St. Augustine’s Press

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).
 

Stanley Rosen completed The Language of Love in the early 1970s, but the manuscript was put aside and only rediscovered in 2013, the year before his death. The Language of Love is an interpretation of the Phaedrus that was meant to follow and complete Rosen’s Symposium commentary. Only two articles have been previously published. Rosen’s frequent references to the central passages and second half of the Phaedrus were more important in pointing up the importance of his absent full interpretation of the dialogue.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A fascinating collection of studies, The Politics of Truth and Other Untimely Essays explores the historical and theoretical underpinnings of personal liberty and free government and provides a trenchant analysis of the crisis of civic consciousness endangering both of them today. The book addresses a range of issues in contemporary political philosophy and constitutional theory. These are seen to be all the more urgent in importance because of the surging aspirations for liberty in the wake of the collapses we see throughout the Middle East, Africa, and other areas, and the withdrawal from leadership in America and Europe.

The essays take up a variety of episodes from modern European and American history and explore, from various angles, three interrelated themes: 'public religion', and the role of Catholicism as a determined critic of modernity; religion as an impetus for innovation; and the tendency to reduce religion to culture.

This volume is in honor of, and in dialogue with Michael Davis’s work, which spans ancient philosophy and literature, continental philosophy and political philosophy. It includes original essays by numerous distinguished scholars in the fields of philosophy and political science. The remarkable range and caliber of the contributions attest to the breadth and depth of Davis’s influence.

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.

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.

As the title of this collection intimates, we begin with the very first interview in the Garden of Eden. We touch many places and issues. The interview always has somewhere even in its written form the touch of the human voice. The one who interviews invites us to speak, to tell us what we hold, why we hold it. Interviews are themselves part of that engagement in conversation that defines our kind in its search for a full knowledge of what is.

What is real and what is noble, as well as what is deranged and wrong, can often be stated briefly. Nietzsche was famous for his succinct aphorisms and epigrams. Aquinas in one of his responses could manage to state clearly what he held to be true. Ultimately, all of our thought needs to be so refined and concentrated that we can see the point. So these are “brief” essays and they are largely of a philosophical “hue.” They touch on things worth thinking about. Indeed, often they consider things we really need to think about if our lives are to make sense.

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.

This book tries to return to the first obligation of the Christian, that of worshipping God. It argues that contemporary Christian thought and practice, insofar as they are moved away from the center, usually in the name of social action or ecology, have changed the essential meaning and purpose of human life in the Christian tradition.

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.

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 book contains some sixteen chapters, each of which was given to an audience in some college or university setting. They consider what it is to teach, what to read, reading places, libraries, and class rooms. They look upon the duties of a teacher or professor as mostly a delight, because the truth should delight us.

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.

God and the City, based on the Aquinas Lecture delivered at the University of Dallas in 2022, aims to think about politics ontologically. In other words, it seeks to reflect on, not some political theory or other, nor on the legitimacy of political action or the distinctiveness of particular regimes, but on the nature of political order as such, and how this order implicates the fundamental questions of existence, those concerning man, being, and God.

To mark the 40th anniversary of John Paul II's encyclical on human work, published in 1981, a group of globally-recognized scholars presents the critical aspects of this document and its purpose. These original essays revisit John Paul II's approach to work in post-modern society and reconnect the dignity of the working person to a pursuit of holiness. These authors convey that only when it is truly Christian can humanism accomplish the lofty ideals it indicates.

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.

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.

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?

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.

“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
 

This work brings together Scruton's best essays from many sources, arranging them thematically. The book has four sections: Language and Art, Writers in Context, Architecture, and Culture and Anarchy. Though the essays are diverse, certain themes are developed in particular and then in general ways, and there are several important essays on writers and critics, that contribute to the reappraisal of their work – among them Dante, Andre Breton, Graham Greene, James Joyce, Sylvia Plath, Jacques Lacan, and Yukio Mishima.

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               

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.
 

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.
 

Seifert analyses five understandings of the term “Christian philosophy” which have never been expounded with such clarity and which he rejects for different, partly for opposite, reasons. He presents these senses of Christian philosophy, and his reasons for rejecting them, in clear, straight-forward language.

From Plato and Aristotle and on to the present, many great philosophers have dealt with the nature of love, which is the most central and profound act of the person. Particularly the philosophy of the twentieth century excelled in this regard, most often inspired by the methods of essential (eidetic) analysis developed and practiced by phenomenology, particularly by realist phenomenology as represented by Max Scheler, by Dietrich von Hildebrand, whose masterwork, The Nature of Love (St. Augustine’s Press, 2009), was recently published in an excellent English translation, and by Karol Wojtyìa in his profound analysis of love in Love and Responsibility and in Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body (1987 in Italian, 2006 in a recent translation).

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.

In addition to examples drawn from his naval background, Shenk references Homer, Shakespeare and Milton in demonstrating forestasis to be a widely useful parallel to traditional stasis. Shenk argues that both deserve to be widely taught as prime, complementary modern techniques of invention. 

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

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.

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.

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.. 

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

This book in three sections uses formally written poems—rhymed quatrains, sonnets, terza rima, blank verse—to link the relationship between the poet and his mother with the wider world derived from a rare definition of umbilical: “descended through the female line.”

In this book – an expanded version of his 2014 University of Dallas Aquinas Lecture – Father Robert Spitzer audaciously combines the intellectual legacies of two Catholic priests, St. Thomas Aquinas and Monsignor Georges Lemaître.

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. 

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.

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.