St. Augustine’s Press

Seth Benardete's study of the Iliad, which initiated his scholarly career, bears the hallmarks of the unique turn of mind that characterized all his later work. In a brief Note written thirty years later, included in this volume, he looks back on what he sees as the limits of his original reading of the Iliad. Yet he seems to have been aware of the fundamental problems from early on that he wrestled with explicitly when he returned to Homer some forty years later: the question of the relations among gods, fate, and human choice, which lies at the core of his late "Platonic reading" of the Odyssey, is already guiding his understanding of the Iliad. And he saw, in working out that understanding, how those relations take on a very distinct form for the tragic hero in contrast with the comic hero – Achilles in contrast with Odysseus.

Can a machine think? More pointedly, if I am a machine, can I think? Beck answers these questions by analyzing two clusters of metaphors – one of which dramatizes human beings as spontaneous agents (actors), and the other sees them as observers attempting to explain causally their own behavior and that of the actor (spectators). Using a hypothetical scene with two spectators, each explaining an action, and each representing a different way of viewing the world, Beck points up the central philosophical problems raised by the varieties of ways in which we explain our own actions and those of others.

“[F]ull of insights and fruitful suggestions.” – Stephan Körner, TLS

Wonderful daily meditations for the Season of Advent to guide you through each day to help you “Wait in Joyful Hope.”

New and revised edition, with three new essays.

Brings together essays on the philosophy of art in which a philosophical theory of aesthetic judgment is tested and developed through its application to particular examples. Each essay approaches, from its own field of study, what Roger Scruton argues to be the central problems of aesthetics – what is aesthetic experience, and what is its importance for human conduct?

New essays in this edition include “The Aesthetic Endeavour Today,” “Upon Nothing” (a deconstruction of deconstruction), and “Humane Education.”

After Forty Years: Vatican Council II’s Diverse Legacy, as the title indicates, commemorates the 40th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council of 1962–1965. However, the book makes no attempt to deal with the legacy of Vatican II as a whole, that is, with the Council’s complete legacy, but only with some important parts of it. The Council as a whole represents a topic too vast to be covered within the confines of a single volume, as it was too vast to be covered within the confines of a single Fellowship of Catholic Scholars convention. This book covers those aspects of the Council that were of special interest to some of the leading scholars and academics active in the Fellowship. These favored topics were covered by means of the scholarly papers prepared especially for the Fellowship’s annual convention held in Charlotte, North Carolina, in September 2005. This book deals with the two great Constitutions on the Church (Lumen Gentium and Gaudium et Spes); its epochal Constitution on Divine Revelation, and hence also on Scripture (Dei Verbum); its Declaration on Religious Liberty (Dignitatis Humanae); and its Decree on Ecumenism (Unitatis Redintegratio). Because of the special interest of a number of the contributors, there is a heavy emphasis on the meaning and significance of the “anthropology” of Gaudium et Spes (the favorite Vatican II document of Pope John Paul II, by the way, who was one of the architects of this document at the Council). This book, however, is no superficial survey of the general ideas and thrust of the Second Vatican Council, as so many books on the subject turn out to be; but it is rather an in-depth look at the meaning an import of several of the Council’s most important themes and decisions. As is usual with the books based on Fellowship conventions, the volume contains a number of outstanding contributors, including Jesuit Father William S. Kurz of Marquette, Sister Mary Timothy Prokes, f.s.e., of the Notre Dame Graduate School of Christendom College, and New York University’s Emeritus Professor of Psychology, Dr. Paul Vitz, now teaching at the new Institute for Psychological Sciences (IPS) in Northern Virginia.

 (1) Science, (2) philosophy, and (3) poetry, myth, and mysticism are three modes of consciousness that are radically different today. We are usually very good at carefully distinguishing them so as not to corrupt them, reduce them, or to confuse them with each other. But almost no one tries to connect them in a synthesis in which each maintains its own identity yet each contributes to a greater whole that no one of them could attain alone – like a happy marriage. If we bring them together at all, it is only to focus in three different ways on a specific issue (like health care, or children’s literature, or gender roles). 

Until the nineteenth century, thinkers who entertained doubts about the existence of God were branded “atheists” and “infidels,” and were subject to persecutions. But in the late nineteenth-century Britain a group of highly respectable thinkers emerged who argued for the radical conclusion that theology is impossible, and that we humans cannot know what, if anything, lies behind the veil of appearances. This volume provides extracts of the best-known agnostics (Spencer, Huxley, Stephen, Clifford, and Tyndall), and their less well-known theological opponents. The debate marks a major turning point in Western attitudes toward religious belief; the burden of proof was henceforth firmly placed on the shoulders of the theologians.

The Lord God Creator has given us five openings to the physical world around us, that sacramental world in which we swim: hearing, sight, taste, touch, and smell. The experience of each of these senses is sometimes sharp and clean; poignant, evocative, almost unendurable. In the lines of this collection, penned during sixty years, Michael Novak has sought to snatch from the flames of rushing time a few simple pieces, shards, remainders. “All Nature is a Heraclitean Fire,” a real poet wrote. Novak calls himself an amateur. But one who believes, however, that everybody should write poetry, or reach for it. It is the language of our soul. It is concentrated prose.

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 known, 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.

WATCH NEWSMAX.TV'S INTERVIEW WITH CO-AUTHOR, THEODORE ROOSEVELT MALLOCH HERE.

From the earliest days in the New World through the disputed presidential election of 2000, the influence of Catholics on American politics has followed a peculiar arc. In Colonial America, Catholics were often denied participation in the process; but in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Catholic bloc was recognized as a swing vote that determined the outcome of numerous elections; and today Catholics are either so assimilated or disunited that as a group their impact is declining.

In this insightful and controversial book, Rosen takes a new look at the famous "quarrel" that the moderns have with the ancients, analyzing and comparing ancient philosophers and modern Continental and analytical thinkers from Plato, Descartes, and Kant to Fichte, Nietzsche, and Rorty. He urges that we not dismiss the classical heritage but appropriate it, for this appropriation is an indispensable step in the process of legitimizing our historical experience.

“In his Emile Rousseau proposes a new plan of education closely connected with a universal overthrow of civil order. The goal of the Emile is to prepare souls by means of a total revolution in their modes of thinking.”—These words were penned in 1763, by the young Catholic philosopher, H. S. Gerdil, more than two decades before the French revolution. In a prophetic moment in the history of the philosophy of education, Gerdil noted that the pedagogy of Rousseau’s book will inspire “vexation with and aversion for religious and social institutions . . . it will make bad Christians and bad citizens.” The disenchantment with any authority or social forms sunk deep roots in the modern European social imagination. It has informed the many liberal reforms of education of the last two centuries. The Emile is still with us.

Heidegger intended to replace metaphysics by a new kind of thought about that which he called Sein, but in his works this noun is very far from meaning the act of being such as it has been traditionally conceived by Western philosophy. His explanations as to what he does mean by Sein underline his departure from traditional metaphysics. Sein is no longer to be understood as the act of the things that exist in the eternal world, but as something revealed to the human mind in an esoteric way. The association of this esoteric revelation of Sein with Hölderlin's theosophy led Heidegger to put forward a new gnosis organized as a substitute of metaphysics and of Christian theology as well.

Not much escapes the intellect and imagination of the Angelic Doctor, St. Thomas Aquinas. Whether it be love, children, education, moral reasoning, happiness or the proper dispositions for human existence, St. Thomas seems an expert in all of it. Crime and criminal conduct are no exceptions to this general tendency with him. Not only does he have much to say about it, what he relates is perpetually fresh and surely the bedrock of what is now taken for granted. In this short treatise, the focus targets St. Thomas’s criminal codification – his law of crimes.

The twenty-six works contained in this collection comprise some of the best and best-known scholars on the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Readers will find here helpful insights into St. Thomas’s adjudication of various streams in the philosophical and theological traditions. Most pertinent for readers today is the way in which Aquinas integrates faith and reason, resulting in mutual benefit.. 

The Archaeology of the Soul is a testimony to the extraordinary scope of Seth Benardete’s thought. Some essays concern particular authors or texts; others range more broadly and are thematic. Some deal explicitly with philosophy; others deal with epic, lyric, andtragic poetry. Some of these authors are Greek, some Roman, and still others are contemporaries writing about antiquity. All of these essays, however, are informed by an underlying vision, which is a reflection of Benardete’s life-long engagement with one thinker in particular – Plato.

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.

Discusses the origin, development, and use of the many senses of priority as a central thesis in Aristotle’s metaphysics, and argues that the concept of priority is central to understanding Aristotle’s ambiguous relationship in Platonism.

Gradations of Being was edited from the papers of Joseph Owens. Some fifty years after his groundbreaking book The Doctrine of Being in the Aristotelian Metaphysics, Owens turned again to consider the central themes in Aristotle’s conception of a science of being or “first philosophy.” Reflecting on a half-century of scholarship, and drawing on his own extensive publications in Greek and medieval philosophy, Owens sets forth in a step-by-step meticulous argument his own interpretation of Aristotle’s account of substance, essence, and the gradations of being. Owens writes extensively of the different but complimentary approaches of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas. He discusses the many facets of the Aristotelian notion of “form,” including its role in a realistic epistemology.

What role did Humanism play in the emergence of English Protestantism? This question has remained a live issue for Reformation scholarship over the past four centuries. In the Ark, the Covenant, and the Poor Men’s Chest, the author examines the issue in detail, utilizing categories drawn from the research of John W. O’Malley on the application of different modes of classical rhetoric to biblical interpretation during the Renaissance.

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 particular of “aesthetic description”), to a theory of aesthetic appreciation, and thence to an account of the nature and value of art.

“This is an important book and one of the best to appear in a long while.” – B. R. Tilghman, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism               

A substantial and in-depth study of the history of the atomic theory of matter between the time of Democritus and that of Newton. It is the first to emphasize the continuity of the atomic debate and the debt owed by the seventeenth-century “moderns” to the medieval critique of Aristotle. 

Since the publication of Etienne Gilson’s magisterial study, La Liberté chez Descartes et la théologie, in 1913, Cartesian scholars have been trying to determine the extent of Augustine’s influence on Descartes. Zbigniew Janowski’s Augustinian-Cartesian Index brings what seems to be a definitive answer. In his Index Janowski shows page by page, in Latin and in the English translation, the passages in the Meditations that find their counterparts in the Augustinian corpus. In his meticulous commentary the author analyzes Augustine’s role in the formation and development of Descartes’s philosophy. There are also two appendixes with borrowings from Thomas Aquinas and Bacon, and a short essay on the role Bacon played in the transformation of Cartesian metaphysics. TheAugustinian-Cartesian Index is a major contribution to the understanding of the origins of modern philosophy and Augustinian tradition in the seventeenth century. It will become a standard reference tool.

“Students of the Aristotelian tradition in medieval philosophy will welcome the excellent English translations of Averroes’ commentaries on these two works of Aristotle.” – Mohamed Alibhai, Religious Studies Review

This volume contains both the translation of the text and an introduction which the arguments of both Averroes and Aristotle are sketch out and their differences from Plato and other important thinkers explored, an outline analysis of the order of Averroes’s commentary, annotations to the text, a bibliography, and a glossary of important terms with their English translations..

Back to the Drawing Board: The Future of the Pro-Life Movement is an unprecedented collection of thoughtful and sometimes painfully honest essays, evaluating the pro-life cause thirty years after Roe v. Wade. Contributing writers are the movement's most respected leaders, including Dr. James Dobson, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, Nat Hentoff, Dr. Mildred Jefferson, Congressman Chris Smith, Phyllis Schlafly, Rabbi Daniel Lapin, Paul Weyrich, and Jean Garton, among others. They are statesmen, scholars, doctors, lawyers, judges, activists and mothers. They are Evangelical Christian, Muslim, Atheist, Jewish, and Catholic. They are men and women, young and old, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican – and third party. Many are veterans, some are new; but all have labored in the effort, and care about its future.

The Nutcracker began as a German fairy tale. It then became a Russian ballet, and now, in its latest incarnation, it has become an American ritual. Every year mothers from the suburbs surrounding South Bend, Indiana, set out in their vans and SUVs to slay the rat king in a military campaign against the rats and everything they symbolize. Every year they volunteer their little boys and girls as soldiers in the culture wars so that they can defeat the rats of appetite, disorder, and chaos by wielding the weapons of truth, beauty, and grace. The Nutcracker is the 21st-century version of the Children’s Crusade.

In this historical/philosophical reflection, Lee Congdon writes of the ways in which baseball spurs memory. This is particularly important at a time when many Americans suffer from a form of amnesia that renders them defenseless in the face of concerted efforts to seize possession of the past. “Who controls the past controls the future,” George Orwell wrote in Nineteen Eighty-Four, “who controls the present controls the past.” Baseball can, and does, stand in the way of those whose ambition it is to gain and maintain power by pretending that memory cannot be trusted; what was once thought to be “the past” was merely a fiction that served the interests of a ruling class.

"Deely's book, the only successful modern English introduction to semiotics, is a clear, creative, and provocative synthesis of major trends, past and present." - Thomas A. Sebeok, Indiana University

A Selection of outstanding articles from the Fellowship’s first thirteen years of Proceedings.

Contributors include Germain Grisez, Msgr. George A. Kelly, Paul C. Vitz, Joseph M. Boyle, Rev. Ronald Lawler, OFM CAP., John M. Finnis, James Hitchcock, Maura A. Daly, R. V. Young, John M. Haas, Robert P. George, Joyce A. Little, Benedict M. Ashley, O.P., Alice Ramos, Rev. Marvin R. O’Connell, Janet E. Smith, Gerard V. Bradley, and Rev. Robert Sokolowski.

[T]he earlier and much-anticipated version [of this book], entitled Baylor Beyond the Crossroads: An Interpretive History, 1985–2005, was in the printing process when its publication was cancelled. The first several hundred copies of the book were then destroyed. The earlier version was cancelled because the new administration at Baylor believed the publication of the book under the Baylor name would unnecessarily involve it, the administration, in the prolonged controversy that had enveloped Baylor at least since the 2001 adoption of Baylor 2012 – Baylor’s sweeping vision to be a Christian research university.

Beauteous Truth explores the inextricable connection between the Good, the True and the Beautiful. It is a book that makes the necessary connections between faith and reason and between theology, philosophy, history and literature. It presents a panoramic overview of Western Civilization, from Homer to Tolkien, and highlights the importance of the great figures of the Catholic cultural revival, including Newman, Wilde, Chesterton, Belloc, and C.S. Lewis. Ranging from Shakespeare to Solzhenitsyn, Beauteous Truth celebrates the marriage of sanity and sanctity, which is the fruit of the indissoluble union of fides et ratio.

Kolakowski shows how Henri Bergson sought to reconcile Darwin’s theory with his own beliefs about the nature of the universe. Bergson believed that time could be thought of in two different ways: as an abstract measuring device used for practical purposes, or as durée, the “real” time we actually experience. He also held that all matter is propelled by an internal élan vital, or life-drive, and that the life of the universe is constantly creative and unpredictable. On the basis of these ideas he constructed a system of thought that embraced his views on memory, matter, consciousness, movement, religious morality, and the nature of laughter. His pantheistic and dynamic vision of the universe, which emerged at a time of crisis in Western intellectual life, was symptomatic of the struggle between a rigid scientific determinism and the Christian tradition of a divine creation.

In addition to being one of the most important logicians and philosophers of this century, Russell was also one of its most prominent public figures, and his influence on his time was not confined to academic subjects. This book deals with Russell’s work on the foundation of mathematics and to the philosophical method that he developed as a consequence of his successes in that field, but there are also examples of the more popular side of his work, with discussions of positions he defended in the philosophy of religion, political philosophy, history, and education, and one of the dominant hemes of his life, political activism.

This collection of new essays from distinguished philosophers and Russell scholars explores Russell’s own unique and enduringly important contribution to shaping the concerns and the methods of contemporary analytical philosophers. It includes both general discussions of the nature of analytical philosophy and minutely detailed analyses of Russell’s own arguments, and covers the whole range of Russell’s famously varied output. Contributors include Nicholas Griffin, Peter Hylton , A. C. Grayling, C. M. Kilmister, and others.

This highly relevant essay by the prominent political philosopher has as its central theme the feature common to all totalitarian ideologies, “the total critique of society” that social criticism that rejects not this or that injustice but damns the entire “system” and overshadows an entire historical period.

A step-by-step excursion through the Mass. Fr. Stravinskas explains the parts of the Mass, giving scriptural references and explanations for the various actions and prayers. Each chapter ends with stud questions geared toward group discussion. Perfect for Bible study, theology class, or prayer group, or simply to deepen one’s own understanding of the Church’s highest form of prayer, the Eucharistic Sacrifice.

A very complete, annotated bibliographical listing of works on the seventeenth-century philosopher, Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715).

Why would a priest turn his back on his priesthood and walk away from his religious vocation and its demanding responsibilities? Why did he become a priest in the first place? And how do such men make reparations for their defection? Both Sides of the Altar strives to look at these questions through one such priest’s life, that of Frank Morgan.

In commenting on contemporary social and political issues, Dougherty provides a critique of the humbug that often passes as philosophy. Much of what is published as philosophy, he claims, has little to do with the pursuit of wisdom, and much is written without any knowledge of the history of philosophy – for example, a professor of moral philosophy, by his own admission, lecturing without any knowledge of the Stoics, and another professor at a prominent university, in a nationally televised series of lectures devoted to the history of philosophy, jumping from Plato to Descartes with nothing in between. Dougherty argues that the ancients, no less intelligent or observant than we, have much to say to us about nature, human nature, and the polity. It is from the vantage point of what he takes to be perennial philosophy that Dougherty discusses topics such as “The Acquisition and Use of Power,” “Property as a Condition of Liberty,” “Tolerance.” “Responsibility,” and “The Nature of Scientific Explanation.”

Immortalized by some of the greatest Hollywood films of the 20th century, Italian Brooklyn became one of the icons of American culture. Brooklyn Existentialism shows that the culture of that time and place was more than just an icon. The oxymoronic combination of uprootedness and ethnic solidarity that were found in Brooklyn during the middle years of the 20th century provide an opening that takes the reader not just back to Italy, not just back to Europe, but back to the sources of philosophical realism that made Europe, Italy, and America possible in the first place. Brooklyn Existentialism is ethnophilosophy with a vengeance. It is a take-no-prisoners attack on the bad ideas which have corrupted the academy over the course of the last century combined with an equally frank discussion of the moral mischief these bad ideas have caused.

This work reopens the question of the relation of the Protestant Reformation to the emergence of a distinctively modern view of political activity. Providing a highly original reading of John Calvin’s major work and an examination of some key interpretations of Calvinism, Ralph C. Hancock argues that Calvin should be considered a founder of modern civilization along with such “secular” thinkers as Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Descartes.

Les Bodnar is a respected orthopedic surgeon and former physician for the Notre Dame football team. His memoir, however, is from an era long before that fame, when he was 12 and 13, and a part of his father’s carnival. The romance of carnival life, of escaping the 9-5 doldrums and somehow recapturing yourself, is there, but so too the hard work and trials, the difficulty of putting on a show day after day and week after week for people who both love the show and are apprehensive of the people who put it on.

