rice tells it like it is on a wide range of issues, including abortion, euthanasia, contraception, homosexuality, pornography, clergy sex abuse, feminism, marriage, bioethics, the death penalty, just war principles, the War on Terror, “Catholic” politicians, etc., etc. He describes Land O’Lakes as a “suicide pact” that has made “Catholic” universities subservient to government, corporate donors, foundations, and the secular educational establishment. Professor Rice, however, goes beyond criticism. He offers a very practical way for Notre Dame to recover its Catholic identity. And he urges that we pray, especially through the intercession of Notre Dame, Our Lady, for her University and for our country.

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Aristotle's much-translated On Poetics is the earliest and arguably the best treatment that we possess of tragedy as a literary form. Seth Benardete and Michael Davis have translated it anew with a view to rendering Aristotle’s text into English as precisely as possible. A literal translation has long been needed, for in order to excavate the argument of On Poetics one has to attend not simply to what is said on the surface but also to the various puzzles, questions, and peculiarities that emerge only on the level of how Aristotle says what he says and thereby leads one to revise and deepen one’s initial understanding of the intent of the argument. As On Poetics is about how tragedy ought to be composed, it should not be surprising that it turns out to be a rather artful piece of literature in its own right.Benardete and Davis supplement their edition of On Poetics with extensive notes and appendices. They explain nuances of the original that elude translation, and they provide translations of passages found elsewhere in Aristotle’s works as well as in those of other ancient authors that prove useful in thinking through the argument of On Poetics both in terms of its treatment of tragedy and in terms of its broader concerns. By following the connections Aristotle plots between On Poetics and his other works, readers will be in a position to appreciate the centrality of this little book for his thought on the whole.In an introduction that sketches the overall interpretation of On Poetics presented in his The Poetry of Philosophy (St. Augustine’s Press, 1999), Davis argues that, while On Poetics is certainly about tragedy, it has a further concern extending beyond poetry to the very structure of the human soul in its relation to what is, and that Aristotle reveals in the form of his argument the true character of human action.

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In 'Shakespearean Variations', Ralph McInerny takes the first lines of the sonnets and their end rhymes, and composes sonnets of his own. The formal structure of the sonnet has always provided a salutary discipline for the poet-iambic pentameter, te delicate symmetry of octet and sextet, the losing couplet which epitomizes the poem. The stamp that Shakespeare put upon the form, the themes of love and death, age and youth, loyalty and betrayal, have come to seem to adhere to the very form. The pleasure to be had form reading 'Shakespearean Variations' will vary with one's acquaintance with the originals buth should always turn one to the bard himself.

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Vittorio Hosle, touted as 'the' German philosopher of the coming generation, exhibits his wide range of scholarship in this, his first book published in America. "Although treating quite different subjects, these essays are linked together by a common philosophical project - the revitalization of the tradition of objective idealism. The conviction that we can have synthetic a priori knowledge, and that this knowledge discovers something that is independant of our mind, is of particular importance for practical philosophy ...The position here defended in systematic terms is also seen in the context of a philosophical history of philosophy, namely as a possible synthesis of realism and subjective idealism, enlightenment and counter-enlightenment, and as the supposition of revewing the humanities tradition." - from the Preface. Not content with merely 'telling' us how to find a way back to objective idealism, Hosle 'exhibits' his philosophy in a wide-ranging series of essays on topics ranging form the reatness and limits of Kant's practical philosophy to the moral ends and means of world population policy, from moral reflection and the decay of institutions in the Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment to a reflection on philosophical foundations of a future humanism in our world of overinformation.

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Mill’s On Liberty has turned out to be, as he predicted, the most widely read and long-lasting of his writings. It has proved, however, extremely difficult to pin Mill down to any definite political doctrines. His contemporaries clearly had the same problems as have beset modern commentators. Some portray Mill as a dangerous revolutionary, a latter-day Jacobin; others see him as peddling mere platitudes. This volume traces the reception of On Liberty in the periodical literature, from the “rave” review of Buckle in Fraser’s Magazine, by way of the furious denunciations in such Tory journals as Blackwood’s and the Quarterly, down to later liberals like John Morley and Leslie Stephen.

