Edward Pols long ago established himself as a philosopher of first rank. His carefully wrought studies have succeeded each other with regularity, The Recognition of Reason, Whitehead’s Metaphysics, Meditation on a Prisoner: Towards Understanding Action and Mind, and The Acts of Our Being: A Reflection on Agency and Responsibility. While clearly within a tradition that can be traced through modernity to the middle ages and to classical philosophy, Pols is no slave to the past. He recognizes the perennial character of (...) fundamental philosophical problems, their complexity, and the challenge they offer to the contemporary investigator. This perspicacity does not lead him to deny the worth of past efforts, but positions him to frame old problems in a new way. His insight is rooted in a profound grasp of the processes of human knowing and in a rare metaphysical sense. (shrink)

Walton takes his lead from the 1956 book by Columbia University’s C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite. The “new power elite,” Walton argues, has gravitated from business to the academy. What goes on there, he is convinced, affects every area of life, notably law, government, business, science, and, one might say, culture in general. Bewildered by the titanic changes occurring simultaneously in law, in the business world, in education, and in the family structure, Walton draws upon his considerable experience in (...) the academy to explore the ideological roots of these changes. Widely read, he is not only conversant with the major philosophical trends of the last half of the 20th century but draws upon his considerable experience in the academy as a dean of Duquesne University’s School of Business, as dean of Columbia University’s School of General Studies, and as president of The Catholic University of America. His discussion is wide ranging, but the focus is on the influence of Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault. Philosophy, he fears, has lost its character as a science based on accurate and precise descriptions of nature and human nature, one given to making distinctions and refining definitions and finally to offering explanations. It is not and should not be, he insists, politics, propaganda, or an evangelizing instrument for cultural change. (shrink)

Interpretations -- Interpreting the Middle Ages -- Interpreting modernity -- Interpreting Islam -- The prophetic voice of Von Hayek -- Benedict XVI -- The future Benedict XVI at Subiaco -- The jurisprudence of Benedict XVI -- Benedict on the nature of scientific enquiry -- Benedict on cultural identity -- Benedict XVI: an intellectual profile -- The philosophical enterprise -- One hundred years of philosophy -- The Catholic philosopher and the Catholic university in North America -- Aristotle in North America -- (...) Escaping the Cartesian trap: retrieving realism with Dreyfus, Taylor, and Yves Simon -- The present and the future -- The impact of Vatican II -- Socialist man -- The natural basis of the theological virtue of hope. (shrink)

Catholic University Of America, Philosophical Series, No 197, Abstract No. 47.

Catholic University Of America, Philosophical Series, No 197, Abstract No. 47.

The Logic of Religion presents an examination of the nature of religion from a philosophical perspective. In successive chapters classical, medieval, and modern authors are canvassed for their views.

Introduction -- The relevance of antiquity -- Wretched Aristotle -- Tom Wolfe's Epictetus -- Aristotle in North America -- Ora et labora : Benedict 's legacy -- Ancients and moderns on the subject of property -- The ontology of the artifact -- The role of religion in society -- The failure of positivism and the enduring legacy of Comte -- Judicial decision within the rule of law -- Modern interpretations of religion : the legacy of Hume and Kant -- Santayana (...) on the role of religion in society -- Indestructible Islam -- Science and the shaping of modernity : the reciprocal influence of science and culture -- The use and abuse of analogy and metaphor in scientific -- Contemporary moral issues -- Morality with and without God -- Responsibility : recognition and limits -- National identity -- The fragility of democracy -- The socialist mind -- The natural basis of the theological virtue of hope. (shrink)

Dougherty investigates the classical roots of Western culture and its religious sources in an effort to define its underlying intellectual and spiritual ...

The thesis to be entertained here can be set forth simply. To address the question, “Is there Christian philosophy?”, it is necessary, first, to acknowledge that there is no such thing as “Christiainity.” As a sociological category “Christianity” may have some content. People the world over profess to be Christian. But, when we look to the content of belief we find so little in common between professed Christians that the designation becomes almost meaningless. Professed Christians subscribe to a multiplicity of (...) faiths with varying degrees of sophistication; they adhere to tenets many of which are contradictory, many irrational, many unexamined. Orthodox Christianity is difficult to define even within the Roman Catholic community where a premium is placed on universality, unity, and apostolic mandate. That is my first observation: the lack of unity in Christianity that might give meaning to the term ‘Christian philosophy’. (shrink)

The subtitle of this work better indicates its content than the lead title itself. The author is more interested in those social and political structures which promote the common good than he is in the concept itself, although the text is not lacking in philosophical analysis. In a first chapter Cicero is allowed to frame the issues which Miller subsequently explores in the thought of Pitt, Abercromby, Pownall, Rutherforth, Brown, Priestley, Locke, Hume, Price, and in the thought of many others. (...) Liberty, law, security, patriotism, colonization, toleration, and the role of religion in promoting the common good are topics frequently addressed by the eighteenth century authors considered. The level of political discourse in eighteenth century Britain is shown to be serious, achieving a depth rivaling ancient Rome itself. (shrink)