In stark and bracing contrast with the signature narcissism and self-pity of contemporary verse, The Cast of Valor is not “feeling verse,” nor is it confessional or even personal. This is true poetry, communal in the greater Christian tradition and anchored in universal human experience. Traditional English verse is employed by the poet in meter and rhyme, but the subject matter is far from archaic in theme and perspective. This poetry is universal in its consideration of historic parallels in individual, personal lives. Born in Nashville, Tennessee, and educated at Vanderbilt and Yale, Rollin Lasseter formed his poetic imagination half a century ago by his mentors in faith and verse – Donald Davidson, Cleanth Brooks, Dorothy L. Sayers, Charles Williams, and W. B. Yeats – and accompany the author into the religious challenges of the millennium. The modern soul is exiled from religious certainties and conventional understanding. It must either reconcile to permanent exile from the disorder of modern culture, or find the connection to Faith that would allow a permanent home in God’s order.

The Catholic Church today finds herself at the very center of some of the most important and controversial moral and social developments of our day, including abortion, capital punishment, cloning, so-called “gay marriage,” pacifism and the morality of war, the ethics of healthcare in a technologically advanced but morally deficient society, and other related subjects. The Fellowship of Catholic Scholars attempts to address issues such as these by inviting the best and most knowledgeable scholars and commentators to speak at its annual conventions. This book brings together the addresses and responses devoted to these topics at the Fellowship's 26th annual convention in 2003. The contributors include the renowned John Finnis of Oxford and Notre Dame, Mary Eberstadt of the Hoover Institution, Christopher Wolfe of Marquette University, William E. May of the John Paul II Institute, Gerard V. Bradley of the Notre Dame Law School, Patrick Lee of Franciscan University, Steven A. Long of the University of St. Thomas, E. Christian Brugger of Loyola University in New Orleans, J. Brian Benestad of the University of Scranton, the Rev. Michael J. Baxter of Notre Dame, and, not least, the well-known moral theologian, Msgr. William B. Smith of St. Joseph's Seminary. Nowhere between two covers can there be found a sharper searchlight trained upon some of the principal moral and social issues of our day than in this collection.

A wide-ranging and enlightening discussion on creativity within the Catholic context.

Contents

Introduction: Kenneth D. Whitehead

Keynote Address: Finding the Sacred in the Profane: Twentieth-century Catholic Literature – Robert Royal

The Beauty of the Cross: The Theological Aesthetics of Hans Urs von Balthasar – Rev. Raymond T. Gawronski, S.J.

Response to Father Raymond T. Gawronski – Larry Chapp

The Sacramental Vision of J.R.R. Tolkien – C.N. Sue Abromaitis

Sacred Architecture and the Christian Imagination – Steven J. Schloeder

Response to Stephen J. Schloeder – Catherine Brown Tkacz

Cinema: The Power of Visual Imagery – Barbara R. Nicolosi

The Music of the Spheres; or, the Metaphysics of Music – Robert R. Reilly

Response to Robert R. Reilly – Rev. Basil Cole, O.P.

The John Cardinal Wright Award Acceptance Speech – Thomas W. Hilgers, M.D.

A New Era in the Renewal of the Liturgy – Helen Hull Hitchcock

Liturgiam Authenticam and the Prospects for Authentic Liturgical Renewal – Rev. Jerry Pokorsky

This volume brings together some of the very best commentary on a wide range of recent events and controversies by some of the very best Catholic writers in the English language: Ralph McInerny, Michael Novak, Fr. James V. Schall, Hadley Arkes, Robert Royal, Anthony Esolen, Brad Miner, George Marlin, David Warren, Austin Ruse, Francis Beckwith, and many others.

In The Christian Idea of Man Josef Pieper brings off an extraordinary feat. He acknowledges that whoever introduces the theme of “virtue” and “the virtues” can expect to be met with a smile – of various shades of condescension. He then proceeds to single out “prudence” as the fundamental virtue on which the other cardinal virtues are based. In defining it, he does away with the shallow connotations which have debased it in modern times. Similarly, he manages to divest it of all traces of “moralism,” which, to a large extent has become identified with the Christian idea of virtue and has made it fall into general disrepute.

The spirituality and immortality of the soul might seem to be an essential Christian doctrine, but in fact many early Christian writers held that the soul is material and that immortality is a gift. As Ernest Fortin’s study of Claudianus Mamertus (d. 475), a priest of Vienne in Gaul, and his De Statu Animae, On the State of the Soul (ca. 470) shows, St. Augustine did not settle the question. De Statu Animae is the only explicitly philosophical work in the West that we possess between Augustine (354–430) and Boethius. It responds to a defense of the corporeality of the soul by Bishop Faustus of Reii, modern Riez. Like many early Christian writers, Faustus held that God alone is spirit, so that the human soul is material, immortality is a gift, and Platonic dialogues or neo-Platonic textbooks of philosophy are the product of unhealthy curiosity.

The Church, Marriage, and the Family is a collection of studies mostly written from the point of view of Catholic teaching dealing primarily with marriage and the family, as the title indicates; but the book also ranges into such related topics as feminism, homosexuality, and even pornography. Prepared in connection with the 2004 International Year of the Family, it constituted the program for the 27th annual convention of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars (FCS). The contributions include those of some scholars with national and even international reputations such as the John Paul II Institute for Studies on Marriage and the Family’s theologian William E. May (with a contribution entitled “The Good of Spouses and Marriage As a Vocation to Holiness”); historian Allan Carlson of the Howard Center and the Family Research Council (“The Future of Marriage and the Family in the United States: Some History Lessons”); and social scientist Nicholas Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute (“The Global War against Little Girls”).

The essay is one of the great inventions of the human mind. It can talk about anything and everything. It can be lightsome or solemn. It can be witty or informative. Above all, it is short. It likes the passage in which Socrates told Callicles in the Gorgias to make his answers brief. Yet, we can find in essays things we need and want to know. Aquinas often managed to make the most profound arguments in two paragraphs. Samuel Johnson did the same.

Catholic teaching regarding human cloning is closely linked to the sanctity of life, the status of the embryo, and the meaning of sex and marriage. It addresses the tensions between the relief of suffering-which can be sought in good or bad ways-and respect for every human being. Anthony McCarthy sets out the scientific background to cloning, explains the Church's teaching, and examines secular arguments for and against human cloning.

The mid-1260s found St. Thomas Aquinas in Rome commenting on the epistles of the Apostle Paul. His overall schema of the Pauline corpus reveals a synoptic vision of the letters unified by the grace of Christ. This grace is present first and foremost in the Head of the Mystical Body, Christ Himself, and to this examination is Hebrews dedicated. It also informs the whole Mystical Body: in that Body itself, in its sacraments, and in its power of effecting ecclesial unity. This accounts for Romans, Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, and Thessalonians. Third, and most apposite here, this grace is found in the principal members of this Mystical Body, both ecclesiastics and lay. Regarding the first we have I and II Timothy and Titus; for the second we have Philemon.

A continuation of the eminent series of Aristotelian Commentaries of St. Thomas from Dumb Ox Books. 

The Posterior Analytics is the summit of Aristotle’s achievement in logic. It investigates the logical requirements for the most perfect of arguments, the demonstration, which proves a necessary conclusion from necessary premises. In his commentary on this treatise, Thomas Aquinas gives us perceptive interpretations of Aristotle’s very concise and difficult text, together with illuminating explanations of the structure of the work as a whole and of the order of its parts. This new translation, based on the Leonine Commission’s 1989 edition, seeks to render Aquinas’s text faithfully in contemporary English. It includes a careful translation of the Latin text of Aristotle on which the commentary was based, with footnotes on passages where it differs from the Greek.

In addition to the great theological works, such as the Summa Theologiae, for which he is justly acclaimed, St. Thomas Aquinas commented on much of the New Testament. He found in the Pauline Epistles a comprehensive exposition of the grace of Christ, from treating the Mystical Body itself to guidance for its principal members. As the summit of the Apostle’s doctrine, the Epistle to the Hebrews was a treatment on the Head of the Mystical Body, Christ inasmuch as He is the high priest of the New Testament.

In ordinary conversation, including among the “educated,” the word “sin” rarely gets mentioned except when one is trying to be coy or facetious. As Thomas Mann once said, “sin” is nowadays “an amusing word used only when one is trying to get a laugh.”.

Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) is most widely known in America for his provocative assertion that history is at its end, that is, its completion. In the “practical” sense, this means that the process of historical development can at last be seen (if from a distance) as the realization of the Marxist “universal and homogeneous state.” However, Kojève claimed as well that the history of philosophical thinking had also reached its goal in the transformation of philosophy, as the “love of wisdom” (or the unsatisfied quest for comprehensive knowledge), into that very Wisdom itself and had done so in the most essential respects in the philosophy of Hegel.

In this eloquent and thought-provoking “autohistory,” John Lukacs, distinguished historian and writer, describes the history of his own convictions and beliefs. The journey takes us from the Hungary of the 1930s and the ravaged Budapest of World War II to Lukacs’s discovery of the New World, his forays into the intellectual life of New York City, and finally his settling in Philadelphia.

One fateful day Edith Stein took from a friend’s bookshelf the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila. In it she found the simple truth about human existence. Shortly afterward, she became a Catholic, but her desire to become a Carmelite like Teresa was delayed for some time. Eventually she entered the convent in Cologne. Because of the Nazi persecution of Jews, converted or not, endangered others in her convent, she ask to be moved to a convent in the Netherlands. The German armies of occupation soon followed. It was from the Carmelite convent at Echt that she was taken in 1942, shipped to Auschwitz and executed.

Cooperation in evil or wrongdoing is one of the most perplexing areas in bioethics, both for those working in the field and those seeking their advice.  The papers collected in this book are written by philosophers, theologians and lawyers who have studied these problems and/or by those who have faced these problems in their own work in law, healthcare and research, and political campaigning. The volume includes both general treatments of the subject of cooperation and conscientious objection, and more specific treatments of topics such as voting to improve unjust laws, research on fetal/embryonic cells, and care of suicidal patients.  The book is offered as a guide to a field which is both of academic interest and of personal concern to those who face cooperation problems in their own lives and work.

A gathering of some of the best scholars in traditional Catholic thinking to discuss the culture of life: Luke Gormally, “Introduction”; Cardinal Thomas J Winning, “The Great Jubilee and the Culture of Life, the Culture of Death”; John Finnis, “Secularism, the Root of the Culture of Death”; Katerina Fedoryka Cuddeback, “The Global Lineaments of the Culture of Death”; Dermot Fenlon, “Dechristianizing England: Newman, Mill and the Stationary State”; Robert George, “The Political Theory of the Culture of Death”; Livio Melina, “Faith in the Incarnation, Death and Resurrection of Jesus and the Culture of Life”; Carlo Lorenzo Rossetti, “What Does It Mean for a Christian to Be ‘Against the world but for the World’?”; Bishop Donal Murray, “The Church as a Community of Hope in the Face of the Culture of Death”; Archbishop George Pell, “The Role of the Bishop in Promoting the Gospel of Life”; Richard Hogan, “The Role of the Priest in Promoting the Culture of Life”; Laura Garcia, “The Family and the Culture of Life”; Anthony Fisher, OP, “Some Problems of Conscience in Bio-Lawmaking”; Jorge Garcia, “The Forms and Limits of the Private Defence of Innocent Human.”

Focused on the idealist/realist dispute, contributors also discuss the relation of idealism to ethics, metaphysics, and epistemology. The volume also deals with the distinctions between ontological and conceptual forms of idealism, the place of idealism within the analytic tradition of philosophy, and the coherence of the idealist/realist distinction. Contributors include: Donald Davidson, Tom Sorrell, T. L. S. Sprigge, Phillip Ferreira, et al.

Focuses on Mary’s cooperation in the work of salvation, with particular attention to what Cardinal Newman has to say on her role of mediation in her Son’s redemptive sacrifice, using his writing and theological principles to help us see he best – the truly traditional way – of both understanding and using these titles. A reference point for all who will in the future write on the subject of Our Lady, especially on her cooperation in the work of redemption.

“Pieper [attempts to] show how death must be seen as an experience of the whole man and is properly to be understood as ‘punishment.’ When he views man’s pilgrim status on earth, Pieper is led to assert that death is an act of human freedom, consistent with Creation and redemption. . . . With his rare gift of high-level popularization, Pieper brings a critical mind and an in-depth acquaintance with the scholastic tradition to bear on contemporary thought and experience. . . .

For almost the entire twentieth century, the discipline of philosophy has been in a quandary in attempting to identify and define its proper role in the contemporary world. During the past twenty-five years, it has fallen on bad days in academe, often reduced to overly technical ramblings or post- modernist rants. Its demise has been predicted, if not reported, for years.

Eugenio Pacelli, Pius XII, was one of the few unalloyed heroes of World War II. At great personal risk, he saved some 800,000 Jews from extermination by the Nazis. Jewish refugees were given asylum in the Vatican, swelling the number of Swiss Guards. No Allied leader can match his glorious record. Golda Meir lauded Pius XII after the war, and the chief rabbi of Rome became a Roman Catholic, taking the name of Eugenio in tribute to Eugenio Pacelli.

“Kenny’s Descartes is a notably good and important book. He says it is ‘designed to help undergraduate and graduate students in understanding Descartes’ philosophy.’ The book concentrates on Descartes’ epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of mind; but the penultimate chapter, on Matter and Motion, contains a succinct account of Descartes’ mechanism and a critique of the a priori side of his natural philosophy.” – The Philosophical Quarterly

The first study based entirely on primary sources of the Dutch academic reactions to Descartes's philosophy. 

The first booklength study of the Cartesian theory of visual perception, which concludes that Descartes ultimately failed to provide a completely mechanistic theory of visual perception.

In his 54th year, Rene Descartes went to Stockholm at the invitation of Queen Christina. He caught pneumonia there and died on February 11, 1650. It is said that because Descartes refused to dance, Queen Christina charged him with writing the verses for a court ballet, La Naissance de la Paix. If Descartes did write the ballet, it would be the last work of his published during his lifetime. And because of its political content, it would be important as a guide for constructing Descartes’s political philosophy, which he certainly had but never published. And what a wonderful story! Alas, the evidence of Descartes’s authorship is virtually nonexistent. It reduces to the mere fact that he sent a copy of the published verses to a friend . . . in order, he said, to make the package heavier so it would not get lost. Almost certainly the ballet was written by Helie Poirier, a professional writer of French verse.

The reader who approaches Descartes's first work “Cartesianly,” that is, epistemologically, is faced with an insurmountable difficulty: the Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii is virtually incomprehensible in Cartesian terms. Indeed, Descartes himself appears to have disowned the work, after having put it aside, never to be completed. In this groundbreaking study, first published in 1975 to accompany an Index to the Regulae published in 1976 and a new French translation published in 1977, Jean-Luc Marion argues that the key to understanding the text – and the genesis of Cartesianism – is to read it as a dialogue with Aristotle. Descartes's Rules for the Direction of the Mind becomes intelligible when the precise correspondence between its themes and various Aristotelian texts concerning science and being is established.

Taken from the original manuscripts of Joachim’s lectures on the Regulae of Descartes, this volume was reconstructed after his death from notes taken by his pupils Errol Harris and John Austin. A critical examination of the main rules for the direction of the mind and the expositions by which Descartes explains them, the work contains commentary on five main topics: the power of knowing, the nature of the intellect, Descartes’s account of induction and deduction, Descartes’s method of analysis and synthesis, and the notice of vera mathesis. Joachim then goes on to criticize Descartes’s method and to expound his own doctrine of philosophical analysis. The last chapter offers his own concrete organic unities in opposition to the Cartesian complex natures. “The reader . . . will be challenged to turn to Descartes and accompany Joachim through the appropriate Rules. This little book should be read by all students of Descartes.” – Mind

A clear, straightforward summary of the history of formal logic from Aristotle to Gödel. Nidditch discusses the four main trends at the root of modern logic: Aristotle’s theory of the syllogism; the idea of a universal language; the idea of the parts of mathematics forming deductive systems; and the discoveries in mathematics in the early nineteenth century. He outlines the chief ideas and theories on mathematical logic, including Jevons, Peirce, Boole, Russell, and Whitehead. The text is easy to read and gives the beginning student a valuable perspective on mathematical logic.

Pope Benedict XVI once said of Dietrich von Hildebrand: “I am personally convinced that, when, at some time in the future, the intellectual history of the Catholic Church in the twentieth century is written, the name of Dietrich von Hildebrand will be most prominent among the figures of our time.” Besides distinguishing himself by his heroic Christian witness against Nazism, he also distinguished himself as one of the greatest and most original Catholic thinkers of the twentieth century. His profound philosophical work on love, man and woman, sexuality, the heart and the emotions, the foundations of the moral life, natural and Christian virtues, the place of beauty in the life of persons, person and community have inspired and influenced many. But these contributions are still not known as they deserve to be.

Includes review articles of books on Wittgenstein and independent discussions of special points of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, as well as Rhees’s personal reminiscences of his friend and teacher.

During his second stint as regent master of theology at the University of Paris in 1269–1272, Thomas Aquinas fulfilled the threefold magisterial task: legere, disputare, praedicare – to lecture, to dispute, to preach. On Virtues in General and On the Cardinal Virtues are two series of disputed questions which date from this period. In them Thomas, at the height of his powers and under the pressure of the raging dispute over Aristotle, discusses the central feature of his moral doctrine, virtue. During the same period he was composing his commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and completing the moral part of the Summa Theologiae.

This volume provides the most economical and textually accurate version of Calhoun’s Disquisition available today. As a treatise, the Disquisition is one of the greatest and most enduring works of American politial thought, and a text of seminal importance to all students of American politics, history, philosophy, and law. In the Disquisition, Calhoun believed he had laid a “solid foundation for political science” through revitalizing popular rule. To complete his theoretical and practical mission, Calhoun attempts to explain the best example of the diffusion of authority and cultivation of liberty: the American Constitution. The fundamental law of the American republic provided, after all, the “interior structure” for regulating the shape and scope of government. As a guide for the states and the general government, the Constitution was also part of the “organism” that limited the centralization of authority and allowed for genuine popular rule; and it was Calhoun’s exposition of the connection between the moral demands of a properly constituted concept of popular rule and the need for practical ordering principles that is articulated in this book.

There have been serious complaints since Vatican II that many Catholics do not know the basic teaching of the Church on the essentials of the faith, such as the Ten Commandments, the Seven Sacraments, the Sacrifice of the Mass and the twelve articles of the Creed. That was one of the main reasons for the production of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which was mandated by Blessed John Paul II and published in the 1990s.

Western culture, which influenced the whole world, came from Europe. But its roots are not there. They are in Athens and Jerusalem. European culture takes its bearing from references that are not in Europe: Europe is eccentric.

Western culture, which influenced the whole world, came from Europe. But its roots are not there. They are in Athens and Jerusalem. European culture takes its bearing from references that are not in Europe: Europe is eccentric.