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Keynes's General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (published in February 1936) is probably the most influential and controversial economics book of the twentieth century. Keynes claimed to have undermined the foundations of orthodox economics and to have developed a radically new way of thinking about unemployment. This volume brings together forty of the reviews published before the end of 1936, showing how a wide range of economists and political and literary figures responded to the book. Here we have perspectives on Keynesian economics that are untainted by the work of subsequent interpreters. 'Nowadays when we read Keynes's General Theory, we do so through a mist of literally hundreds of commentaries. Here is a book that allows us to travel backwards in time to witness what people said about the General Theory when it was still new and uncontaminated by secondary opinion.' - Mark Blaug, author of Economic Theory in Retrospect

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What Does “Academic” Mean? focuses, in two essays, on the prospects of contemporary universities. The term “academic” is traced back to Plato’s Academy in a grove in Athens. The Academy is isolated, far away from the hustle and bustle of the city. Western universities founded in the Middle Ages show continuity, via Byzantium, with Plato’s Academy. Not surprisingly, the Oxford Dictionary quoted by Pieper defines “academic” as “Not leading to a decision; unpractical.” The preoccupation of the academic as academic is seen by Pieper to be fundamentally theoretical, not practical. Pure theory is that which cannot at all be pressed into service. Clearly, many university disciplines that are richly funded by industry and business concerns tend to be favored by university administrations, which, intent on financial survival, frown on “unproductive” disciplines such as pure philosophy: metaphysics being a case in point, since it is the discipline least capable of practical application. Pure philosophy, unlike any other discipline, has as its “subject” the totality of being. Every other discipline deals with a particular aspect of being – for example, the physical, the psychological, the technical – but not the totality. For Pieper, spirit is that which makes us open to truth – all truth – without any need to exploit it in the concrete world. The sciences open up more and more access to reality, more and more for us to contemplate. They show us more of the totality, but none of the sciences is interested in the totality as such. The philosophy which deals with the totality and asks, with Alfred North Whitehead, “What is it all about?” is seen by Pieper as central to the university. Essentially, it contemplates the wonder of being.

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This book in three sections uses formally written poems—rhymed quatrains, sonnets, terza rima, blank verse—to link the relationship between the poet and his mother with the wider world derived from a rare definition of umbilical: “descended through the female line.” “Motherlands” deals with the connection of physical and mental landscapes. “Mother Tongues” focuses on language, spoken and unspoken. And “Blood Mothers” concentrates on flesh-and-blood mothers, whose support and inspiration help to shape our first thoughts. The poems move among scenes as varied as World War II, divorce, the Vietnam War, 9/11, and the imagined end of the world. The book concludes with a crown of sonnets about the poet’s mother and his childhood in the South, showing in its way how all human life begins as female. Umbilical is the fifteenth winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize. The New Criterion is recognized as one of the foremost contemporary venues for poetry that pays close attention to form. Building upon its commitment to serious poetry, The New Criterion established this annual prize in 2000.

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Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu—In Search of Lost Time—is one of the most important and influential novels of the modern era. In recent decades, Proust has enjoyed a new surge of critical attention, as well as a sustained growth in readership—well beyond that of other prose masters of twentieth century modernism such as Joyce, Woolf, Kafka, and Beckett. The MLA Bibliography presently lists over 3,000 citations to scholarly works devoted to Proust’s novel, and if one Googles “Proust,” the number of hits exceeds 2,000,000. The temporal nature of human existence and consciousness is one of the many themes explored in In Search of Lost Time, and it is this dimension of Proust’s work that unifies this collection of essays that grew from a roundtable discussion entitled “The Timelessness of Proust” conducted at the 31st annual meeting of the Eric Voegelin Society. The collection includes the following essays: “In Search of Lost Time: Biographies of Consciousness,” Charles R. Embry “Proust, Transcendence, and Metaxic Existence,” Glenn Hughes “The Normative Flow of Consciousness and the Self: A Philosophical Meditation on Proust’s In Search of Lost Time,” Thomas J. McPartland; “Imprisonment and Freedom: Resisting and Embracing the Tension of Existence in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time,” Paulette Kidder; “Proust’s Luminous Memory and L’Homme Éternel: The Quest for Limitless Meaning,” Michael Henry “Unsought Revelations of Eternal Reality in Eliot’s Four Quartets and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time,” Glenn Hughes Persons who are interested not only in the philosophical importance of literary masterworks and in how the philosophical thought of Eric Voegelin may illuminate them, but also in letting Proust serve as a guide in the exploration and understanding of their own lives, will find these essays to be of lasting interest and value.

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The work of St. Bartholomew of Braga, O.P. (1514–1590) appears here in English for the first time despite its long and enduring influence in ecclesiastical circles. His meditations on the office of pastor have provided critical insight bishops since their initial circulation and have helped form the most famous among them, including Bartholomew's proteges Charles Borromeo. Pope Paul VI ordered a copy of Bartholomew's work to be distributed among the Catholic bishops at the Second Vatican Council. Donald Prudlo's translation situates St. Bartholomew of the Martyrs in his historical context as a lynchpin of Catholic Reform and affirms him as a figurehead of pastoral administration even in our own times.

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Theology and the Cartesian Doctrine of Freedom, now for the first time available in English, was Étienne Gilson’s doctoral thesis and part of a larger project to show the medieval roots of Descartes at a time when the very existence of medieval philosophy was often ignored. Young Descartes was sent to La Flèche, one of the Jesuits schools that offered a complete philosophical program, and Descartes would have had the same philosophical training as a Jesuit. There is some controversy about the exact dates of Descartes’s stay at La Flèche and consequently about his philosophy instructor. By Gilson’s calculations François Véron taught Descartes for three years. Véron eventually left the Jesuits to be free to engage in extraordinarily aggressive anti-Calvinist polemics. If anything, Véron’s overbearing manner may have contributed to Descartes antipathy toward Scholastic philosophy. (Whatever Descartes’s objections to its philosophy curriculum, later in life he recommended la Flèche as the best school in France.) Descartes,s great intellectual mission in life was not his mathematics but his physics, which was understood as a part of philosophy. We see him navigate the shoals of heated theological and religious strife in his attempt to articulate the metaphysical foundations (and in particular a philosophical vision of God) for his physics or theory of nature. As a layman, he always pleaded ignorance in technically theological matters. He presented himself as a loyal Catholic, quite sincerely in the portrait Gilson paints. Descartes certainly did not avoid controversial philosophical positions. For example, he held that God has created eternal truths rather than the latter being eternal participations in God’s essence, which seems to put in doubt the necessity of these truths. Descartes took sides in the great seventeenth-century debate between Thomists and Molinists on human freedom. Gilson presents a Descartes influenced personally and intellectually by the Augustinianism of the founder of the French Oratory, Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle, who encouraged Descartes in his intellectual quest to renovate European intellectual life. De Bérulle and his disciple, the theologian Guillaume Gibieuf, rather than Thomism and Scotism would have influenced Descartes. Still, we also meet a Descartes determined to have his Principles of Philosophy adopted as the textbook for the schools run by the Jesuits who had educated him. Indeed, Descartes is somewhat opportunistic in reinventing his theory of freedom to bring it closer to the Molinist doctrine held by the Jesuits. Alas, the Jesuits had their own textbooks. This is not Gilson’s last work on the development of Descartes’ thinking, but the book already shows the engaging, vivid historian of thought who would become world famous. As Gilson guides us through Descartes’ voluminous correspondence, the feelers he sends out through his friend Marin Mersenne, his attempts to make peace with the Jesuits, we feel we have lived in seventeenth-century French intellectual circles