Juxtaposing “ecumenism” and “jihad,” two words that many would consider strange and at odds with one another, Peter Kreeft argues that we need to change our current categories and alignments. We need to realize that we are at war and that the sides have changed radically. Documenting the spiritual and moral decay that has taken hold of modern society, Kreeft issues a wake-up call to all God-fearing Christians, Jews, and Muslims to unite together in a “religious war” against the common enemy of godless secular humanism, materialism, and immorality.

The 1870s is a key decade in the evolution of British thinking about the nature, purpose, and future of empire. Increasing economic competition began to disturb the complacent assumption about Britain's leadership in technology and in the world economy. The growth of other countries, most notably the United States and Germany, put in question Britain's survival as a great power. These changes set in motion a reappraisal of Britain's empire and its importance to the motherland, and a heated debated as to whether colonialism and imperialism were a burden rather than a benefit to Britain. The discussion of the 1870s set the agenda for the debates of the next half-century. This volume documents the writing central to the debate; it includes contributions b such leading British thinkers and statesmen as J. A. Froude, Robert Lowe, Edward Dicey, Frederic Seebohm, Lord Carnarvon, Gladstone, Julius Vogel, and Lord Blanchford.

One of the classics of modern spirituality, Encounters with Silence is one of Karl Rahner’s most lucid and powerful books. A book of meditations about man’s relation with God, it is not a work of dry theology, but rather a book of prayerful reflections on love, knowledge, and faith, obedience, everyday routines, life with our friends and neighbors, our work and vocation, and human goodness. The immense success of this moving work is a tribute to its practicality and the ability of the great theologian to speak simply and yet profoundly to ordinary men and women seeking an inspiring guide to the inner life, one that never forsakes the world of reality. The book is cast in the form of a dialogue with God that moves from humble but concerned inquiry to joyful contemplation.

The main thesis – that in poetry and in love man is “beside himself,” i.e., divinely inspired – is discussed with reference to modern poets, novelists, and modern psychology.

Convinced that epistemology and philosophy in general have gone astray in the twentieth century, Chatalian sought to restore the classical tradition in both, in part by marshalling a mass of data about philosophical skepticism, data which taken as a whole are not to be found in any other work.

“My best book in matter; in style, I may call it my only book.” – R. G. Collingwood

The essays in these two books were selected from Stanley Rosen’s career as a philosopher, scholar, and teacher over the last half of a century. They represent both the vast range of his learning in the most important philosophers of the tradition and the daring and penetration of his exploration of the fundamental philosophical questions. Yet the essays are written with an accessibility that is an expression of Rosen’s thesis that our ordinary experience and speech provides the only stable ground for understanding and evaluating extraordinary thought and experiences.

The essays in these two books were selected from Stanley Rosen’s career as a philosopher, scholar, and teacher over the last half of a century. They represent both the vast range of his learning in the most important philosophers of the tradition and the daring and penetration of his exploration of the fundamental philosophical questions. Yet the essays are written with an accessibility that is an expression of Rosen’s thesis that our ordinary experience and speech provides the only stable ground for understanding and evaluating extraordinary thought and experiences.

The most controversial foundational issue today in both legal philosophy and constitutional law is the relationship between objective moral norms and the positive law. Is it possible for the state to be morally “neutral” about such matters as marriage, the family, religion, religious liberty, and – as the Supreme Court once famously phrased it – “the meaning of life”? If such neutrality is possible, is it desirable?

“This book goes a considerable way towards filling a gap which Christian nurses may become aware of when studying ethics i.e. a clear exposition of a Christian perspective on ethical issues affecting nursing.” – Dorothy Whyte, Ethics and Medicine

Ethics Without God? brings the theological perspective of the Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions to bear on a variety of current political and theoretical questions. The main essays explore a place for the role of God in recent academic philosophy and political theory. The volume also explores the implications of two recent books, each a major scholarly venture in theologically realist ethical reflection: a defense of Platonism in John Rist’s Real Ethics and a natural law jurisprudence in Russell Hittinger’s The First Grace. With lengthy essays prompted by these books – four essays each, by prominent theologians, moral philosophers, and political scientists – and with extended responses from Rist and Hittinger, the result is a volume that engages ultimate questions across academic disciplines and intellectual traditions. Fulvio Di Blasi is author ofGod and the Natural Law, from St. Augustine’s Press..

In a society where euthanasia is strongly supported by many, and where supporters make appeals to Christian virtues such as mercy, compassion, and love, it is more important than ever for the Church's real teaching to be known. Is “mercy killing” ever right? This booklet explores the Catholic Church's teaching on why euthanasia is always wrong and explodes popular myths and misconceptions.

“This book is a wonderful antidote for anyone tempted to despair of the obfuscation, duplicity and just plain muddleheadedness of many of the participants in the public debate about euthanasia. . . . If you are interested in the debate over euthanasia (and none of us can afford not to be) beg, borrow or buy this book.” – Karin Clark, News Weekly

A series of important papers over the topics raised by Pope John Paul II in Fides et Ratio.

“New England comes to flower dying,” writes J. Bottum in The Fall and Other Poems. In this powerful new collection of poetry, he argues for the centrality of winter, spring, summer, and fall – mourning their loss of meaning, celebrating their symbolic power, and finding in their cycle a figure for God’s presence in the world.

The story of New York's feisty Conservative Party is really the saga of America's tumultuous political maturity. Born in response to the rise of Nelson Rockefeller's liberal Republicanism, the New York's Conservative Party has grown to become the nation's most successful third party. It has also turned out to be its political conscience.

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.

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.

“Cultural instructions.” Everyone who has handled a package of seedlings has encountered that enigmatic advisory. This much water and that much sun, certain tips about fertilizer, soil, and drainage. Planting one sort of flower nearby keeps the bugs away but proximity to another sort makes bad things happen. Young shoots might need stakes, and watch out for beetles, weeds, and unseasonable frosts. It’s a complicated business.

In 1756 a volume of Hue's essays entitled Five Dissertations was printed and ready for distribution. The essays included "The Natural History of Religion," "Of the Passions," "Of Tragedy," "Of Suicide," and "Of the Immortality of the Soul." The latter two essays made direct attacks on common religious doctrines by defending a person's moral right to commit suicide and by criticizing the idea of life after death. Early copies were passed around, and someone of influence threatened to prosecute Hume's publisher if the book was distributed as is. The printed copies of Five Dissertations were then physically altered with a new essay, "Of the Standard of Taste" inserted in place of the two removed essays. Hume also took this opportunity to alter two particularly offending paragraphs in the Natural History. The essays were then bound with the new title Four Dissertations and distributed in Jan. 1757.

Despite the renewed interest in the repeal of the Corn Laws (1846), the original source material surrounding the repeal legislation has remained difficult to find for researchers, especially those outside Britain. This volume offers easy access to key Parliamentary documents, pamphlets, and speeches of the Anti-Corn Law League and a number of contemporary documents on the anticipated effects of repeal by Torrens,McCulloch, Porter, Pennington, and others.

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.

Although Nathaniel Hawthorne, the renowned author of The Scarlet Letter, shunned organized religion, his stories were heavily weighted with sin and guilt. The fascinating history of generations of Hawthornes and their journey from Puritanism to Catholicism offers a penetrating glimpse into an extraordinary family. As one critic remarked, it is a story enveloped "with a veil woven of intermingled gloom and brightness."

“This is a brilliant book and an important contribution to Hegelian studies in English. It attempts to provide a comprehensive summary of the Hegelian system as a whole that is technically accurate and faithful to Hegel’s intention.... A brilliant explication of the character of Hegelian logic . . . required reading for all Hegel scholars.”  – Journal of the American Academy of Religion

French existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel (1883–1973) is one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. The central themes of his philosophy, which are developed with a blend of realism, concreteness, and common sense, continue to be relevant for the plight of humanity in the twentieth-first century. Marcel’s thought emphasizes: the attempt to safeguard the dignity and integrity of the human person by emphasizing the inadequacy of the materialistic life and the unavoidable human need for transcendence; the inability of philosophy to capture the profundity and depth of key human experiences, and so the need to find a deeper kind of reflection; the importance of the experience of inter-subjectivity, which Marcel believes is at the root of human fulfillment, and which also finds expression in the transcendent dimension of human experience, a dimension that cannot be denied without loss, and that often gives meaning to our most profound experiences. Marcel is also one of the few contemporary thinkers who manages to do justice to the subjectivity and individuality of the human person, while avoiding the relativism and skepticism that has tended to accompany these notions, and that has plagued contemporary philosophy after Heidegger. He makes an unwavering effort to challenge the moral relativism and spiritual nihilism of his French rival, Jean-Paul Sartre, and of other representative existentialist philosophers.

Gained Horizons takes up Pope Benedict XVI’s invitation, issued in his lecture at the University of Regensburg, to enter into the dialogue of cultures by “broadening our concept of reason” to “once more disclose its vast horizons.” Benedict placed in the foreground the notion of God as acting with reason, and said of “this great logos, this breadth of reason,” that “to rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.” The contributors to Gained Horizons conduct their inquiries down the paths of their disciplines of thought – philosophy, theology, political thought and literary criticism – examining the broader nature of reason and the forces that oppose it today in politics, culture, and education.

Widely recognized as a classic account of the circumstances, issues, and consequences of Galileo’s tragic confrontation with the theologians, Galileo, Science and the Church is now available in a sewn, clothbound edition for the first time in more than thirty years.

Explores how late nineteenth-century science affected the construction and understanding of gender categories. Presenting a range of views on issues raised by the women’s movement, the volume particularly focuses on the question of middleclass women’s education, occupations, and professions.

Introduction. Background Science: Genes. Genetic disorders, ‘Preventing’ genetic disorders. Germline gene therapy. Somatic gene therapy. Genetic enhancement. Delivering genes. Risks and benefits. Cloning. Cloning for birth. Cloning for research/transplantation. Stem cell research. Catholic Teaching: Respecting the embryo. Non-therapeutic interventions. Respect for liberty. Designer babies. In vitro fertilization [UK]. Cloning. Family relationships. Enhancement. Genetic enhancement. Germ-line therapy: Moral concerns. Somatic therapy: Moral concerns. Conclusion. Further Reading. Glossary.

“[This book] will be of immense interest to all ethicists, regardless of whether or not they are involved in human genetic intervention, or are Roman Catholic. . . .

The book revolves around the motivation and context of the American Founding and drives home its relevance to contemporary living. The Founders fought against tyranny that attempted to control their physical and spiritual lives. Unjust governance was deemed to be without authority. Aristocrats and commoners ultimately must answer to the Final Authority. These concepts are reflected in the Declaration of Independence: “all men are created equal and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights — that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Sandoz is not only a scholar, but a grandfather; his words will engender Liberty for future generations.

It seems that to have credibility in the post-Kantian and analytical world, contemporary natural-law theory wants to show its independence both from God and from human nature. But can there be a natural-law theory without the "natural" – not grounded on the facts of nature – and without "law" – not in need of a Legislator? In God and the Natural Law, Fulvio Di Blasi, starts with an original analysis of the current debate in ethics, jurisprudence, and politics in order to give the background for a sound understanding of the concept of natural law, which sets the stage for the heart of the book: a recovery of the authentic meaning of the two main concepts of classical natural law theory as synthesized by Thomas Aquinas – the will of God and the order of nature.

This collection of nine papers brings together Many of Geach’s thoughts on such wide topics as resurrection, deductive proof of the existence of God, God’s role in ethics, materialism, and the relation of time and prayer. The first three papers are concerned with the survival of death and what form such a survival might take. This includes Geach’s argument against materialism in “What Do We Think With?” Two further papers are concerned with arguments about existence, and the remaining papers concern natural theology.

The purpose of this book is to set out an argument for the existence of God, to show how criticism of this argument arising from modern and contemporary philosophy can be met, to explicate how language is used to talk about God, and to show that various existential and analytic attacks upon the meaningfulness of Christian faith are not cogent.

These stories represent an intermediate stage in the evolution of the Knight brothers in Ralph McInerny’s fiction. In The Noonday Devil, Phil, in his capacity as private detective, was fairly close to the action, but by no means the major character. Roger, his blimpsized brother, entered obliquely into the story but ended by starring in the finale.

In this work of model clarity, Yves Simon discusses the basic insights of the creators of modern thought: Descartes, Newton, Galileo, Comte, Mach, Meyerson, Bergson, Planck, and the issues at stake in the development of modern science and in the rejection of the Aristotelian physics.

This is a concise and easy-to-read account of the ethical philosophy of the Greeks, from the Sophists to the Stoics. With particular emphasis on Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the author skillfully traces the themes of law and nature, virtue, knowledge and happiness, and love and friendship, giving a comprehensive account of the meanings the Greeks attached to expressions such as “justice,” “voluntary action,” “virtue,” and “good.” “The story of Greek moral philosophy has been told many times, at varying lengths and different levels, but Mrs Huby has shown that there was room for yet another version.” – Philosophical Quarterly

The idea of unitary states has been greatly eroded by the rise of group consciousness in the twentieth century. Consequently, it has been argued that groups, as well as individuals, are subjects of “rights.” The articles in this book illustrated the different kinds of groups that have been accorded rights, the various threats to which the doctrine of group rights has been a response, and the reservations that its protagonists have elicited. Contributors include Michael Oakeshott, F. W. Maitland, G. D. C. Cole, Ernest Barker, F. A. Hayek, and contemporary political thinkers.

“The ultimate of human happiness is to be found in contemplation.” In offering this proposition of Thomas Aquinas to our thought, Josef Pieper uses traditional wisdom in order to throw light on present-day reality and present-day psychological problems. What, in fact, does one pursue in pursuing happiness? What, in the consensus of the wisdom of the early Greeks, of Plato and Aristotle, of the New Testament, of Augustine and Aquinas, is that condition of perfect bliss toward which all life and effort tend by nature? In this profound and illuminating inquiry, Pieper considers the nature of contemplation, and the meaning and goal of life.

This volume argues that there is a need for an alternative to prevailing understandings of the ethical requirements which healthcare allocation policy should meet. It offers a detailed critique both of liberal-welfarist and utilitarian approaches to healthcare allocation. The authors maintain that an ethically adequate approach to resource allocation in healthcare must be based on specific ('contentfull') understandings of the human person, of human needs, of human community and the common good, and of the nature of healthcare. Only if policy is informed by such understandings can it avoid serious injustice to patients and the abandonment of values essential to healthcare practice. The volume details the normative requirements allocation policy should meet, and highlights injustices which are encouraged by current tendencies in policy, reinforced by decisions in the courts.

“Heart Stoppers and Hail Marys makes you realize why college football is part of America's DNA. These games are the type that cause heartache, tears, and joy . . . all-in-one!” – Beano Cook, ESPN

This new edition of The Heart (out of print for nearly 30 years) is the flagship volume in a series of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s works to be published by St. Augustine’s Press in collaboration with the Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project. Founded in 2004, the Legacy Project exists in the first place to translate the many German writings of von Hildebrand into English.

Walsh’s study is based on a comparison of Hegel with Kant. Examining their methods, the scope of their ethical theories, and their views as to the content of ethics, he concludes that, while Hegel worked with a moral psychology very different from Kant’s, his ethical theory should not be dismissed for that reason. Walsh explains how Hegel sought in his own ethical theory to overcome the deficiencies of Kantian ethics, first in his early writings through the notion of a morality of love, and then in his mature system by means of the conception of “concrete ethics” (sittlichkeit).

Following the condemnation of 219 propositions in philosophy and theology by Étienne Tempier, bishop of Paris, in 1277, there was a revival of Augustinian thought and a move away from aspects of Aristotelianism that were – rightly or wrongly – condemned as incompatible with the Christian faith. Henry of Ghent was the most important representative of such Neo-Augustinian thought in the late thirteenth century. His Summa, which represents his ordinary lectures at the University of Paris, affords an excellent insight into the character of theology and philosophy in the years after the death of Aquinas. The first article of the Summa, translated here, is devoted to the possibility of human knowledge and provides a sophisticated attempt to combine an Aristotelian empiricism, Platonic exemplarism, and an Augustinian doctrine of divine illumination.

Contains a representative sample of writings by the Individualists and their critics, and also by some leading Victorian politicians who attempted to translate political theories into practical politics. The debates between these thinkers raise some fundamental issues about the nature of liberty and the role and limits of the State that remain with us still. Many present-day concerns, including the issues at stake between liberals and communitarians, are to be found prefigured in the pages of this collection.

Now available for the first time in a quality paperbound edition,Herodotean Inquiries should be regarded as our best and most complete document for pre-Socratic philosophy. Without being a work of philosophy, its plan and intention cannot be understood apart from philosophy. Here an attempt is made to uncover Herodotus’ plan and intention and to link them with their philosophic roots. This attempt requires that Herodotus’ way of telling a story be examined, for Herodotus primarily reveals himself in the stories themselves and not in the moral he sometimes draws from them. Once one sees the importance Herodotus himself places in his own Inquiries, his account of Egypt, which has long been a stumbling block on any interpretation, can be appreciated; and Egypt in turn supplies the basis for understanding Book II on Persia and IV on Scythia and Libya.

This is a personal and insightful portrait of Pope Pius XII, the memories of Sister M. Pascalina Lehnert, who served as his housekeeper for forty years. Her book, most of it written just a few months after the Pope’s death, shares insights into the person, the life, and the thinking of Pius XII, from his time as Nuncio in Munich until his death. Much of Sister’s motivation in writing this work was to correct the many distortions of fact and interpretation regarding this great pope.

Discusses analytically all the important thinkers and publicists who were active at the time of the great revolution. Zagorin gives particular emphasis to the period 1645–60, when Hobbes, the Leveller leaders, and Winstanley were active. The book also restores to attention other writers who, although influential at the time, have seen been neglected and relates the motives of these men to the underlying causes of the age.

Here is a broad and deep exploration of the many ways that today’s Americans are the most and least homeless of the people of the contemporary West. Contemporary Europeans may largely be in the thrall of a postpolitical, postreligious, and postfamilial fantasy, or so alienated that they no longer recognize their alienation. But we Americans are relatively at home with our homelessness, and so comparatively capable of experiencing ourselves not primarily as rootless individuals but as at home as family members, citizens, and creatures still capable of exercising truthfully our familial, political, and religious responsibilities. But the moral and religious practice of Americans is progressively more endangered by their individualistic theory, and even pious, evangelical Americans have trouble explaining themselves to themselves, much less to their fellow citizens. Our democratic concern with the genuine significance of particular individuals – and so with genuinely liberal education – is threatened by the self-denial that produces the theory that human morality can be captured by the theory of selfinterest rightly understood, and even more so by theories that deny the very existence of the self with interests.

This edition of Marcel’s inspiring Homo Viator has been updated to includle fifty pages of new materials available for the first time in English, making this the first English-language edition to conform to the standard French edition. Here, Christianity’s foremost existentialist of the twentieth century gives us a prodigious personal insight on ‘man on the way’ that will reinforce and commend our own pilgrimages in hope.

In a time when the relation of theology to science is in question, due in part to the unwitting fideism of religious fundamentalists and, conversely, as a result of the equally fundamentalist diatribes of the so-called “New Atheists,” How Science Enriches Theology provides a much-needed demonstration of the possibility and necessity for dialogue and integration between the two perspectives or fields of inquiry. 