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Will Morrisey again considers the political dimensions of literary classics, as previously seen in Melville’s Ship of State (2019). His attention to Shakespeare’s comedies is a reader’s and playgoer’s delight. INTRODUCTORY NOTE: The Politic Character of Shakespeare’s Comedy PART ONE: THREE REGIMES: OLIGARCHY, ARISTOCRACY, MONARCHY Chapter One: Shakespearean Comedy: Two Points on the Compass Chapter Two: Gentlemen and Gentlemanliness Chapter Three: Royal Dreaming PART TWO: THE RULE OF LAW Chapter Four: Comic Errors, Legal Slapstick Chapter Five: What Will You? PART THREE: THE COMEDY OF MORALS Chapter Six: Taming Our Shrewishness Chapter Seven: What Does Shakespeare Mean When He Says, “As You Like It”? PART FOUR: THE COMEDY OF POLITICS Chapter Eight: Is All Well That Ends Well? Chapter Nine: The Geopolitics of Love Chapter Ten: The Wisest Beholder SHAKESPEARE’S POLITIC MERRIMENT

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Probably no single thinker since Jesus has influenced the thoughts and lives of more people living in the Western world today than Sigmund Freud. Even agnostics like William Barrett, in Irrational Man, and atheists like Nietzsche, agree that the single most radical change in the last thousand years of Western civilization has been the decline of religion. And the four most influential critics of religion have certainly been Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, and Freud. Of the four, Freud is by far the most popular No name is more associated with, and in fact responsible for, “the sexual revolution” than Freud. And no revolution in history, at least none since the one around a cross and an empty tomb, and perhaps even none since the one around a snake and an apple, has been more life-changing, and has more potential to continue to be more radically life-changing in the future, than the sexual revolution. To see this, just read Huxley’s Brave New World. (And remember that Huxley was far from being a theist.) Freud wore three hats. Freud was (1) a practicing psychoanalyst (indeed, the inventor of psychoanalysis), (2) a professional theoretical psychologist and sociologist, and (3) an amateur philosopher. This book explores only his philosophy, for that is the point of his intersection with Socrates. If Socrates is right in his deepest convictions about the power of reason and the importance of philosophy, Freud’s philosophy is the ultimate source, foundation, explanation, and justification for his psychology. Readers of this book, therefore, should not expect direct evaluations of the famous “Freudian” details of these other two dimensions of Freud’s work—not because they are not important, and not because they are unrelated to his philosophy, but because one cannot do everything at once (unless one’s proper name is “I AM WHO AM”), and certainly cannot do justice to everything at once.

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Immanuel Kant is one of the greatest philosophers in history. As Peter Kreeft here notes, Kant is really two philosophers – a philosopher concerned with how we know things (epistemology) and a philosopher of right and wrong (ethics). If he had written only on either topic, he would still be the most important and influential of the modern philosophers. The combination of the two, though, makes for a formidable thinker, one it would take a figure such as Socrates to confront. Kreeft’s Socrates reflects what the historical philosopher would likely have made of Kant’s ideas, while also recognizing the greatness, genius, and insightfulness of Kant. The result is a helpful, highly readable, even amusing book. Kant’s philosopher of knowing truly is a “Copernican revolution in philosophy,” as he himself dubbed it. His ethics intended to set out the rational grounds for morality. Did he achieve his goals? What would Socrates say about the matter?

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Humorous, frank, and insightful, this book challenges the reader to step in and take hold of what is right and to cast away what is wrong. Topics covered included such varied subjects as private property, the individual, the Three Philosophies of Man, women, individualism, and more. A wonderful introduction to philosophy for the neophyte, and a joy for the experienced student of thought. “Imagine two of the most influential thinkers of all time, and two of the most diametrically opposed, thrust together in a no holds barred debate about some of the most important questions: Does man move the world or is he only a puppet of forces beyond his control? Is there a human nature or only market forces? Is Communism the liberator of mankind or a deadly scourge? In Peter Kreeft’s Socrates Meets Marx, the father of philosophy cross examines the founder of communism using the Communist Manifesto, details from the life of Marx himself, and the witnesses of history as evidence to be considered for judgment. If only every edition of the Communist Manifesto would have been bound together with a copy of this book, the world would be a much saner place.” – Christopher Kaczor, author of Proportionalism and the Natural Law Tradition

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This new paperbound edition of The Sacred Monster of Thomism (the epithet comes from François Mauriac) is the first full-length study of the life and thought of the most influential Dominican theologian in the first half of the twentieth century, and the scourge of liberal theologians everywhere. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange taught at the Angelicum for fifty years, held the first chair of spiritual theology in the Church’s history, and authored twenty-eight books and over six hundred articles. He was also the doctoral dissertation director for Pope John Paul II. This work sketches the life and general context of Garrigou’s life, discusses at length the most important factor in his life – his affiliation with the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) – and examines his philosophical disputes with Henry Bergson and Maurice Blondel, his theological (and political) disputes with Jacques Maritain and M.- Dominique Chenu, and ends with the chapters examining Garrigou’s Thomism and his approaches to theology and spirituality.

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To be a Christian is to be a convert. The word “convert” applies in a real sense both to cradle-born Catholics and to those, traditionally regarded as converts, who become Catholics as adults. The Catholic Church is the divinely established framework of the program of a conversion, which Christ presented as a thorough change of mind and heart (metanoia). While for a cradle-born Catholic the implementation of that program is usually a gradual process, for converts it contains a momentous act as they vote, so to speak, with their feet, on behalf of Truth, by joining the Church as the One True Fold, the Sole Ark of Salvation, to recall hallowed phrases dear to John Henry Newman, easily the greatest convert during the nineteenth century. The aim of this book is to summarize the lives of notable converts from Britain and Ireland and explain (by reference to quotations from their writings) why they entered the Catholic Church. These reasons were many. Some looked chiefly at history and saw the apostolic Church in their day to be residing in the Catholic communion. Others, though appreciating the fact of the gift of faith, saw reason as the chief support of the step they were taking. To yet others it was the endurance of both the Church and that remarkable office of the papacy that proved the necessary stimulus. Many were inspired by the witness of some unsung saint in their neighbourhood. Some were eminent even before their “move to Rome,” others almost completely unknown. Some found fame on their conversion, others suffered greatly for their zeal for the one true fold of Christ. Some came into the Church relatively early in life, others entered at the final hour, even while on their death bed. Taken altogether these accounts provide a profound and moving witness to the operation of divine grace in human souls.

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“Pre-modern philosophy” means the line of reflection that started with Plato andvAristotle, passed through Augustine and Boethius, and reached its acme in Aquinas, Scotus, and Suarez. The whole line was harshly judged by Descartes, then mocked by the empiricsts of the 18th Century. Why, then, did Pope Leo XII make a determined effort to revive it? And, more importantly, why was the revival a stunning success by the middle of the 20th Century?The answers to both questions are found in a famous German book, Philosophie der Vorzeit by Josef Kleutgen, now available for the first time in English. Pre-ModernPhilosophy Defended shaped and strengthened Pope Leo’s resolve. It showed how inaccurate the harsh judgments had been and how sadly inferior the modern replacements from Descartes to Hegel had turned out to be in many respects.Not in all. Kleutgen was no knee-jerk reactionary. He made no bones about the obsolete status of pre-Newtonian physics and cosmology. Rather, he focused on the central boast of “modern” thought, namely, that it had turned at least to the “subject” and had provided a long-needed thing called a “critique of knowledge.”This book is must reading for intellectual historians and for philosophers working today in epistemology. But most of all, it is essential reading for laity and clergy concerned about revivals of modernism in the church. What was modernism, after all, but an attempt to make the Church revise her theology in the “light” of Kant or Hegel? This is why every Modernist knew Kleutgen’s name and hated this book.Here is the first English translation (from the German) of the master work of Josef Kleutgen, the nineteenth century social philosopher whose thought lies at, or near, the heart of Catholic Social Thought. Kleutgen is widely and rightly seen as the shadow author of the social encyclicals of Leo XII. Leo’s Rerum Novarum remains the origin and constant reference point of all Catholic Social Teaching. And Popes since have dated their own social encyclicals from Rerum Novarum – hence, Quadragesimo anno and Centesimus annus. —Gerard V. Bradley, University of Notre DamePre-Modern Philosophy Defended is must reading for intellectual historians and for philosophers working today in epistemology. And it is essential reading for laity and clergy concerned about revivals of modernism in the church. What was modernism, after all, but an attempt to make the Church revise her theology in the ‘light’ of Kant or Hegel? This is why every Modernist knew Kleutgen's name and hated Philosophie der Vorzeit (Pre-Modern Philosophy Defended).