How to Read Descartes's Meditations consists of seven independent studies of Descartes's Meditations. The discussion in each chapter is organized around one problem which either has never or very seldom been explored in Cartesian scholarship. For example, in the study of the Letter to the Sorbonne, Janowski centers his discussion around the decree of the Lateran Council, showing the unorthodox character of Descartes's conception of the soul. Further, in his chapter devoted to the notoriously difficult proof for the existence of God in the Third Meditation, Janowski shows that to understand properly Descartes's explicitly Scholastic proof is to read it as a reformulation of Duns Scotus's own proof. And in the final chapter on the Sixth Meditation, the author shows that Modern (Cartesian) Man – the man whose soul is no longer the Scholastic anima but blood that animates his bones, veins, and muscles - germinated in the writings of Francis Bacon, a predecessor never properly acknowledged by Descartes.

Containing the most important secondary literature, this work focuses on responses to Hume’s Essay on Miracles. The material included ranges from 1751 to 1883, and includes such authors as T. Rutherford, William Adams, John Leland, George Campbell, Rev. S. Vince, John Hollis, Rev. James Somerville, Dr. Wately, Rev. A. C. L. D’Arblay, Rev. Francis Kilvert, Malthus, Joseph Napier, Joseph Mazzinin Wheeler, Sir Edmund Beckett, James McCosh, and Huxley.

Focuses on general remarks on Hume’s life and philosophy, his Natural History of Religion, Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, and his work on the immortality of the soul and suicide. Contributors include: William Warburton, Henry O’Connor, Thomas Hayter, Joseph Priestley, Joseph Milner, William Craven, and George Giles.

Stresses the importance of Hume’s An Inquiry concerning Human Understanding not only as a philosophical text in its own right, but also as the starting point for developing an understanding of broader philosophical issues. Flew takes in such modern thinkers as Peirce, Wittgenstein, Frege, and Ryle. First published in 1961, this is a reprint of the corrected 1966 edition.

The essays in this volume honor the work of political scientist and Eric Voegelin scholar, Barry Cooper, by considering how political philosophy (a form of hunting) and empiricism get “woven” together (to borrow a metaphor from Plato). In other words, they consider how science needs to be conducted if it is to remain true to our commonsense experience of the world and to facilitate political judgment.

Mintz examines the contemporary reaction in England to the “Monster of Malmesbury,” with a particular focus on his materialism and moral philosophy. He argues that most scholars have ignored the contemporary reaction to Hobbes and thus have failed to realize the importance of the historical context against which the analysis of Hobbes’s ideas can be measured.

“[Husserl] better than anybody, compelled us to realize the painful dilemma of  knowledge: either consistent empiricism, with its relativistic, skeptical results (a standpoint which many regard discouraging, inadmissible, and in fact ruinous for culture) or transcendental dogmatism, which cannot really justify itself and remains in the end an arbitrary decision. I have to admit that although ultimate certitude is a goal that cannot be attained within the rationalist framework, our culture would be poor and miserable without people who keep trying to reach this goal, and it hardly could survive when left entirely in the hands of the skeptics.” – From the author’s conclusion.

This is the first book about surfing ever written by a philosopher. The author, a 70-year-old surfanatic, has been Professor of Philosophy at Boston College for over 40 years and has written 50 other books on philosophy, religion, and culture. But compared to this one, the others are nothing but straw..

(1) Science, (2) philosophy, and (3) poetry, myth, and mysticism are three modes of consciousness that are radically different today. We are usually very good at carefully distinguishing them so as not to corrupt them, reduce them, or to confuse them with each other. But almost no one tries to connect them in a synthesis in which each maintains its own identity yet each contributes to a greater whole that no one of them could attain alone – like a happy marriage. If we bring them together at all, it is only to focus in three different ways on a specific issue (like health care, or children’s literature, or gender roles).If Einstein Had Been a Surfer dares to do it for Everything, or rather for a “Theory of Everything” that only scientists today dare to talk about. But how can a “theory of the whole” be discovered by a brain that is less than a whole brain?

Karl Rahner, S.J. (1904–1984) ranks among the most influential theologians of our time. His contributions to the Second Vatican Council (1963–1965) shaped to a large degree the doctrinal formulations on the church, the sacraments, and the role of the laity. And his efforts at reconciling the scholastic method with an existential and anthropological understanding of humanity’s relationship with God earned him the reputation of having opened doors for ecumenical dialogue and to those outside the church.

This book is a coherent argument about the meaning of the term "postmodern" is it applies to philosophy at the opening of the twenty-first century. The author makes the case that the twentieth-century development of the doctrine of signs, commonly known as semiotics, represents the positive essential thrust giving birth to a postmodern era of philosophy, as clean a break with modern thought as modern thought was with Latin scholasticism in the time of Galileo, Poinsot, and Descartes – but with a difference. Contrary to what the author dismisses as false claims of postmodernity, the work shows that what is truly postmodern in philosophy both goes beyond modernity and recovers philosophy’s past in a renewed understanding of the human condition. The "problem of the external world," which modern philosophy began by creating, postmodern philosophy begins by revealing as a quasi-error. The book concludes with a philosophical dialogue revealing the inadequacy to the postmodern situation of a simple return to any past form of "realism."

In this stimulating and still-timely study, Josef Pieper takes up a theme of paramount importance to his thinking – that festivals belong by rights among the great topics of philosophical discussion. As he develops his theory of festivity, the modern age comes under close and painful scrutiny. It is obvious that we no longer know what festivity is, namely, the celebration of existence under various symbols.

As infertility rates among couples increase, so do the lengths to which people go to have children. In this booklet Agneta Sutton looks at the Church's teaching in the area of medically assisted conception, exploring the effects of modern treatments on the couple and the child.

Received by the British press with equal acclaim and indignation, this book sets out to define and defend high culture against the world of pop, corn, and popcorn. It shows just why culture matters in an age without faith, and gives an extended argument, drawing on philosophy, criticism, and anthro-pology, against the “post-modernist” world-view. Scruton offers a penetrating attack on deconstruction, on Foucault, on Nietzschean self-indulgence, and on the “culture of repudiation” which has infected the modern academy. But his book is not only negative. It is a celebration of the true heroes of modern culture and a call to the higher life.
 

John of St. Thomas (John Poinsot) lived from 1584 to 1644 and was one of the luminaries of the Second Scholasticism, which flourished on the Iberian Peninsula at a time when, on the continent, Thomism was virtually eclipsed. In his Cursus Philosophicus, John of St. Thomas provides a remarkable précis of the philosophy that is presupposed by theology. HisCursus Theologicusis a commentary on the Summa Theologiaein the manner of the Master’s exposition of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, that is, the pursuit of the main questions raised by the text rather than a textual commentary. Included in modern editions of theCursus Theologicusare a number of preliminary studies, among them a remarkable analysis of the Summa, part by part, treatise by treatise, in which the exquisite architecture of this masterpiece of Thomas Aquinas is magisterially displayed. This may be read as the explicatio textus, essential for reading the Cursus Theologicus. Readers of Jacques and Raissa Maritain are aware of the central role John of St. Thomas played in their grasp of Aquinas. Indeed, this was true of most of those involved in the Thomistic Revival inaugurated by Leo XIII. This translation of John of St. Thomas’s Introduction as it appears in the Solesmes edition makes available to a new generation of students of Thomas a precious handbook and guide to the Summa.

Anscombe guides us through the Tractatus and, thereby, Wittgenstein's early philosophy as a whole. She shows in particular how his arguments developed out of the discussions of Russell and Frege. This reprint is of the fourth, corrected edition.

Subjects from public philosophy and natural law to spiritual healing and alienation, and building a culture of life, from contributors Deal Hudson, Robert P. George, Rev. Stephen F. Brett, SSJ, Gerald L. Campbell, Patrick Fagan, John Haas, Bernard Dobranski, and others.

On March 25, 2009, Notre Dame was embroiled in the biggest controversy to hit the campus since the performance of The Vagina Monologues. A few days earlier, Notre Dame president John Jenkins, C.S.C., had announced that the university planned to give President Barack Obama an honorary doctorate. Within hours of the announcement a storm of protest erupted which showed no sign of dying down any time soon. Citing the statement of the U.S. Catholic Bishops in 2004, “The Catholic community and Catholic institutions should not honor those who act in defiance of our fundamental moral principles. They should not be given awards, honors or platforms which would suggest support for their actions,” the ordinary of the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend, John M. D’Arcy, announced that, for the first time in 25 years, he would not be attending graduation ceremonies at Notre Dame, because “President Obama has recently affirmed, and has now placed in public policy, his long stated unwillingness to hold human life as sacred.”

“It conveys predictably that Catholic bioethics has as much concern with philosophical issues about body and soul as it has to do with medical casuistry. Less predictably it offers some welcome indications that current Catholic discussion is biblically, as well as philosophically formed: a rather good section called ‘Anthropology’ contains two memorable essays, one by Professor John Haldane on the philosophy of the body and one by Gregory Glazov on biblical anthropology. There are discussions of sexual ethics (with especial reference to John-Paul II’s allocutions) as well as of the vocation of health care and the vocation to suffer. But there is attention to practical questions, too. Six contributions concern themselves with the relation of Catholic medical practice to the norms of contemporary secular society, and especially the problem of cooperation in evil, an understandable preoccupation.” – Oliver O’Donovan, New Blackfriars

Global temperatures have increased since 1880. New data show that solar impacts (radiation and magnetic flux) have increased by the same amount and follow the dips in temperature from 1938 to 1970. The report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that, based upon computer models, increased solar absorption by CO2 and other “greenhouse gases” (GHG) are overwhelmingly the basis for temperature increases.

D.H. Tracy’s debut volume, winner of The New Criterion Poetry Prize, marks a major event in contemporary poetry. Janet’s Cottage collects the richly textured, highly musical poems that have become Tracy’s hallmark in America’s finest literary journals, including Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Tracy brings buoyant wit and piercing intelligence to a range of poetic subjects, both intimate and domestic (“Janet’s Cottage”) and exotic and far-flung (“Impressions of the Tribeless”).

James V. Schall, S.J. is unquestionably one of the wisest Catholic political thinkers of our time. For more than forty years, Fr. Schall has been an unabashed practitioner of what he does not hesitate to call Roman Catholic political philosophy. A prolific writer and renowned teacher at Georgetown University, Fr. Schall has helped to educate two generations of Catholic thinkers. The present volume brings together seventeen essays by noted scholars in honor of Fr. Schall. It is a testimony to Fr. Schall’s erudition and influence that the authors of these essays did not have the privilege of directly studying under him. Rather, they are the indirect but grateful beneficiaries of “Another Sort of Learning,” one that Fr. Schall tirelessly defends and practices.

Jesus Christ is the most important person who ever set foot on planet earth because he was and is God Almighty in human flesh. He came from heaven into this world of suffering and death to save all mankind from sin and the sad consequences of sin – ignorance of God, suffering and death. He is the only one who could possibly reconcile man with God, since as God all his actions have infinite merit.

The point of the title: Imagine a storm has downed a telephone wire so that everyone who touches it is shocked in every cell of his body. Well, the storm of God’s crazy love has “downed” (incarnated) Jesus, and everyone who touches this “live wire” is shocked in every cell of his soul.

Seventeenth-century mathematician Craige attempted to determine the earliest possible date of the Apocalypse by using the most current mathematical and philosophical reasoning, but, more often than not, he was ridiculed as an eccentric and a crank.

Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity, published anonymously in 1695, entered a world upset by fierce theological conflict and immediately became a subject of controversy. At issue were the author’s intentions. John Edwards labeled it a Socinian work and charged that it was subversive not only of Christianity but of religion itself; others praised it as a sure preservative of both. Few understood Locke’s intentions.

This volume offers an English translation of John of St. Thomas’s Cursus theologicus I, question I, disputation 2. In this particular text, the Dominican master raises questions concerning the scientific status and nature of theology. At issue, here, are a number of factors: namely, Christianity’s continual coming to terms with the “Third Entry” of Aristotelian thought into Western Christian intellectual culture – specifically the Aristotelian notion of ‘science’ and sacra doctrina’s satisfaction of those requirements – the Thomistic-commentary tradition, and the larger backdrop of the Iberian Peninsula’s flourishing “Second Scholasticism.”

The late Pope John Paul II’s words and life have inspired millions of people. Here, in one handy and easy-to-use guide, are some of the most memorable and inspiring quotes encompassing all of John Paul’s long life, grouped around principal categories such as human love, creation, suffering, human life/Gospel of life, the person, time and eternity, faith and reason, love of country, and many more, plus a careful, detailed subject index and quotable-line index.

This volume consists of the addresses delivered to the 23rd Annual Convention of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars held in September 2000. Each chapter is from a major Catholic social thinker on various aspects of the reign of Pope John Paul II.

Articles include:

“John Paul II and the Family” by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese

“John Paul II and the Public Square” by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus

“John Paul II – Witness to Hope” by George Weigel

“John Paul II – Life Issues” by Janet E. Smith

“John Paul II and Ecumenism” by Bishop J. Basil Meeking

Jokes, Life after Death, and God has two main tasks: to try to understand exactly what a joke is, and to see whether there are any connections between jokes, on the one hand, and life after death and God, on the other hand. But it pursues other tasks as well, tasks of an ancillary sort.

This work studies hope as a phenomenon that both reveals and belongs to our status of being human. To understand that status, we must understand what it means to hope, which profoundly surpasses both psychological wish or desire and the “merely religious” belief in salvation. The author looks at hope in all its concrete manifestation: He examines works of art, some of which depict hope in unflattering terms as delusional, while others see it as dangerous and elusive; he examines the work of Kant, who saw hope as among the three interests of reason itself (the others being cognition and morality); he examines false hope as that which confuses intensity of desire for a specific boon as an actual cause of the boon; he points to the metaphors of hope (light and darkness as congruents of revealing/concealing; or the two forms of light itself: illumination, or hope for, versus radiation, or hope in (to trust).

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.

Kant’s pre-critical period is commonly considered to run from 1747 when he publishedOn the True Estimate of Living Forces to the appearance in 1770 of his inaugural dissertation, On the Form and Principles of the Sensible and the Intellectual Worlds. It is in this period that the origins of his later system of ethical thought can be found. Yet there is very little literature in English dealing with this early period, and many secondary sources deal only with his later major ethical works, the Critique of Practical Reason and Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.

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.

For five centuries, literary treasures had lain dormant in the archives of the Palazzo Tuttofare in Florence. Through a fortunate coincidence they have been recently discovered, and the present work is the result of this find. Contained herein, in fact, is the unedited correspondence – or presented as such – exchanged between Desiderius Erasmus, Thomas More, and Niccolò Machiavelli in 1517–1518. To these letters are added texts which serve, as it were, as annexes of the Prince and of the Utopia.

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.

Why have philosophers and linguists in the West always failed to agree about language? How can we use language to talk about language? Is the division between the disciplines of philosophy and linguistics artificial?

The central contention of the “New Atheism” of Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens is that there has for several centuries been a war between science and religion, that religion has been steadily losing that war, and that at this point in human history a completely secular scientific account of the world has been worked out in such thorough and convincing detail that there is no longer any reason why a rational and educated person should find the claims of any religion the least bit worthy of attention.

The Bible teaching on the end times have long been a source of sometimes morbid fascination for Christians. And now, at the turn of another millennium, we are seeing renewed bouts of predictions fever. Amid the frenzy, how can we take end-times teachings seriously and understand them clearly?

In September 1947, after reading The Screwtape Letters in Italian, Fr. Giovanni Calabria was moved to write the author, but he knew no English, so he addressed his letter in Latin. Therein began a correspondence that was to outlive Fr. Calabria himself (he died in December 1954 and was succeeded in the correspondence by Fr. Luigi Pedrollo).

Both an explanation and a spiritual guide to the season of Lent, from Ash Wednesday through Holy Week, including the Seven Last Words of Christ, Easter Vigil, and Easter Sunday.

To become lifelong learners, students need to be able to work and play in the world of ideas as easily as they do in the world of objects and feelings. But the culture of American education focuses on drills and projects with no clear connection to this goal.

At last, a user-friendly introduction to Church Latin using church and scriptural documents themselves, allowing the student to build up knowledge with meaningful texts. All paradigms, grammar, and vocabulary are included, and the texts are explained line by line. A 60-minute audio CD is included to aid in pronunciation. Let’s Read Latin is for students of all ages, and a boon to home-schoolers too.

The five pieces reprinted here are part of the vibrant polemical literature of liberalism in the last four decades of the nineteenth century. The dynamic, highly reflective nature of British liberalism in this period is already familiar through substantial texts such as Mill’s Subjection of Women (1969) and Spencer’s The Man Versus the State (1884). However, many works on a smaller scale were also important in defining the contours of liberal thought when the political fortunes of liberalism were at their height. This volume represents a sample of such writings. It will be of interest to scholars and advanced undergraduates studying liberalism and English political thought and history. Contributors include James Fitzjames Stephen, J. E. E. Dalberg-Acton, T. H. Green, Herbert Spencer, and others.

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. Was he aiming to preach Pyrrhonism, undermine the Church, and dissolve social bonds; or were his principles already informing the thought and practice of Victorian Britain?

“Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but, what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.” – St. Augustine,City of God

Philosophy in the twentieth century has been dominated by the urge for analysis, a methodology that is supposed to be comparable in clarity and correctness to scientific thought. In this brilliant and devastating attack on such exaggerated claims, Stanley Rosen demonstrates how analysis alone lacks the power to approach the deepest and most important philosophical questions. He thus provides us with a new and deeper understanding of the nature and limits of analytic thinking.

Included here are twenty essays from renowned scholars, honoring Stanley Rosen, whose work in ancient and modern philosophy is among the most influential today. Rosen is the author of fourteen books, including nine from St. Augustine’s Press.

George Green is a pop-culture Juvenal, whose satiric strain is both trenchant and elegiac. The poems in Lord Byron’s Foot move deftly between the back alleys of Trieste and the parking lots of his hometown in Pennsylvania, between Chichester Cathedral and the downtown streets and parks of Manhattan where he has lived for three decades. Green’s range and depth of knowledge in these technically accomplished poems might be intimidating if not for the disarming delight and passion with which he engages his material and the bizarrely raucous humor in which the poetry often revels.

In this profound and prescient novel, Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson gives us an imaginative foretelling of the end of the world. All stories, Aristotle said, have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but most ends are relative, the terminus of this chain of acts or that. But what of the end that terminates all human action as we know it, the end of time itself, the Second Coming? Since this novel appeared in 1906, many others have been devoted to nuclear disaster, destructive comets, and other hair-raising possibilities. What sets Benson’s story apart and makes it as readable today as when it was written is the Catholic and biblical context that provides the ultimate meaning.

That the United States is currently in the midst of a serious crisis, even an ideological civil war, which is part of the general and prolonged crisis of Western civilization is obvious to any thoughtful observer. One of the most perceptive observers of the development of this crisis was Gerhart Niemeyer. As a fugitive from Nazi Germany, a devout Christian, and a political theorist who had mastered the philosophical tradition and the Communist worldview, he was particularly well equipped to discern the ways in which the various modern ideologies insidiously erode the substance of truth and order in contemporary society and to seek remedies in the return to the ontological and spiritual roots of order in the Western tradition.

Essays by John Wisdom, Theodore Redpath, George Pitcher, Morris Lazerowitz, and others attempt to elucidate and critically assess Wittgenstein’s reflections on a number of important linguistic problems.

A positive engagement of the complementary dimensions of intellect that St. Thomas calls the intellectus (intuitive) and the ratio (rational), Making enlarges the concept of making as that capacity to our nature as persons whereby we exercise stewardship in the world, whether in the making of a garden or of a poem. Demanding and provocative, Making examines significant levels of “disorientation of intellect” in the modern world.

Includes the influential firstpublished critique of Malebranche’s Of the Search for the Truth by Simon Foucher, plus the translation of the long correspondence between Malebranche and Dortous de Mairan, which is the basis of Malebranche’s criticism of Spinoza.

The central theme of this important book is that we are paying the price of an arrogance that refuses to recognize mystery. The author invites the reader to enter into the argument that he holds with himself on a great number of problems. Written in the early 1950s, Marcel’s discussion of these topics are remarkably contemporary.

In 1972, Karol Wojtyla, then Cardinal Archbishop of Cracow but still teaching at the Catholic University of Lublin, began work on a book on the conception and methodology of ethics that he intended to write together with his former student Tadeusz Stycze?. Although the manuscript served as the basis for further discussion between Wojty?a and his colleagues, the work remained unfinished when, in 1978, Wojtyla was elected Bishop of Rome. In 1991, Fr Stycze? decided, with the approval of Pope John Paul II, to publish the manuscript in book form. Although an Italian translation appeared in 2002, the book is appearing now for the first time in English translation.

This volume consists of the addresses delivered to the 22nd Annual Convention of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars held in Chicago in September 1999. Each chapter includes a discussion of one of the major themes related to the contemporary question of marriage and the common good expounded by a competent senior scholar, followed by a response on the same subject by a younger scholar. The end result is an in-depth treatment of several of the major issues that concern marriage and the family today.

The first document enacted by the Second Vatican Council was its Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium, and the liturgical reform mandated by that document has probably had a greater impact on the average Catholic than any other action of the Council. That this liturgical reform has not in every respect been the unalloyed success hoped for by the Council Fathers, however, has only been grudgingly recognized. The liturgists and other Church officials responsible for implementing the reforms have had a vested interest in claiming success, even where there was evidence to the contrary. Nevertheless, the many and sometimes abrupt liturgical changes made were bound to affect long-established modes of worship and devotion – not to speak of the drastic move from Latin to the vernacular which came shortly after the Council, and which necessarily entailed radical change in the Church’s worship.

Charles Journet, the great Swiss theologian and cardinal of the Church, first wrote this work on the Mass over forty years ago; yet his ever-ancient-ever-new insights into the sacrificial nature of the Mass are most needed today, when this aspect of the sacrament is so often misunderstood or neglected.

This is a detailed exposition of Aristotelian mathematics and mathematical terminology. It contains clear translations of all the most important passages on mathematics in the writings of Aristotle, together with explanatory notes and commentary by Heath. Particularly interesting are the discussions of hypothesis and related terms, of Zeno’s paradox, and of the relation of mathematics to other sciences. The book includes a comprehensive index of the passages translated. “The commentary clears up many difficult points and provides a wealth of scholarly information on the history of mathematics and mathematical terminology.” – Martha Kneale, Mind

“The book opens up the whole of Aristotle to mathematicians who have no Greek, and enables them to form a judgement of Aristotle both as a mathematician, and as a mathematical philosopher.” – Philosophy

This is the first-ever French-English edition of La Rochefoucauld’s Réflexions, ou sentences et maximes morales, long known in English simply as the Maxims. The translation, the first to appear in forty years, is completely new and aims – unlike all previous versions – at being as literal as possible. This involves, among other things, rendering the same word – for example, amour-propre as “self-love” – as consistently throughout as good sense allows. This also means that the translators have made every effort to maintain La Rochefoucauld’s word order. This allows the reader the best vantage point for viewing La Rochefoucauld’s dramatic and paradoxical juxtapositions of words and ideas, juxtapositions of the utmost importance to understanding his thought. Despite the translation’s concern with literalness, careful attention has been paid to the nuances of the literary character of the Maxims. In addition, this work contains a series of detailed indices that will greatly aid the reader in finding just the right maxim, and an updated version, in English, of the original French index of the work.

This is a major contribution to political thought from conservatism’s greatest contemporary proponent. Originally published in Britain in 1980 and revised in 1984, this edition – the first ever in the United States – is a major rewriting of the work. Scruton’s idea of conservatism – what in America we tend to call “paleo-conservatism” – might well shock the sensibilities of those American conservatives” who view it as little more than the workings of the free market. Conservatism, says Scruton, is neither automatic hostility toward the state nor the desire to limit the state’s obligations toward the citizen.

Geach insists, in opposition to the behaviorism of the day, that there are episodic mental acts such as acts of judgment. How to characterize such mental acts remains as problematic as it was fifty years ago, and his book still has much to teach us. He begins with an attack on the abstractionist theory of concept-formation, then goes on to criticize the relational theory of judgment propounded by Bertrand Russell. Moving from criticism to construction, Geach first offers an improved version of Russell’s analysis, then moves on to offer an alternative of his own.

“Mr. Geach has written a splendid book, which deserves to be read by every serious student of the philosophy of mind.” – Alan Donagan, Philosophical Review

The two Disputations of the present volume open the second part of Francisco Suárez's famous Disputationes metaphysicae. Marking a turn from being in general, the subject matter of metaphysics and the concern of the first part, Disputation 28, presents various divisions of being in general, whose members equate with God and creatures. Disputation 29, in an expressly metaphysical way that reflects Avicenna, demonstrates the existence of God, the principal member. The demonstration hinges on the principle, "Everything which comes to be, comes to be by another" and scales the ladder of the common analogous concept of being from lesser and lower being to a First Being. In the course of his argument, Suárez rejects any "physical" demonstration, which would employ the Aristotelian principle, "Everything which is moved is moved by another," in order to pass from motion to a First Mover. Other topics that he treats include, in Disputation 28, the analogy of being between God and creatures, and in Disputation 29, the fact that there is only one God who is the creator of all else.

Rosen addresses a wide range of topics – from eros, poetry, and freedom to problems like negation and the epistemological status of sense perception. Though diverse in subject, Rosen’s essays share two unifying principles: there can be no legitimate separation of textual hermeneutics from philosophical analysis, and philosophical investigation must be oriented in terms of everyday language and experience, although it cannot simply remain within these confines. Ordinary experience provides a minimal criterion for the assessment of extraordinary discourses, Rosen argues, and without such a criterion we would have no basis for evaluating conflicting discourses: philosophy would give way to poetry.

At its beginning, every age has been “modern.” We speak of “pre-” and “post-” modern ages. We are likewise tempted to identify what is most up-to-date with what is true. But to be up-to-date is to be out-of-date. If we find what is really true in any age, it will be true in all ages. This proposition is central to this book. Moreover, what is true will appear in different guises, as will what is false. The “modern age” had often considered itself relativist, or secular, or skeptical. It strove to divest itself of its theological and metaphysical backgrounds, only to find that the central themes from this tradition recur again and again, most often under political or even scientific forms.

Modernity and What Has Been Lost comes out of a conference held at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków, Poland, on June 4–5, 2009 that sought to identify Leo Strauss’s intellectual background in re: the repudiation of a modern idea of homogenous, universal state (considered as an illegitimate synthesis of Jerusalem and Athens, i.e., the claims of Reason and Revelation). The world we live in, molded by science and historical relativism, may be described as hostile to human dignity or perfection, or abhorrent to those who love the search for wisdom. Straussian teaching consisted in the steady effort to reopen “the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns,” and refers to the esoteric way of writing practiced by the most profound thinkers of the past which has been apparently forgotten in the last three centuries. Strauss binds the concept of natural right with the question of maintenance of conditions for philosophizing, and it probably seems to him that such defense of philosophy is the highest task in our times.

Fr. Servais Pinckaers’s work is well on its way to being accepted as the work on Catholic moral thinking for the coming generation of laymen and students. Pinckaers sharply distinguishes this view of morality from modern “moralities of obligation,” which regard the moral life primarily as obedience to rules that limit human freedom and curb human desires. Pinckaers sees moralities of obligation as the logical outcome of a new understanding of human freedom. Instead of regarding freedom as the capacity to engage in excellent acts of virtue (freedom for excellence), the modern view understands freedom as the radical ability to do good or evil indifferently (freedom of indifference). Pinckaers argues convincingly that this view of freedom and the morality of obligation that flows from it have impoverished the Catholic understanding of the moral life. This work offers the reader a compelling itinerary of moral development, rooted in the theology of St. Paul and the morality of the Gospels.

“To explain irrational belief formation and irrational action . . . we may invoke the notions of self-deception and weakness of will. . . . When described in a certain way, these phenomena appear so par-adoxical that doubts have been raised as to their very possibility. David Pear’s Motivated Irrationality is a major step towards this goal. . . .

The iconic Endless Summer movie poster and artist John Van Hamersveld’s highly recognizable and sometimes psychedelic art began with the renowned color-saturated sunset and surfer poster for the 1966 movie. Inspired by a sunset photo of a beach in Orange County, it was destined to become an internationally recognized icon of Southern California’s surfing scene. His works include famous album covers for the Beatles and Rolling Stones, as well as concert posters for Jimi Hendrix and Cream.

The Mystery of Being contains the most systematic exposition of the philosophical thought of Gabriel Marcel, a convert to Catholicism and the most distinguished twentieth-century exponent of Christian existentialism. Its two volumes are the Gifford lectures which Marcel delivered in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1949 and 1950. Marcel’s work fundamentally challenges most of the major positions of the atheistic existentialists (Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus), especially their belief in an absurd, meaningless, godless universe. These volumes deal with almost all of the major themes of Marcel’s thought: the nature of philosophy, our broken world, man’s deep ontological need for being, our incarnate bodily existence, primary and secondary reflection, participation, being in situation, the identity of the human self, intersubjectivity, mystery and problem, faith, hope, and the reality of God, and immortality.

The Mystery of Being contains the most systematic exposition of the philosophical thought of Gabriel Marcel, a convert to Catholicism and the most distinguished twentieth-century exponent of Christian existentialism. Its two volumes are the Gifford lectures which Marcel delivered in Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1949 and 1950. Marcel’s work fundamentally challenges most of the major positions of the atheistic existentialists (Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus), especially their belief in an absurd, meaningless, godless universe. These volumes deal with almost all of the major themes of Marcel’s thought: the nature of philosophy, our broken world, man’s deep ontological need for being, our incarnate bodily existence, primary and secondary reflection, participation, being in situation, the identity of the human self, intersubjectivity, mystery and problem, faith, hope, and the reality of God, and immortality.

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.

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.”

This book discusses some of those ethical and political questions that puzzled several of the great minds of the twentieth century, such as Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Jacques Maritain, and John Finnis: the question of natural law and its relationship to a teaching of individual freedom and rights.

Early on Dietrich von Hildebrand distinguished himself as a thinker with an unusual understanding of human love. His books in the 1920s on man and woman broke new ground and stirred up fruitful controversy. Toward the end of his life he wrote a foundational book on love,The Nature of Love. He had in fact been preparing all his life to write this work; he was so drawn to the philosophical analysis of love that his students long ago had dubbed him doctor amoris, the doctor of love. This great work, the mature fruit of von Hildebrand’s genius, is now available for the first time in English, ably translated and introduced by the philosopher John F. Crosby, who had been a student of von Hildebrand.

Contains a variety of weighty topics concerning the Catholic university in America as treated by practitioners in the field of higher education, including the Revs. Ian Ker, Stephen M. Fields, S.J., C. John McCloskey, Peter Stravinskas, and Profs. William Marshner, Alan Kors, and John Murray. It features a foreword and a conclusion by Archbishop Elden Francis Curtiss of Omaha and Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J.

Since November’s election, conservative columnists have filled the op-ed pages with calls for a new conservative agenda. In The Next Conservatism, two of the conservative movement’s best-known thinkers, Paul M. Weyrich and William S. Lind, offer exactly that. More, they offer a new kind of conservative agenda, one that reaches far beyond politics to grapple with the sources of our nation’s cultural decay.

“The growing importance of reason in philosophy concerns Stanley Rosen in this essay. Rosen’s primary objective is to defend Plato and classical philosophy against Martin Heidegger’s radical existentialist criticism. . . . Many critics of Heidegger consider his dubious politics during the early days of Nazi rule irrelevant to the understanding of his work. Rosen argues, on the contrary, that Heidegger’s philosophy helps explain his initial enthusiasm for, and later submission to, the Nazi regime. The argument yields genuine insight into the connection between philosophical and political nihilism. Furthermore, exposing the evil consequences of nihilistic thought adds to his stout defense of the classical tradition.” – Elliot Feingold, Book Week

Ara Parseghian’s appearance in 1964 to head the Notre Dame football squad put an end to the previous decade of mediocre seasons and returned Notre Dame to the status of a national contender in collegiate football. Over the next eleven years he led the team to an overall record of 95-17-4, coached numerous All-Americans, such as John Huarte, Terry Hanratty, Joe Theismann, Tom Clements, Alan Page, Ross Browner, and Willie Fry, and steered himself, his staff, and his players through the unpredictable social changes of the late ’60s and early ’70s.

During more than a half century at the University of Notre Dame, Dr. Ralph McInerny’s legendary achievements include writing more than 50 non-fiction books in philosophy, medieval studies, and theology, as well as more than 90 novels, including the Father Dowling Murder Mystery series. This volume offers personal reflections on the man himself and what he meant to so many over his rich life of teaching, writing, and contributing to the life of the mind. Alasdair MacIntyre, Cardinal Francis George, Ralph’s brother D.Q. McInerny, Michael Novak, John Haldane, Joseph Bottum, Thomas De Konick, Jude P. Dougherty, Gerard V. Bradley, Fr. Marvin O’Connell, and many others (see below) aim to capture some of the ‘more’ that was McInerny, a more that cannot be captured by any curriculum vitae, even one as impressive as Ralph’s. The stories, anecdotes, and reflections in this volume give us various snapshots of the man that cannot be found in news accounts, press releases, or academic evaluations. A person as great as Ralph should not live merely in memory, so some record such as this volume written his friends, colleagues, and former students becomes appropriate.

Vittorio Hösle, touted as the German philosopher of the coming generation, exhibits his wide range of scholarship in this, his first book published in America.

[In the author’s words:] I have written almost sixty books, but this one is very different from all the others. For one thing, it took 20 years. I had to wait patiently for it to grow, like a tree. I was not in control of it; it kept changing, as I watched at it and let it do what it did, like an animal out of its cage.

In this work Ockham proposes a theory of simple predication, which he then uses inexplicating 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.

William of Ockham, the most prestigious philosopher of the fourteenth century, was a late Scholastic thinker who is regarded as the founder of Nominalism – the school of thought that denies that universals have any reality apart from the individual things signified by the universal or general term. Ockham’s Summa Logicae was intended as a basic text in philosophy, but its originality and scope encompass his whole system of philosophy. Yet the paucity of English translations and the structural complexity of the Latin have made the Summa, until now, almost completely inaccessible.

The Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suarez (1548–1617) was an eminent Catholic philosopher-theologian whose Disputationes Metaphysicae were first published in Spain in 1597 and came to be widely studied throughout Europe during the seventeenth century. The Disputationes Metaphysicae not only constituted the high point of sixteenth-century scholastic metaphysics but exercised a great influence on early modern philosophers such as Descartes, Malebranche, and Leibniz.

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?

To say that On Hunting is a book on fox hunting is like saying that Moby-Dick is a whaling yarn.

Modern people are as given to loving, fearing, fleeing, and pursuing other species as were their hunter-gatherer forebears. And in fox hunting, they join together with their most ancient friends among the animals, to pursue an ancient enemy. The feelings stirred by hunting are explored by Scruton, in a book that is both illuminating and deeply personal. Drawing on his own experiences of hunting and offering a delightful portrait of the people and animals who take part in it. Scruton introduces the reader to the mysteries of country life. His book is a plea for tolerance toward a sport in which the love of animals prevails over the pursuit of them, and in which Nature herself is the center of the drama.
 

Spanning over one hundred years of critical responses, the collection includesthree different sections: the initial reply from Smith’s friends David Hume, Edmund Burke, and William Robertson; the more considered opinions put forward by Smith’s contemporaries, such as Lord Kames, Thomas Reid, Adam Ferguson, and Dugald Stewart; and the later nineteenth-century, largely critical, views expressed by a new generation of philosophers.

It is debatable whether the disorder gripping the world at the beginning of the third millennium is greater than that depicted in On Order, the first book of the newly converted St. Augustine in 386.

Originally given in 1953 as the Adamson Lecture at Manchester University, On Philosophical Style has become the classic presentation of the thesis that profundity and clarity are not opposed philosophical virtues but rather required companions. Blanshard begins with the question: Why is it that philosophers of great perception sometimes confess a failure to comprehend certain of their colleagues? He ends with the assertion “that the problem of style is not a problem of words and sentences merely, but of being the right kind of mine.” In between, there is much offered, in fine style and short compass, for those who write and read philosophy. “In these few pages, Professor Blanshard has said the last word on style in philosophy. The reader is expertly conducted on a tour of inspection of all relevant areas, in and out of philosophy proper.” – Virgil C. Aldrich,The Journal of Philosophy

“Notable as probably the first book specifically on this subject by a distinguished philosopher.” –Bibliographie de la Philosophie

On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, the work that was to have been Nietzsche's second book until he canceled the contract and used portions in his Untimely Meditations, is a substantial call for radical educational reform presented in the form of a prolonged narrative dialogue. It is presented here in the first English translation ever from the standard critical edition (a little-known translation was made for the Complete Works of 1909, long out of print). Here Nietzsche, through the characters of this prolonged narrative dialogue, starts from a consideration of German educational institutions and rises to a consideration of what is needed for true, or classical, education. Though Nietzsche engages his contemporary world more in this work than in perhaps any other, this engagement is neither arbitrary nor limiting. Starting where one is and has grown up happens to be the necessary grounding of the organic unity that belongs to true culture:

On the God of the Christians tries to explain how Christians conceive of the God whom they worship. No proof for His existence is offered, but simply a description of the Christian image of God.

The first book to capture the impact Smith’s great work had on his contemporaries, this volume documents the immediate reaction in Britain, the entrance of the Wealth of Nations into politics, and the early reception on the Continent. Features letters written to Smith, early reviews, and extracts from books, and includes a wealth of previously inaccessible criticism and analysis, including contributions from David Hume, William Robertson, Adam Ferguson, Lord Lauderdale, Dugald Stewart, William Pitt, Henry Mackenzie, J. G. Schiller, and others.