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Josef Pieper’s The Platonic Myths is the work of a scholar and philosopher whose search for the level of truth contained in the myths is carried out with a series of careful distinctions between the kinds of myths told by Plato. In the Platonic stories Plato crystallizes mythical fragments from the mere stories which contain them, and in the genuine Platonic myths he purifies the proper mythical elements, freeing them of the non-mythical elements which tend to obscure them. In examining the ‘accepted’ scholarly interpretations of the myths, Pieper succeeds in establishing the case for a truth, found particularly in the eschatological myths, that is not reducible to the rational truth normally sought by philosophers. While it is not purely rational truth, it is not inferior. It is different. It stems from tradition, which reaches back to the ultimate beginnings of man’s existence – back into our pre-history and to events of which, naturally, we have no experience. The only access we have to this truth is through ‘hearing’ (ex akoés), which is not dependent on mere ‘hearsay,’ but which, in Pieper’s interpretation, reflects the handing on, in stories, of what the gods first communicated to man about the creation of the world and about the afterlife. These truths are to be found – long before the New Testament (or even the Old Testament) – in the myths of a variety of civilizations and give evidence of an extraordinary consensus: that there was a creating hand, that primeval man incurred guilt in the eyes of the gods; that he could be saved; that there is an afterlife in which man is rewarded or punished; that he can undergo a kind of purgatory for lesser offenses; and that in the afterlife he can dwell with the gods. What is the basis for accepting such truth as is contained in the myths? No purely rational argument will suffice. What man cannot experience himself he either tends to reject or, if he accepts it, he does so on the authority of another – ex akoés. Even before – or even without – Christian revelation, men have based their lives on a conviction, for instance, that there is an afterlife. They have this conviction not from experience or from some rational philosophical argument. They have it on the basis of ‘belief.’ With the coming of Christian revelation, the logos, or word, of the myth is seen – to the believer – to be the Logos of the New Testament. But even here the ‘believer’ can depend neither on purely rational argument nor on satisfactorily verifiable fact. He has only – belief.