A Brief History of Transplant Medicine: Problems of rejection. Breakthrough. Moral Issues in Organ Transplantation: Receiving an organ. Taking organs from dead bodies. Taking organs from living donors. Finding new sources of organs. Sharing out organs and sharing out costs. Thinking about the transplant movement as a whole. The Official Teaching of the Catholic Church: Before the era of organ transplantation. Pope Pius XII. Dignity of the Body. Pope John Paul II. Donations as free gift. Abuses. The Catechism of the Catholic Church. Recent teaching. Definition of death. Weighing up the Arguments: The principle of totality. Having the right attitudes. Brain death. Organ donation as Christian selfgiving. Tentative Conclusions and Unresolved Questions. Further Reading. Glossary.

Public debate about language in the English-speaking world during the nineteenth-century turned on the issue of how language began. The notion that language was a divine gift to humanity, not shared by lower creatures, was supported by the Biblical accounts of Adam naming the animals and of the Tower of Babel. It was still accepted by leading religious authorities. But this notion was seriously brought into question by the publication of Darwin’s theory of evolution. Those who rejected Darwinism ridiculed all attempts to conjure up language out of primitive calls, grunts, and ejaculations.. On the other side were those who held that it was possible to account for the birth of language rationally as a function of the development of human communicational needs in society.

One of Collingwood’s earliest attempts to define the aesthetic essence of art. His aim, he writes in the preface, is to state a general conception of art and develop its consequences. His conception is one already familiar through the writings of others – “that art is as bottom neither more nor less than imagination” – but from his observation he goes on to outline the various distinctions between subordinate conceptions of art, and to attempt to demonstrate their place in the general conception, and the place of both in life. He urges that the meaningfulness of art cannot be torn from the imaginative setting in which it is embedded, and that we must attempt to explain the process by which an artist reaches a particular point of view on reality.

Providing an essential overview of all the main tenets of ancient Greek philosophy in one compact but comprehensive source, Zeller concentrates on four main periods of thought from before Socrates until the end of the Roman Empire. Clearly written and constructed, it includes a full bibliography and is indexed by name. First published in 1883, this classic historical work stood as the leading authority on the subject for many years and remains a useful and valuable guide. This reprints the fully revised thirteenth edition of 1931.

Pope John Paul II is not only the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Church, but is Head of State for the Vatican. As such, he is among the most experienced diplomats on the international scene today, having given, during the 25-year span of his pontificate, over 2,000 speeches to representatives of the UN, to 172 ambassadors accredited to the Holy See, to non-governmental entities and to inter-governmental organizations.

The Party Line is a historical drama. Using real and fictional characters, it intermingles the story of Walter Duranty – the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning Moscow correspondent in the 1930s – with the more contemporary story of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated in 2002, on the eve of becoming prime minister.

Over the past few decades an increasing number of Christians have sought to celebrate the Last Supper, which was a Passover seder, as a way of better understanding Easter. Several Passover haggadahs aimed at Christians are presently on the market. But all have sought to celebrate the Passover outside of the context of the Old Testament itself. The seders resulting from using these haggadahs are rewrites of the authentic haggadahs and do not recapture either the usage that the Jewish people have experienced throughout the ages or the Last Supper that Jesus celebrated with his Disciples.. 

This, the sequel to the same author’s much-acclaimed Xanthippic Dialogues, is a multi-faceted commentary on the post-modern condition, which takes the form of a part-Hellenistic, part-Arabian fairy tale. Archeanassa of Colophon, subject of a poem attributed by Diogenes Laertius to Plato, has returned to her birthplace in search of the lost manuscripts of another ex-lover, the poet Antimachus. There she encounters Perictione, Plato’s niece, who lives alone in the ruined and brutalized city amid memories and dreams. Perictione tells the strange story of Merope of Sardis, the Nietzschean philosopher who both made and destroyed her life. Little by little Archeanassa comes to recognize that Perictione’s story is also her own story, and that the mystery of Colophon is the mystery of modernity itself. Through dialogues, stories, and fantasies, the narrative explores the aesthetic way of life, and the possibilities of meaning in an age of inverted commas.

“Jokes in a serious work are acceptable on the condition that they hide a profound sense beneath a trivial form. It is in this way that Montesquieu, in his novel, Persian Letters, has written one of the most philosophical books of the eighteenth century.” – Alexis de Tocqueville

Covers all aspects of Bradley’s work on logic and metaphysics, from his critique of relational thought to his doctrine of immediate experience. Contributors include Donald Baxter, James Bradley, Richard Ingardia, James Allard, Phillip Ferreira, and others.

Tom Pagna, former football star at Miami of Ohio and coach at Notre Dame, traces the narrative of his family around the central character of his mother Rose, and in so doing shows us a way to live that is more than a way to survive In it, Pagna tells the wonderful sotries of his family’s past.

Started before the Second Vatican Council opened and completed and published shortly before it closed, Peter and Caesar is more radical than the Council was or could be in two major and seemingly opposed directions. They seemed opposed from the perspective of the conventional opposition of liberal and conservative tendencies in the church.

Since antiquity the Phaedo has been considered the source of “the twin pillars of Platonism” – the theory of ideas and the immortality of the soul. Burger’s attempt to trace the underlying argument of the work as a whole leads to a radical rethinking of the status of those doctrines.

In the Era of Ara from 1964 through the 1974 season, a written chronicle of pre-game information, slogans, mottoes, and ideals emerged. The author was known only as the Phantom. The letters were one or two pages, written in staccato phrases, geared to thoughts that encompassed team goals and the philosophy to win.

“It is a great pity that we in the United States do not have our own Roger Scruton. As his new collection of essays reminds us, he is an accomplished philosopher who writes trenchantly about many important political, social and religious issues, who cares passionately about art and culture and who is also a brilliant conservative polemicist.” – Roger Kimball, New York Times Book Review
 

In The Philosopher’s Enigma, Richard Watson explains to believers in temperate and readable prose why he and many others are not believers. His discussion is based on strict Augustinianism, the foundation of seriously argued Christianity. God is hidden – that is, the concept of God is unintelligible – as discussed at length by Leszek Kolakowski in his Religion If There Is No God (St. Augustine’s Press) – in the sense that there are no known rational arguments for God’s existence. Moreover, Augustine argues that finite human beings cannot understand God’s infinite perfections.

A contemporary of David Hume, Reid was the chief figure in the group of philosophers constituting the Scottish school of common sense; he influenced Thomas Jefferson, and for the first dozen academic generations after the Revolutionary War, Reid’s philosophy served as a cornerstone of American education.

This work contains the essence of McTaggart’s idealistic philosophy. In his lucid and well-argued style, he tackles the fundamental aspects of metaphysical inquiry: the existence of God, belief and mysticism, time, eternity, causality, self, immortality, the nature of good, individual purpose, and value.

This new edition reintroduces on the central texts of late nineteenth-century political thought. In addition to the fourth and final edition of the Philosophical Theory of the State, the editors have added a comprehensive selection of Bosanquet’s most important essays on political theory and social policy. Also added is a detailed new introduction, a guide to further reading, and an index. Together they make clear the social and political background and implications of Bosanquet’s political philosophy and allow a more complete understanding of British idealism.

Philosophy means “the love of wisdom.” Kreeft uses the dialogues of Socrates to help the reader grow in that love. He says that no master of the art of philosophizing has ever been more simple, clear, and accessible to beginners as has Socrates. He focuses on Plato’s dialogues, the Apology of Socrates, as a lively example to imitate, and a model partner for the reader for dialogue. Kreeft calls it “the Magna Carta of philosophy,” a timeless classic that is “a portable classroom.”

Bradley’s rich and complex version of Absolute Idealism plays a key role not only in Idealist philosophy, politics, and ethics, but also in the development of modern logic, analytical philosophy, and pragmatism, as well as in the thinking of such figures as R. G. Collingwood and A. N. Whitehead. Topics covered include: the history of Idealism in the twentieth century; Bradley’s relation to figures such as Bernard Bosanquet, C. A. Campbell, Brand Blanshard, John Watson, John Dewey, and others; Bradley’s influence on twentieth-century empiricism, modern logic, and analytical philosophy; and his significance for contemporary debates in epistemology and ethics.

How can pictorial and narrative arts be usefully contrasted and compared? What in principal can be, or cannot be, communicated in such different media? Why does it seem that, at its best, artistic communication goes beyond the limitations of its own medium – seeming to think and to communicate the uncommunicable? Indeed, what kinds of thought are exercised in the pictorial and narrative arts?

Amazingly, no one ever seems to have looked at Jesus as a philosopher, or his teaching as philosophy. Yet no one in history has ever had a more radically new philosophy, or made more of a difference to philosophy, than Jesus. He divided all human history into two, into "B.C." and "A.D."; and the history of philosophy is crucial to human history, since philosophy is crucial to man; so how could He not also divide philosophy?

“This brief and lucid synopsis of Kant’s critical philosophy is written in the hope that it will make reading of Kant ‘a little easier’ – a hope which is not disappointed. The book expounds the principal theses of Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy and of his philosophy of beauty and purpose. Although Professor Kemp’s main aim is with the exposition of Kant’s meaning, he also clearly indicates on the one hand the extent of Kant’s originality, on the other the extent of his dependence on his philosophical predecessors and the science and morality of his day.” – Times Literary Supplement

This is an elementary but sophisticated account of the nature of philosophy and the relations between philosophy and other disciplines. Thought-provoking and eminently readable, it is one of the best introductions to philosophy ever written.

“I have frequently recommended the book to students taking a beginning philosophy course – and to those more advanced – and it is good to have it available again.” – Marcus Singer

The Physics is the fundamental text in Western philosophy, as Heidegger said. The text analyzes the most common features of the natural world, such as motion, place, and time, grounding its arguments in common experience and proceeding to a proof of the prime mover.

The first sustained modern investigation of Plato’s theology, which focuses on the Timaeus as Plato’s most complete effort to provide what (according to the Phaedo) Anaxagoras had failed to deliver: an explanation of the world through Reason.

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.

Platonic Productions presents Prof. Stanley Rosen’s Etienne Gilson Lectures, delivered at the Institut Catholique de Paris and now available in English for first time. His lectures bring Heidegger and Plato into a conversation around a basic philosophical question: Does the acquisition of truth resemble discovery or production?

Plato’s great attempt to define the nature of the sophist – the false image of the philosopher – has perplexed readers from classical times to the present. The dialogue has been central in the ongoing debate about the theory of forms, and it remains a crucial text for Plato scholars in both the analytical and the phenomenological traditions.

Rosen presents a rich and provocative analysis of the Statesman, one of Plato’s most challenging works, and contends that the main theme of the dialogue is defining the art of politics and the degree to which political experience is subject to the rule of sound judgment (phronésis) and to technical construction (techné).
 

This is the first full-length study of the Symposium to be published in English, and one of the first English works on Plato to take its bearings by the dramatic form of the Platonic dialogue, a thesis that was regarded as heterodox at the time but which today is widely accepted by scholars of the most diverse standpoint. Rosen was also one of the first to study in detail the philosophical significance of the phenomenon of concrete human sexuality, as it is presented by Plato in the diverse characters of the main speakers in the dialogue. His analysis of the theoretical significance of pederasty in the dialogue was highly controversial at the time, but is today accepted as central to Plato’s dramatic phenomenology of human existence.

Although Aristotle’s Poetics is the most frequently read of his works, philosophers and political theorists have, for the most part, left analysis of the text to literary critics and classicists. In this book Michael Davis argues convincingly that in addition to teaching us something about poetry, Poetics contains an understanding of the common structure of human action and human thought that connects it to Aristotle’s other writings on politics and morality. Davis demonstrates that the duality of Poetics reaches out to the philosopher, writer, and political theorist and shows the importance of the ideal in our imaginings of and goals for the future.

Few thinkers exerted a greater influence upon British thought and public policy between 1880 and 1914 than T. H. Green. Chapter headings include: Idealism and the Crisis of Evangelical Conscience; Metaphysical Foundations; the Principles of Political Obligation; From the Old Liberalism to the New; Private Property, Capitalism and State Intervention; the Life of Citizenship.

Here are seven readable biographical sketches of important people who influenced the times in which they lived by bringing their faith to bear on social issues. In writing about them the author incorporates biography, theology, and politics into a coherent whole portrait of the subjects. Present day journals like First Things, National Review, and Christianity Today began as an extension of the personalities of the people profiled in this book, whose interests guided faithful believers in the midst of changing and turbulent times.

To perceive Adam Smith’s place in the stream of Enlightenment philosophy is to gain an indispensable insight into our own condition as denizens of the liberal capitalist society. Before Smith was the author of An Inquiry into the Nature andCauses of the Wealth of Nations, he was the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments. The earlier work establishes Smith unmistakably as among those thinkers who aspired to describe the human condition in terms of motivation, of cause and effect, thus in terms of the principles of nature itself, of nature as mechanism, not nature as edifying teleology. Precisely because morality was not to be traced to any homiletic beyond nature or to a volition with nature, the thinkers of the modern order assumed responsibility for locating the ground of true moral virtue within mechanical nature alone. And just as the locating of mankind within a remorseless system of cause and effect could be the reduction of humanity to the status of robotic slavery, it became the self-assigned task of the thinkers in question to demonstrate that the natural order was one not of etiological bondage but of freedom in an elevated sense.

Thomas Malthus’s An Essay on the Principle of Population, published in 1798, was a work much more widely discussed than read. This selection represents a wide range of arguments that followed this contentious work – from those who vehemently attacked Malthusian notions to those who passionately defended them. Including articles by William Cobbett, William Hazlitt, and Thomas de Quincey, this volume brings together some of the most lively contributors to the debate.

A key introduction to Aristotle, emphasizing the importance of his biological thinking to the study of his thought. Written for students and the general reader with little prior knowledge of Aristotle, this edition features a new preface by Professor Grene.
 

“Thanks to the skill of Father Nicholas Gregoris, the publication in English translation of Giocanni Velocci’s important work, Prayer in Newman, will bring before a wider audience a significant study. In a few pages are drawn together from Newman’s sermons and meditations, both Anglican and Catholic, his reflections on the life of prayer. Moreover, this little work reveals Newman himself to be a masterful teacher of the art of prayer and – most important – to be essentially a man of prayer. In Father Velocci’s admirable phrase, ‘prayer became the preferred occupation of Newman.’

Prefaces to Unwritten Works is a collection of five essays, prefaces to books that Nietzsche never went on to write. Nietzsche himself put these prefaces together in the form of a small leather-bound, handwritten book, and gave that book to Cosima Wagner as a Christmas present in 1872. The dedicatory letter indicates that Nietzsche sent this little book to Cosima “in heartfelt reverence and as an answer to verbal and epistolary questions.” As such, this work is a window into Nietzsche’s relations with the Wagners at the height of their association, but it is also a continuation of Nietzsche’s radical confrontation with Greek antiquity that had begun with the then-recently published Birth of Tragedy. The Wagners read Nietzsche’s book of prefaces on the evening of New Year’s Day 1873, and Cosima records in her diary five days later that at night, “again” she reflected about the essence of art as a consequence of Nietzsche’s work. A month later, Cosima sent Nietzsche a letter encouraging him to write at least two of the books promised by his prefaces.

“The breath of Sutton’s analysis is vast. She draws on biological, medical, legal, and sociological information. The analysis also includes a review of Roman Catholic tradition concerning abortion and canonical penalties.” Kevin T. Fitzgerald, S.J., Theological Studies

Introduction. Two Case Studies. Techniques, Aims and Risks: Tests to promote the health of mother and baby. Non-invasive tests. Invasive tests. Tests to detect babies with disabilities and enable abortion. Invasive tests: mother only. Invasive tests: both mother and child. A specialist test with therapeutic and nontherapeutic potential. The Church’s Teaching. A Critical Examination of the Arguments in Favour of Selective Abortion: Parental pity. Burden to society and the family. Down’s Syndrome. Burdens for parents. Inconsistent treatment. Prenatal Diagnosis — Social and Psychological Aspects: Possible psychological consequences. Ethical and social implications of prenatal diagnosis. Eugenic mentality. Conclusion. Further Reading. Glossary.

“The practice of celibacy has come under attack at various times in the past thirty years. The debates have sometimes obscured the great value celibacy is to the individual practitioner and to the Church. Father Stravinskas, completing the work of Kenneth Howell, has compiled an excellent presentation on the gift of celibacy from many different theological disciplines. The work addresses various aspects of the practice, from the scriptural and dogmatic, to the historical, spiritual, and practical. The work defends the practice of celibacy and highlights the benefits and fruits of the practice in the life of the Church. Clergy and laity, married andsingle, will find reading this book worthwhile both theologically and spiritually.” – Anthony Cardinal Bevilacqua, Archbishop of Philadelphia.

This book is a “You Are There” approach to a portion of the Second World War, specifically the decisive years of 1942–1943. While referencing the events which are part of well-recorded history, Fr. Rutler gives a monthly commentary on them, drawn from letters, newspapers, and journals. This information might well have been lost, especially as most of these documents are rare and, having been printed on rationed paper, are deteriorating.

Written for his brother Benedictine monks around 1077, Anselm’s Proslogion is perhaps the best-known partially-read book of the Middle Ages. Many readers are familiar only with Anselm’s well-known argument for God’s existence in Chapters 2–4, which is often called the “ontological argument,” a misleading appellation coined centuries later by Immanuel Kant. In this argument Anselm begins with the thought of “something than which nothing greater is able to be thought,” and subsequently he leads the reader to see that such a reality necessarily exists and cannot be thought not to be. This argument – which is, to be sure, crucial to the work constitutes – but a small portion of the whole. 

The radical empiricism of William James was first formally presented in his seminal papers of 1904, “Does Consciousness Exist?” and “A World of Pure Experience.” In James’s view, pure experience was to serve as the source for psychology’s primary data, and radical empiricism was to launch an effective critique of experimentalism in psychology, a critique from which the problem of experimentalism within science could be addressed more broadly. This collection of papers presents James’s formal statements on radical empiricism and a representative sample of contemporary responses from psychologists and philosophers. With only a few exceptions, these responses indicate just how badly James was misread – psychologists ignoring the heart of James’s message and philosophers transforming James’s metaphysics into something quite unintelligible to the emerging generation of experimental psychologists.

Why should modern philosophers read the works of R. G. Collingwood? His ideas are often thought difficult to locate the main lines of development taken by twentieth- century philosophy. Some have read Collingwood as anticipating the later Wittgenstein; others have concentrated exclusively on the internal coherence of his thought. This work aims to introduce Collingwood to contemporary students of philosophy through direct engagement with his arguments. It is a conversation with Collingwood that takes as its subject matter the topics that interested him – philosophy and method, the historical imagination, art and expression, action, metaphysics and life – and which still preoccupy us today.

The nineteenth century saw the rejection of earlier classifications of racial diversity – as grounded in environment, education, and divine origins – for that of scientific racialism. Used to account for political problems within Europe, it justified imperialism and the imposition of rule over so-called primitive peoples. And yet such racial theory, which is nowadays seen as a characteristic development of the nineteenth century, had its foundations in the age of Enlightenment. This volume reproduces documents written between 1760 and 1850, surveying developments in Germany, France, and England, which reveal the rise of racial theory in all its complex diversity from Buffon and Blumenbach onwards.

This concise survey, accessible to students and general readers alike, traces the main elements of rationalism from the classical period to the present day. It contains a lucid account of the arguments of the great seventeenth-century rationalists, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, on scientific knowledge, mind and body, and freedom and necessity, and compares these with the empiricist counter-arguments of Locke and Hume, culminating in the great synthesis of Kant. Later sections discuss the ideas of Hegel, Russell, Wittgenstein, Ayer, Quine, Kripke, Chomsky, and Popper, along with rationalist and anti-rationalist elements in modern ethics.

The European Enlightenment is a period that contributed concepts that continue to be authoritative in philosophical conversation, and defined the criteria for what is important in the endeavors of human thought even in our own day. Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy presents the questions that are responsible for a departure from Scholasticism and the dawn of modern philosophy. To understand Continental Philosophy, and the history that precedes the analytical tradition, one cannot overlook Descartes’ precedent.

This is an indispensable document for anyone interested in the progress of Locke’s thinking about the laws of nature, morality, religion, and the limits of reason, and it is a landmark text in the history of biblical and historical theology. As fashions in philosophy turn from logical analysis to the interpretation of texts, the method that Locke employs in this work is both instructive and prescient. It was and remains a controversial text. This edition contains the two Vindications Locke wrote in response to the attacks of his critics.

A much-needed, incisive book that looks at elementary education from a philophic point of view, and recognizes that, in practice, education is replete with unexamined philosophical presuppositions. “. . . [accounts] for these philosophical presuppositions and [explains] the serious problems connected with them, together with a more reasonable and adequate understanding of what it is to educate the human being, from child to adult.” – James V. Schall, S.J., Georgetown University

In this, his first book, Collingwood attempts to rescue the philosophy of religion from the efforts of psychologists to explain the human mind by empirical techniques. Here he contends that the mind can be interpreted only by introspection, and not by the methods of natural science, and tries to establish the characteristics of religion that make it unamenable to scientific analysis. This he does by asserting that religion has its closest affinity with philosophy. He believes religion and philosophy both involve an aspiration to grasp the totality of experience, whereas scientific psychology can focus only on particular motives and acts.

Leszek Kolakowski discusses, in a highly original way, the arguments for and against the existence of God as they have been conducted through the ages. He examines the critiques of religious belief, from the Epicureans through Nietzsche to contemporary anthropological inquiry, the assumptions that underlie them, and the counter-arguments of such apologists as Descartes, Leibniz, and Pascal.

One of the gravest and most divisive issues confronting the Catholic Church in recent decades – a major factor in an ongoing institutionalized rupture between Rome and at least half a million traditionalist Catholics – is the question of whether Vatican II’s Declaration Dignitatis Humanae can be reconciled with traditional Church doctrine on religious liberty.

On the publication of the first volume of The Decline and Fall in 1776, there arose a controversy that rapidly became broader than a dispute about an individual writer. Gibbon replied to his critics in the rhetorically brilliant Vindication in 1779, and then withdrew from the fray. But the debate continued long after that. Gibbon’s adversaries were more substantial figures than he was willing to concede, and it is Gibbon’s account of the dispute that has for the most part conditioned the work of later commentators. This comprehensive selection from the writings of Gibbon’s adversaries allows the reader to judge the critics for themselves, and so enter into one of the most important literary disputes of the eighteenth century.

Hilaire Belloc was a man of many parts. Half English, half French, with an American wife, Belloc was a man who thought and traveled widely. He was the best essayist in the English language. His historical studies covered much of European history. He wrote a book on America, another on Paris, another on the Servile State. He sailed his boat The Nona around England and into the Island of Patmos. He walked to Rome and, with his four companions, through Sussex. While he did so, he thought, reflected, laughed, wondered. He was a born Catholic. He saw the depths of European civilization in its classical and Christian heritage, as well as in their being lost.

This work addresses the particular problems of economic and financial policy, and broke new ground when it was published.

The concept of nature has drawn criticism from many quarters, including the natural sciences, ethics, metaphysics and theology. In these essays, distinguished thomistic philosophers and theologians seek to recover nature for their disciplines. The volume contains extensive treatment of nature’s much disputed role in ethics, as well as its importance for the philosophy of science (including biology), philosophical anthropology, metaphysics, the philosophy of art, theology and other areas.

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.

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 name David Lindberg is certainly not new to the study of medieval science in general or of medieval optics in particular. . . . But without any doubt we have in hand now the man’s masterwork, a truly first-rate book, done with consummate skill, complete in every detail. . . .

The concern in this essay is for our age as one suffering an intellectual severance between our response to existential reality in which the beauty of a created particular thing is divorced from the Cause of that thing’s existence. The separation speaks of a deracination of homo viator – the person on his way. It is a consequence of what may be called the Modernist Ideology of the Self, by which the ideological reduction of reality usurps the mystery of soul into the concept of self.

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.

This detailed commentary on the action and argument of Sophocles’ Antigone is meant to be a reflection on and response to Hegel’s interpretation in the Phenomenology (VI.A.a-b). It thus moves within the principles Hegel discovers in the play but reinserts them into the play as they show themselves across the eccentricities of its plot. Wherever plot and principles do not match, there is a glimmer of the argument: Haemon speaks up for the city and Tiresias for the divine law but neither for Antigone. The guard who reports the burial and presents Antigone to Creon is as important as Antigone or Creon for understanding Antigone. The Chorus too in their inconsistent thoughtfulness have to be taken into account, and in particular how their understanding of the canniness of man reveals Antigone in their very failure to count her as a sign of man’s uncanniness: She who is below the horizon of their awareness is at the heart of their speech. Megareus, the older son of Creon, who sacrificed his life for the city, looms as large as Eurydice, whose suicide has nothing in common with Antigone’s. She is “all-mother”; Antigone is anti-generation.

This work addresses parents whose children believe themselves to be attracted sexually to persons of the same sex, and it involves many aspects of the complex issues surrounding homosexuality and the homosexual movement. Renowned scholars in scripture, dogmatic and moral theology, philosophy, canon and civil law, pastoral theology, and psychology and psychiatry address the many aspects of the subject with care, sensitivity, and clarity. Although this work is written by Catholics and aimed principally at a Catholic audience, much of what is written is applicable to parents of any religious persuasion.

Savrola is Winston Churchill’s first major literary effort and his only full-length work of fiction. Published in 1900, the novel’s subtitle, A Tale of the Revolution in Laurania, reflects the story’s modern political focus. Laurania, a long-established republic, is subjected to the autocratic rule of President Antonio Molara, a former general who has become known as the Dictator. Savrola, the man of the multitude, leads the democratic effort to restore the political liberties of the people. When the register of eligible electors is mutilated and the popular franchise compromised, a riot breaks out and the stage is set for a fight to the death between Molara and Savrola over who will rule Laurania. General Molara enlists the assistance of his beautiful wife, Lucille, to undermine Savrola’s influence with the people. But Lucille falls in love with Savrola, who is equally moved by the beauty and charm of the First Lady. As is indicated by the last chapter’s title, “Life’s Compensations,” all ends well in Laurania. After the violent troubles of the revolution, Molara is dead, Lucille and Savrola are united, and the Mediterranean republic returns to peace and prosperity.

In this amazing tour de monde medievale, Josef Pieper moves easily back and forth between the figures and the doctrines that made medieval philosophy unique in Western thought. After reflecting on the invidious implications of the phrase “Middle Ages,” he turns to the fascinating personality of Boethius whose Consolation of Philosophy is second only to the Bible in the number of manuscript copies. Neo-Platonic figures Dionysius and Eriugena are the occasion for a discussion of negative theology. The treatment of Anselm of Canterbury’s proof of God’s existence involves later voices, e.g., Kant. Pieper is enamored of the twelfth century, which is regularly eclipsed by accounts of the thirteenth. He does justice to both, and he gives a thorough and lively account of the struggle between Aristotelians and anti-Aristotelians, and the famous condemnations that put the effort of Saint Thomas Aquinas at risk.

A selection from the Proceedings of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars 1998 meeting on the subject of science’s intersection with faith. Contributors include Don De Marco, Charles J. Chaput, OFM CAP, Michael J. Behe, Stephen M. Barr, F. F. Centore, Germain Kopaczynski, OFM CONV., William Kilpatrick, Cynthia Toolin, and Archbishop George Pell.

One of the great mathematicians of his age, Poincaré here deals with a variety of issues of methodology: the selection of facts for study, the calculation of errors, and the use of statistical methods to compensate for errors. It also contains an attack on logicism in the foundations of mathematics, and an early account of the significance of methodology of the “new mechanics” of radioactive decay.

Peter Kreeft isn’t just another major Renaissance man. Author of dozens of works in theology, philosophy, and logic, including a unique series of books designed to introduce major philosophers using the Socratic Method, Kreeft also created Socratic Logic, from St. Augustine’s Press, a non-symbolic logic text that bills itself as using Socratic method, Platonic questions, and Aristotelian principles.

The conservative movement in America seems to have fallen on hard times. Even though conservative talk radio is at its height, and President Obama had to shift to the political center to win the 2008 election (only to disappoint months after his inauguration), conservative ideas garner little excitement or serious engagement among young people as they once did even just two decades ago. We have gone from Eric Voegelin “Don’t immanentize the eschaton” to Hannity’s “Sean, you’re a great American.” To be sure, many conservative and liberal young people have firm opinions on issues along the conservative-liberal fault line. They can opine, and fiercely so, by blog, twitter, or email on issues as wide ranging as same-sex marriage, Constitutional interpretation, abortion, free markets, and the role of religion in the public square. But very few, if any, of them seem to be aware of the intellectual patrimony from which their views sprang, and the arguments and reasons that animated the proponents of the ideas they claim to sincerely and deeply hold. “Hope” and “change,” though fine words in their own right, do not qualify as actual ideas that may guide presidents and prime ministers to excellence in statecraft.

Monsignor George Kelly, one of the great churchmen of our time, turns a keen but loving eye on the contemporary Church in this magnificent new book. On several notable occasions in the past, Monsignor Kelly has set before his readers the status quo of Roman Catholicism in the United States. But in this new book, he combines as never before an unclouded vision of unfortunate aspects of the contemporary Church with a robust optimism concerning what lies ahead.

In The Second Spring, the widely published author Joseph Bottum pens what may be the most original cultural undertaking in decades – an attempt to heal the damaged poetry of our time with an infusion of music, and an effort to strengthen the weak music of our age with an injection of poetry.

A semiotic animal is an animal that lives with the awareness that the action of signs is more fundamental to the constitution of human experience than are either objects or things.

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, the delicate symmetry of octet and sextet, the closing 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.

During the last months of the war, Josef Pieper saw the realization of a long-cherished plan to escape from the “lethal chaos” that was the Germany of that time, “plucked,” he writes, “as was Habakkuk, by the hair of his head . . . to be planted into a realm of the most peaceful seclusion, whose borders and exists were, of course, controlled by armed sentries.” There he made contact with a friend close-by, who possessed an amazing library, and Pieper hit upon the idea of reading the letters of Goethe from that library. Soon, however, he decided to read the entire Weimar edition of fifty volumes, which were brought to him in sequence, two or three at a time.

A single theme runs through the three essays on St. Thomas gather in this book. It is the theme of mystery or, more exactly, the response of the searching human intellect to the fact of mystery. Both the fact and the response are suggested in a short biography of St. Thomas that forms the first essay and are then sketched out in detail by a presentation of the “negative element” in his philosophy. The third essay shows that contemporary Existentialism is in basic agreement with the philosophia perennis on this fundamental element of philosophical thinking.

Beck discusses the works on religion of the six philosophers he considers most germane to contemporary issues: Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, James, and Santayana. “I have tried to choose men whose independence of mind was such that they often appeared to their contemporaries to be enemies of religion.” He first addresses the question, What is secular philosophy? And then explains the differences between the “families” of secular philosophers, before examining both their life and works.

By now, it should be obvious that the government-sponsored initiative to renew this country’s large cities which began in the 1930s and continued largely unabated in the East and Midwest through the 1960s and beyond has been a profound and devastating failure. More homes were destroyed than were ever built; once-great metropolises like Detroit lay in ruins; once-thriving neighborhoods were overwhelmed with drugs and crime; buildings that were built to last centuries fell to the wrecking ball mere decades after they were built; an entire generation of young people, both those who came to the cities and those who were driven from the cities into the suburbs, have grown up rootless, in a Hobbsian state in which man's life was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”

Socrates’ distinctive take on the gods is essential to understanding the meaning of Socrates’ life, death, and self-proclaimed divine mission. The Euthyphro shows how Socrates overturns Homeric religion in a way that subtly but definitively establishes the philosophical basis of Christian Revelation. Determined to allow the Apology of Socrates to speak for itself, Plato uses the persona of Euthyphro, who almost certainly did not exist, to represent Meletus and the problem of religious literalism in a godless age. Socrates’ reinterpretation of Homer is shown to overcome the pervasive Oedipal antagonisms of the Iliad and bequeath posterity a healthier view of the respective roles played by divine and human elements in the Cosmos.

This is the first full-length monograph to address the religious, ethical, and political dimensions of Plato’s Gorgias. The third longest and most serious dialogue has long been neglected because of the disconcerting moral and psychic demands it makes on its readers. Yet such a personal appropriation, equivalent to taking the uncanny daimon of Socrates back to one’s cave or body, is the key to understanding the philosopher’s paradoxical claim that nobody deliberately chooses to do evil. The dramatic action of the Gorgias shows how angry and insecure men can be led by demagogic rhetoric to perform violent and thoughtless deeds. The repeated performance of such actions has the effect of blinding their judgment to the extent that they truly know not what they do. Deliberately using the disastrous demagogue-driven Peloponnesian War as the backdrop for the Gorgias, Plato suggests that only Socrates practiced the true political art. This art seems to consist of undoing the insidious effects of rhetoric and making persons aware of the great potential for virtue and beauty present in their souls. Indeed, Socrates must be recognized as the discoverer of the human soul’s strange power to transcend mimetic coercion and physical necessity. Lacking this vital self-knowledge, men live like dead souls in Hades – ruled by slanderous stories and seductive shadows. The Gorgias gives us Plato’s fullest speculative re-construction of the worldview presupposed by Socrates’ ironic words and noble deeds.

Kreeft states that Socrates and Descartes are perhaps the two most important philosophers who have ever lived; they are the two who made the most difference to all philosophers after them. These two fathers of philosophy stand at the beginning of two basic philosopher options: the classical and the modern.

Kreeft focuses on seven features that unite these two major philosophers and distinguish them from all others. So this dialogue is one between the fundamental stages in the history of philosopher, the history of consciousness, and the history of Western culture.

Socrates Meets Descartes is a profound and witty reading that makes for an entertaining and insightful exploration of modern philosophy.

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.

Kreeft presents a Socratic examination of Hume’s Enquiry concerning Human Understanding in relation to the skepticism of Hume, posing questions that challenge the concepts that Hume proposed. Kreeft states that Hume is the “most formidable, serious, difficult-to-refute skeptic in the history of modern thought.”

Kreeft invites the reader to take part in the process of refuting Hume’s skeptical arguments, with the great insights of Socrates. Based on an imagination dialogue between Socrates and Hume that takes place in the afterlife, this profound and witty book makes an entertaining and informative exploration of modern philosophy.

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.

No philosopher since Augustine had more strings to his bow than Søren Kierkegaard. He wrote from many points of view, in many literary styles, about many topics (not all of them traditional philosophical topics). He should have written novels or plays, for he turned himself into a different character every time he wrote a new book. Is there a philosopher who has ever exceeded the quantity, quality and variety of his output in such a short time?

What if we could overhear a conversation in the afterlife between Socrates and Machiavelli, in which Machiavelli has to submit to an Oxford tutorial style examination of his book conducted by Socrates using his famous method of cross-examination? How might the conversation go?

This imaginative thought-experiment makes for both imaginative drama and a good lesson in logic, in moral and political philosophy, in “how to read a book,” and in the history of early modern thought.

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.

Kreeft takes the reader through the world of existentialist philosophy, posing questions that challenge the concepts that Sartre proposed. Based on an imagination dialogue between Socrates and Sartre that takes place in the afterlife, this profound and witty book makes an entertaining and informative exploration of modern philosophy.

“Peter Kreeft’s work is (1) unfailingly brilliant, (2) intellectually agile, (3) astonishingly perspicacious, (4) gloriously orthodox, (5) Chestertonian aphoristic.” – Thomas Howard, author of On Being Catholic

How is this history of philosophy different from all others?

1. It’s neither very long (like Copleston’s twelve-volume tome, which is a clear and helpful reference work but pretty dull reading) nor very short (like many skimpy one-volume summaries) but just long enough...

How is this history of philosophy different from all others?

1. It’s neither very long (like Copleston’s twelve-volume tome, which is a clear and helpful reference work but pretty dull reading) nor very short (like many skimpy one-volume summaries) but just long enough...

This is the third of a four-volume history of philosophy . . . on ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary philosophy. After the fourth volume is produced in paper, a one-volume clothbound edition, containing all four paperbound editions, will be published.

This new and revised edition of Peter Kreeft’s Socratic Logic is updated, adding new exercises and more complete examples, all with Kreeft’s characteristic clarity and wit. Since its introduction in the spring of 2004, Socratic Logic has proven to be a different type of logic text:
 

In a series of swift aperçus, Ralph McInerny puts before the reader a number of writers who in their different ways were influenced by their Catholic faith – or in the case of Willa Cather by a faith that was a near cousin to Catholicism. Many of these writers would have been surprised by, even unhappy with, the designation Catholic. The adjective may suggest that their fiction is apologetic, catechetical, pastoral. But the point of noticing the influence of faith on the outlook of these writers is not to separate them off from writers tout court, but to emphasize that they occupy in a way noteworthy in these last times the mainstream of Western literature. It would seem gratuitous to refer to Dante and Shakespeare and Dryden as Catholic authors. There is no need to point out that the faith was the very air they breathed. Nowadays it seems useful to make the point explicit.

For most of the twentieth century, discussions of McTaggart has revolved around his notorious denial of the reality of time. Some Dogmas of Religion is a popular exposition of his philosophy that provides an accessible route into the central elements of his fuller metaphysical system without becoming embroiled with this still contentious issue. First published in 1906, this, the second edition, appeared in 1930 and includes an introduction by C. D. Broad.

Poems written in what, in the debased coin of chronology, can be called the golden years are not like those written in youth. In earlier volumes, Ralph McInerny has proved that Belloc has no equal in light verse (An Abecedary) and that the Bard cannot be approximated (Shakespearian Variations). In his latest collection, The Soul of Wit, he tries his hand at a variety of forms, preferring the formal comfort of more demanding prosody.

“When statesmen forsake their own private conscience for the sake of their public duties, they lead their country by a short route to chaos.” – Thomas More, patron saint of politicians

Collected here are two hundred of the most memorable quotations from the pen of the incomparable St. Augustine. Each quotation appears in Latin and English in a new clear and rhetorically correct translation by Silvano Borruso. The topics are grouped in broad categories, such as order, God, human life, truth and wisdom, reward and punishment, the Church, scripture, and virtues, and the book contains a careful, detailed subject index and quotable-line index, which together will allow the reader to find any quote desired.