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The essays and lectures first collected here span a period of over 25 years and cover the greater part of Joseph Cropsey’s illustrious career of scholarship and teaching at the University of Chicago. They are presented in the order in which he wrote them. The central problem of human thought and existence, according to Cropsey, is that it is absolutely impossible for a human being to understand his human condition without understanding his position within the whole of which the human is only a part. Our imperfect knowledge of the whole therefore places limits on our knowledge of ourselves, for we do not know where we stand in relation to the whole that conditions us, and therewith our own condition. What then should we do in the face of our irremediable ignorance and uncertainty? Cropsey argues that the difficulties currently faced by liberalism arise from the efforts of later thinkers to elevate it beyond its Hobbesian origins in self-preservation and natural necessity. As a result of their flights from nature to morality, the sovereignty that for Hobbes protected natural rights decayed into a mere legalism that undermines liberalism’s ability to defend itself. Cropsey explores the tendencies within liberalism toward both self-abnegation and self-assertion as well as the resources in the Western tradition that can help fortify contemporary liberalism. Both Scripture and Plato, for example, insist that our “flights from nature” remain cognizant of human limitation. And the robust strands of modernity, found in the works of Locke and Smith as well as of Hobbes, demonstrate the benefits of a freedom within the limits of nature. In contrasting liberal democracy and Marxism – the version of modern politics that best exemplifies the flight from nature – Cropsey finds that liberal democracy manifests a spirited animus against being ruled by others, and celebrates individual choice, whereas Marxism allows a freedom to will only the rational, as it emerges in history, and aspires to replace the competitiveness of bourgeois life with an affectionate sociability. Cropsey also shows how liberalism’s separation of church and state, which replaces Hobbes’ teaching on sovereignty, serves in fact to protect civil supremacy by limiting religious authority to the private sphere at the same time that it moderates the state by depriving it of any claim to divine support. But he warns against the complacency implied in the thesis that liberal democracy represents the end or culmination of history. Looking further at the resources within the tradition that might strengthen contemporary liberalism, Cropsey challenges not merely orthodoxies of Platonic scholarship, but the very distinction between ancients and moderns, the identification of philosophy with reason, and ultimately the dichotomy between reason and revelation. Cropsey’s equating the meaning of an open society with openness to the activity of philosophy within it might appear to be in tension with Plato’s famous description in the Republic of a closed society ruled by philosopher-kings. But Cropsey shows that in the Timaeus, which provides a cosmological setting for the activity of the Republic’s city, Plato himself questions the intelligibility of the whole. In his analysis of Plato’s Philebus Cropsey emphasizes the disjunction between the finite, intelligible and infinite, unintelligible elements.. The inscrutability of the whole connects philosophy to revelation as well as philosophy’s political activity to an open or liberal society. Crospey’s essays represent experiments in philosophic interpretations of our world, which draw on the political and philosophical thought that has helped to form that world and that help us to evaluate our strengths and weaknesses in light of our essential humanity.

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In this work Ockham proposes a theory of simple predication, which he then uses in explicating the truth conditions of progressively more complicated kinds of propositions. His discussion includes what he takes to be the correct semantic treatment of quantified propositions, past tense and future tense propositions, and modal propositions, all of which are receiving much attention from contemporary philosophers. He also illustrates the use of exponential analysis to deal with propositions that prove troublesome in both semantic theory and other disciplines, such as metaphysics, physics, and theology. This type of analysis plays an essential role in his substantive philosophical and theological works, and in many cases then can hardly be understood without a prior acquaintance with this section of the Summa. An introduction by Alfred J. Freddoso clarifies and summarizes Ockham’s theory, discusses certain philosophical problems what it engenders, and proposes new interpretations for parts of it. The essay will be helpful both to those interested in Ockham as a historical figure and to those interested in his substantive systematic contributions to logical history.

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It’s not easy being Catholic and conservative in secular ‘Blue State’ New York, but that’s what George J. Marlin is, always has been, and always will be. Don’t ask him to change. Besides, like America, it’s the Empire State that needs to change. Generation after generation of elitists have put in place their plans for making the machineries of state work more efficiently and more equitably, and they’ve succeeded in wrecking what was never broken in the first place. And Mr. Marlin has a name for political types who think they know better than the rest of us: narcissists. Narcissists have been fouling up societies since the beginning of time. As Marlin writes:Throughout history, a subset of people have viewed themselves as superior to the rest of the population due to their perceived distinctive qualities: intelli-gence, breeding, class, or wealth. These elites have generally held that because they are exceptional persons they were best suited to conduct the affairs of state. They are wrong. But they have succeeded, and they appear to be ascendant in America today, although the Tea Party may have something to say about that. But consider the following contemporary examples: * The elitist imposition of Obamacare upon an unwilling nation * The lionizing by the Left of eugenicists, such as Margaret Sanger and Ruth Bader Ginsburg * The way “Catholic” politicians such as New York governors George Pataki and David Paterson and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani run roughshod over Church teaching * The way contemporary education – from nursery school through college – infantilizes and fails our kids, preparing them poorly for the rigors of adulthood With an acid pen and a ready wit, George Marlin takes on many of modern America’s most revered intellectuals and shows conclusively that they’re just not as smart as they think they are.

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