Influenced by the logical positivism of Moritz , and by Russell and Ramsey, Maslow’s interpretation is that Wittgenstein’s basic philosophy is a kind of Kantian phenomenology. In this, the first critical study of the Tractatus by an American philosopher, Maslow examines Wittgenstein’s solipsism and mysticism, neglected areas of his philosophy. “One of the earliest, most neglected, and most thorough works covering several important aspects of the Tractatus.” – Plochmann and Lawson,Terms in their Propositional Contexts in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus

Mill’s On Liberty (1859) denies people the right to sell themselves into slavery. Yet such, says Mill, is the condition of half the population, denied the most elementary legal and political rights.The Subjection of Women is a cry of protest against the injustices of existing British institutions and a plea for political, legal, and educational reforms. This volume contains a sample of the resulting literature. Of particular interest is the fact that, among the critics and reviewers who responded to The Subjection of Women, one may find a number of the most eminent of the women intellectuals of the period.

This is a book on the truth of things, including the truth found in thingsthat are wrong or even evil, the “alternative world.” But it is primarily a book about the many things that are, the infinity of particular things, as well as the highest things, both of which come to us primarily by gift and superabundance. The wonder, indeed the amazement, of our `1existence is not that there is so little, but so much. And it is intrinsic to this “so much” that, through our minds and our experience, we are open to these things that are not ourselves. The mind is capax omnium, capable of knowing all things.

Next to the Socratic Method, the best method for organizing a logical debate over a controversial philosophical or theological issue is the method St. Thomas Aquinas uses in the Summa Theologiae. As the charm of the Socratic dialogue is its dramatic length, its uncertainty, and the psychological dimension of a clash between live characters, so the charm of the Summa method is the opposite: its condensation and its impersonality, objectivity, simplicity, directness, and logical clarity. 

In the summer of 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley pulled himself away from a flurry of other projects to devote himself to translating Plato’s Symposium. Besides being one of the very great lyric poets of Romanticism, Shelley was an accomplished Hellenist, and had a natural sympathy for Plato’s way of seeing the world. The result of his labor was a translation of Plato’s principal work on love that is, in both clarity and felicity of expression, unmatched by any contemporary translation.

George Boole (1815–1864) is renowned as the first logician to apply algebraic methods to logic successfully. His Mathematical Analysis of Logic, first published in 1847, was the ground-breaking work that laid the foundations for what is known today as Boolean algebra and the propositional calculus. Written in response to the altercation between Sr. William Hamilton and Augustus de Morgan over the quantification of the predicate within syllogistic theory, its remarkable innovations led other logicians, among them William Stanley Jevons, John Venn, Charles Sanders Peirce, and Ernst Schröder, to refine and develop Boole’s system. In turn, their efforts were incorporated by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell into the monumental system of Principia Mathematica. In short, modern symbolic logic was founded in the pages of this book.

In this book, Rosen enters into a debate with Heidegger in order to provide a justification for metaphysics. Rosen presents a fresh interpretation of metaphysics that opposes the traditional doctrines attacked by Heidegger, on the one hand, and by contemporary philosophers influenced by Heidegger, on the other. He refutes Heidegger’s claim that metaphysics (or what Heidegger calls Platonism) is derived from the Aristotelian science of being as being. He argues indeed that metaphysics is simply the commonsensical reflection on the nature of ordinary experience and on the standards of living a better life.

Overshadowed by the violent reaction and rioting throughout the world, the September 12, 2006, lecture by Pope Benedict XVI at Regensburg, Germany, at the university where he once taught, is a multifaceted and brilliant speech that addresses the very nature of man’s understanding of a free conscience, his thirst for knowledge in both reason and revelation, his understanding of the limitations of the will, and the nature of his ability to understand his neighbor. It explains the Church’s historical claims that Christ himself is Logos (as the opening of John’s Gospel proclaims), a term meaning “word,” “logic,” and “speech.” One’s faith is to be grounded in a self-limiting God, Who does not capriciously change the rules on humans but Who reveals himself to our reason as well as our hearts. A God Who respects His own creation enough to give man free will, and thus a free conscience and an ability to fail; Who leads man, through both reason and revelation, to Himself, always in peace and never in violence; Who is a God of Life, not Death.

In this ground-breaking work, one of our foremost literary and cultural critics turns to the major figure in English literature, William Shakespeare, and proposes a dramatic new reading of nearly all his plays and poems. The key to A Theater of Envy is Girard’s novel reinterpretation of "mimesis." For Girard, people desire objects not for their intrinsic value, but because they are desired by someone else – we mime or imitate their desires. This envy – or "mimetic desire" – he sees as one of the foundations of the human condition.

Bringing such proocative and iconoclastic insights to bear on Shakespeare, Girard reveals the previously overlooked coherence of problem plays like Troilus and Cressida, and makes a convincing argument for elevating A Midsummer Night’s Dream from the status of a chaotic comedy to a masterpiece. The book abounds with novel and provocative interpretations: Shakespeare becomes "a prophet of modern advertising," and the threat of nuclear disaster is read in the light of Hamlet. Most intriguing of all, perhaps, is a brief, but brilliant aside in which an entirely new perspective is brought to the chapter on Joyce’s Ulysses in which Stephen Dedalus gives a lecture on Shakespeare. In Girard’s view only Joyce, perhaps the greatest of twentieth-century novelists, comes close to  understanding the greatest of Renaissance playwrights.

Throughout this impressively sustained reading of Shakespeare, Girard’s prose is sophisticated, but contemporary, and accessible to the general reader.

Dick Allen’s earlier collections have always included poems written in traditional form. But This Shadowy Place is his only book in which every poem is rhymed and metered. Allen’s “stand alone” new poems – narrative, meditative, lyric, sometimes excursions into Zen Buddhism – consistently merge traditional form with his hallmark cultural, political and religious themes. Even when seeming to write of himself, Allen is actually forever writing of the strange and unique transitions from the American Twentieth Century to the Twenty-first. Known as one of the best craftsmen and poetry performers in the country, Allen here gives us new poems that when read either silently or aloud constantly shift between the literal and the metaphorical. The paths in these new poems lead unexpectedly through both calming and foreboding shadows.

Alfred Edward Taylor (1869–1945), an international authority on Plato, here gives a useful introductory sketch of the life and thought of Hobbes. Constructed from the original texts of Hobbes and his contemporary biographers, as well as the later studies of Croom Robertson, Tönnies and Leslie Stephen, this accessible book also includes a brief account of Hobbes’s life.

“An admirable little book.” J. W. N. Watkins, in Hobbes’s System of Ideas.

Compiled here for the first time are some pithy and incisive sayings of philosopher/playwright Gabriel Marcel, which give rich insight into his spirituality. Written with particular attention to the nature of man’s mortality and his longing for life and sure knowledge of his death, this intimate self-portrait introduces a new Marcel to the reader of his intricate philosophy, perhaps best said by Anne Marcel...

This is a corrected second impression of the original bilingual critical edition of Poinsot’s work on signs completed in 1632 but not brought to independent publication until 1985 in the edition prepared by John Deely in collaboration with Ralph Austin Powell. Besides a new “Foreword” by the translator and an errata sheet, we have some new materials and a full table of correlations between the independent Tractatus edition and the original Cursus Philosophicus volumes from which that edition was established.

Josef Pieper’s Tradition: Concept and Claim analyzes tradition as an idea and as a living reality in the lives and languages of ordinary people. In the modern world of constant, unrelenting change, tradition, says Pieper, is that which must be preserved unchanged. Drawing on thinkers from Plato to Pascal, Pieper describes the key elements and figures in the act of tradition and what is distinctive about it.

For Pieper, the study of tradition is anything but antiquarian. He begins with a consideration of tradition in a changing world and is well aware of the need to confront the all-too-common perception that “tradition” is nowadays irrelevant. On the basis of his profound knowledge of the Western philosophical tradition from Plato and Aristotle through Augustine, Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, and Descartes, to modern Existentialism and Marxism, Pieper is able to highlight the values established – and challenged – down through the centuries...

This is a new English translation of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Treatise on Law, found in Questions 90–108 of the First Part of the Second Part of the Summa Theologiae. In fact, it is the only free-standing English translation of the entire Treatise, which includes both a general account of law (Questions 90–92) and also specific treatments of what St. Thomas identifies as the five kinds of law: the eternal law (Question 93), the natural law (Question 94), human law (Questions 95–97), the Old Law (Questions 98–105), and the New Law (Questions 106–108). All other extant editions of Treatise on Law stop with the human law, and are thus approximately one-third the size of the full Treatise.

Known in the English-speaking world mainly as the author of Main Currents of Marxism (1976), and in France as the author of the monumental study Chrétiens sans Eglise (1966), in his Two Eyes of Spinoza and Other Essays on Philosophers Leszek Kolakowski offers the English-speaking reader for the first time a significant selection of his early writings. Originally written in Polish, German, and French, this collection is his first book ever in English on seventeenth-century thought, which subject he has been writing on since “Individual and Infinity: Freedom and Antinomies of Freedom in the Philosophy of Spinoza” was published in 1957. Included in Two Eyes of Spinoza are essays on “The Philosophical Role of the Reformation” and the “Mystical Heresy,” on Uriel da Costa, Spinoza, Gassendi, and Pierre Bayle, but also on Freud, Marx, Avenarius, and Heidegger. Also included is Kolakowski’s well-known essay “The Priest and the Jester,” in which he considers the question of the theological heritage in contemporary thought.

This is one of the most stimulating of MacIntyre’s early writings, in which he distinguishes between the two uses of the Freudian term “unconscious”: the descriptive, where Freud is seen as offering a non-causal description of psychological phenomena; and the explanatory, where he seems to be making correlations between crucial childhood events and adult behavior. Noting that the concept of the unconscious is one that has strongly captured the public mind, MacIntyre seeks to discover what it means to assert the existence of the unconscious rather than assess the empirical grounds for such an assertion. His explanation takes in the nature of psychological theory and the problems raised by our ordinary pre-Freudian view of the mind. “[I]nteresting and very suggestive.” – Philosophical Review

As a leading member of the Vienna Circle, Carnap’s aim was to bring about a “unified science” by applying a method of logical analysis to the empirical data of all the sciences. This work endeavors to work out a way in which the observation statements required for verification are not private to the observer. The work shows the strong influence of Wittgenstein, Russell, and Frege. This, the first English translation, was revised by Carnap for this edition.

Before the Second Vatican Council, America’s Catholics operated largely as a coherent voting bloc, usually in connection with the Democratic Party. Their episcopal leaders generally spoke for Catholics in political matters; at least, where America’s bishops asserted themselves in public affairs there was little audible dissent from the faithful.

This is the most complete collection ever of original writings on religion and utilitarianism. Illustrating both the sympathetic and antagonistic relationships between the principle of utility and religious beliefs in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this is a work that no scholar of modern political thought should be without.

This book does some philosophy of religion. It takes as its point of departure what Aquinas calls divine truth (veritas divina), i.e., the collection of truths revealed to man by God. And it tries to make as clear as possible what Aquinas says about some of these revealed truths. Then it agrees or disagrees with what he says, as needed, for reasons of various sorts, whether philosophical, theological, scientific, historical, etc. – of whatever sort, just so long as they are relevant and cogent; to do these things as well as possible, if only in a small way – pro nostro modulo, as Aquinas puts it, in describing what he intends to do as the author of the Summa Contra Gentiles. Veritas Divina includes not only certain truths which are attainable by natural reason, like truths about certain aspects of the virtue of religion, of prayer, of pain and suffering, of friendship, of death; but also certain truths which are not attainable by natural reason, like truths about the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Eucharist, Purgatory, Heaven, Hell.

The story of Aristotelianism’s revival in recent academic moral philosophy is well known. By the middle of the twentieth century, ethical theory was dominated by versions of utilitarianism and Kantianism. Attention was paid to consequences, rules, intentions, obligations, rights, but the concerns central to an Aristotelian approach – virtue, happiness, contemplation, the summum bonum – remained little more than historical curiosities. Then, thanks to a number of perceptive authors influenced by Aristotle and Aquinas, the Aristotelian tradition regained, if not its former authoritative status, at least full respect as a viable alternative moral philosophy.

What is the future of the Catholic Church in America? This book provides a very informed answer to this question by collecting the various addresses delivered at the 25th annual convention of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars on the subject of the "new springtime" of the Catholic faith so tirelessly preached by Pope John Paul II. The conference was keynoted by Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J. – who at this point in his life is surely the dean of contemporary American Catholic theologians. His considered view of the Church's future ("the springtime") is ably supplemented by contributions from such veteran scholars as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese of Emory University and Robert P. George of Princeton, writing on the subject of women in the Church and religious liberty respectively. Younger figures such as Pia De Solenni of the Family Research Council and National Review's Kathryn Jean Lopez add different perspectives, on women, again, and on how the Church is impacted by the modern media. Among other speakers is the president of the Catholic University of America dealing with Catholic higher education as it is encountered today. The book thus features an up-to-date take on where the Catholic Church is headed today provided by very knowledgeable observers.

The authors give, in brief and simple form, a summary of the fundamental teachings of the Catholic Church, and of the fruits of the faith contained in the teachings.

In 1982, the author of this book issued a “promissory note” of just the sort that analytic philosophers of the twentieth century have led us to expect will come to nothing. This particular “note” occurred as a passing remark in the concluding chapter of his Introducing Semiotic (Indiana University Press, p. 187, text and note 4) to the effect that it would be possible to establish the classical distinction between sense and intellect by means of the analysis of the role of relations in the action of signs.

When the University of Notre Dame announced that President Barack Obama would speak at its 2009 Commencement and would receive an honorary doctor of laws degree, the reaction was more than anyone expected. Students, faculty, alumni, and friends of Notre Dame denounced the honoring of Obama, who is the most relentlessly pro-abortion public official in the world. Beyond abortion, Obama has taken steps to withdraw from health-care professionals the right of conscientious objection. Among them are thousands of Notre Dame alumni who will be forced to choose between continuing their profession and participating in activities they view as immoral, including the execution of the unborn. And they will be forced to that choice by the politician upon whom their alma mater confers its highest honors. (Mary Ann Glendon, distinguished Harvard law professor and former ambassador to the Vatican, felt obliged to turn down the prestigious Laetare Medal because of this.)

Where Did I Come From? Where Am I Going? How Do I Get There? is a complete course on Catholicism, featuring concise, reader-friendly, relevant prose. Straight answers are tailored for today’s generation. Topics addressed include: Can I know anything? Can I know what God is like? How am I really in the image and likeness of God? What about my conscience? Am I a gift to others? What about my freedom? Is any sexual activity OK before marriage? Do we have to keep Grandma on a feeding tube forever?

Pope John Paul II said, “All together we must build a new culture of life.” Is this possible in the United States? Over 40 million Americans have died by legalized abortion, euthanasia is an accepted practice now, and a pagan culture is hostile to morality and the family. 

Montgomerymakes a retrospective journey with Walker Percy, as Percy comes to an accommodation with the modern world in company with other companionable journeymen. Percy himself enjoyed a large company of pilgrims who prove amenable to his vision of the human condition – in Percy’s words, man is “in a predicament and on the move in a real world of real things, a world which is a sacrament and a mystery,” words celebratively spoken of as “the holiness of the ordinary,” as opposed to what he called the “losangelization” of the popular spirit, a spirit which increasingly takes refuge in enclaves of “selves” in the relapse into tribalism celebrated as our “New Age.”

The eleven essays in this collection are of two sorts – those which present new sources for the study of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and those which relate particular aspects of his work to that of other thinkers. Contributors include Georg Henrik von Wright, P. M. S. Hacker, Gordon Baker, and David Pears.

Anthony Kenny attempts to reconcile Wittgenstein’s apparently contradictory images of the nature of philosophy; McGuinness explores the similarities of method between philosophy as Wittgenstein practices it and psychoanalysis; J. C. Nyíri examines the influence on Wittgenstein of Spengler and the conservative fascination with mythology, symbolism, gesture, and ritual in Frazer’s Golden Bough, G. H. von Wright sums up Wittgenstein’s relation to his times and stresses his alienation from contemporary attitudes.

Studies the central topics of Wittgenstein’s philosophy prior to and within the first parts of the Tractatus, covering such subjects as objects, substance, states of affairs, elementary propositions, pictures, and thoughts. He concludes that analysis is reduction to what is basic not in experience but in reference, and argues that the Tractatus is concerned not with problems of knowledge but with problems of sense.

“[F]ull of clear and detailed expositions of obscure passages.” –Philosophical Books

“[L[ively and interesting throughout.” – Max

At a time when the cost of undergraduate education is soaring, it is worth attempting to gain some clarity about what liberal education is really for. Wonderlust attempts to sneak up on this question by both describing and exemplifying the centrality of wonder in thinking, and so in education. In the day-to-day life of an undergraduate college certain occasions call for reflection on the nature of a liberal-arts education – orientations and graduations, to be sure, but also panel discussions and talks of various sorts. Because events of this kind encourage thought about our lives as wholes, they are especially rich opportunities to make manifest the close connection between philosophy and everyday life. Most of the essays in this book were originally lectures for such occasions, composed by the author over a period of thirty years while teaching at several undergraduate institutions. The essays seek to avoid a double danger: they are both academic and practical. For learning is empty if it sheds no light on the pressing questions of contemporary life, and, at the same time, the day-to-day experience of ordinary life is rich in philosophical implications the importance of which reaches far beyond the day to day. The slightly off humor of a Gary Larson cartoon can teach us something about Aristotle’s Metaphysics. The enormous significance of the execution of Socrates by the city of Athens has echoes in the question of the imposition of speech codes in the contemporary university. This mixture of the day to day and the philosophical in the experience of wonder is the heart of liberal education. Wonderlust is meant to be of help in recognizing when it is present.

These twelve essays, as varied in style and scope as sculpture and astro-physics, all point out the truth of Yves Simon’s belief that "the mind has for its end the perfection of the mind itself."

In Plato’s dialogues, an idealized Socrates expounds the ideas for which Plato will, until the end of history, be famous. The world of Forms; the ideal Republic with its totalitarian masterplan; the tribute to Eros, god of love (or at least of homosexual love); the promise of the soul’s salvation – all this has come down to us in the distinctive tone of voice of Plato’s teacher. But how much of it did Socrates believe? Were Plato’s contemporaries really taken in? And what lay behind his philosophy, from which the real world of men and women was so rigorously excluded?

Relying exclusively on the texts, Professor Strauss analyzes and compares every seemingly casual utterance as well as the more formal statements to recover the true Socrates and to determine the character of political philosophy. He investigates its origins, possibilities, and intention against the nonphilosophical background from which it emerged.

Xenophon’s only true Socratic discourse, the Oeconomicus, is a dialogue between Socrates and a gentleman-farmer on the art of household management and the art of farming as practiced on a gentleman’s estate. It is generally acknowledged to be the oldest surviving work devoted to “economics,” and it constitutes the classic statement of “economic” thought in ancient Greece. The dialogue examines the roles of husband and wife in the household and the division of labor between them, and considers the duties of the farm steward and the housekeeper. It discusses the goals of efficient management and the means for attaining these goals.