This paper is a review of the book: John J. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2018). Mearsheimer observes that in the aftermath of the Cold War, the U.S. adopted a profoundly liberal foreign policy dedicated to turning as many countries as possible into liberal democracies. Mearsheimer concludes that the liberal hegemony of the past twenty-five years does not work: it has left a legacy of futile wars, failed diplomacy, and diminished (...) prestige for the United States. (shrink)

Real Ethics is a hard-hitting critique of contemporary moral theory from a realist point of view by John M. Rist, Professor Emeritus of philosophy and classics at the University of Toronto. His previous works include Plotinus: The Road to Reality, The Mind of Aristotle, and Augustine: Ancient Thought Baptized. Addressing what he calls the deception, equivocation, outright lying, and humbug that pass for contemporary moral discourse—humbug that extends from the universities into the marketplace, legislative assemblies, and juridical bodies—Rist offers a (...) defense of traditional Christian morality grounded in classical metaphysics. In rather forceful language he writes that there is “no need to look in the public lavatory for the lowest common denominator.” The habits of what was low life morality have become the norms of moral and political discourse. “In the wake of any clear sense of what ‘low life’ might suggest, intellectuals are becoming ‘downwardly mobile’ and while losing their grip on an overall concept of virtue, often see such a direction as in itself virtuous and high minded or sentimentally as solidarity with the marginalized or dispossessed.”. (shrink)

An ambitious work, based on a lifetime of reading and research, Science, Language and the Human Condition provides a strong defense of a realist theory of knowledge, opposing various forms of contemporary positivism and subjectivism. Kaplan identifies with the pragmatic tradition of Peirce, James, and Dewey, and acknowledges a particular intellectual debt to Morris Cohen. He views that tradition as fundamentally Aristotelian in orientation, as one that recognizes a plurality of methods of inquiry as well as the open-ended character of (...) science. Encyclopedic in his treatment of contemporary figures and movements, Kaplan calls for a synoptic view of the world and the recognition of objective moral values in that world. He affirms the possibility of knowledge both of nature and of the moral order. But as he puts it, knowledge is not a seamless whole. Knowledge is pragmatically constructed in terms of multiple purposes and levels of certainty. While our knowledge of the world is objective, no single way of knowing yields absolute certainty. Thus Kaplan is equally critical of those positivists who would adhere to the model of mathematical physics as the only source of reliable knowledge and of those system builders such as Hegel and Marx whose global vision is inevitably obscurantist. He is just as harsh in dealing with Derrida and with the deconstructionist movement. (shrink)

Perhaps one of the most neglected fields of philosophy is the philosophy of nature, “physics” in Aristotle’s sense. In The Science Before Science, Anthony Rizzi, a well-established theoretical physicist, examines the underlying assumptions of his discipline. Trained in physics without any background in philosophy, he found himself dissatisfied with contemporary accounts of science that reduced it to mere description and prediction. Reflecting on the structure of scientific explanation, he was quickly led to discussions of nature, causality, and truth. Taking Aristotle (...) and Aquinas as mentors in the difficult terrain of metaphysics and epistemology, he discovered with awe the larger philosophical landscape that placed his professional endeavor in a new perspective. From discussions of nature, knowledge, and God he moves to discussions of evolution, quantum mechanics, Bell’s theorem, and the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen paradox. Rizzi brings to every topic a freshness denied the seasoned philosopher. He remains a physicist, but one who has discovered the insights provided by a realistic metaphysics. The book may be understood as a brief for wisdom in the Thomistic sense. It ends with an examination of evidence for the existence of God and the moral import of a teleological conception of nature. (shrink)

This is the 1992 Marquette Aquinas lecture, the fifty-third in a distinguished series sponsored by the Wisconsin Alpha Chapter of Phi Sigma Tau. Though presented as a lecture, it is clearly the outline of a project that draws upon Ernan McMullin's considerable knowledge of the history of the philosophy of science and his realistic assessment of contemporary scientific inquiry. His is a large canvas and he admittedly paints with wide brush strokes. His major thesis, contra the positivism that lingers in (...) some quarters, is that nothing other than a realist philosophy of science will enable one to make sense of contemporary natural science. A very literal reading of Aristotle leads him to distance himself from the Stagirite in certain respects, but McMullin's is fundamentally an Aristotelian analysis of science. To have science is not merely to know what is given in experience and codified in laws of nature, but to have an explanation of the given in terms of its proper causes. It is not enough to know that copper is malleable, conducts electricity, takes on a certain hue under such and such circumstances, and has a melting point of 1083 degrees centigrade. To have scientific knowledge of a material which has been used since antiquity is to know why it has these properties. Such knowledge is not obtained by simple observation, but is gained by the inference which leads to the postulation of an unobserved structure. McMullin believes that empiricists in the tradition of Bacon, Hume, and Mill are hard pressed to explain the inferential leap from observed effect to inferred cause. In passing he notes, "Though Bacon is trying very hard to separate himself from the Aristotelian tradition, one can still catch echoes of [Aristotle's] epagoge". Reviewing Mill's logic of science, McMullin observes that at the same time Mill was writing that causal relations hold only between observables, "the growing reliance of natural scientists on non-inductive inference to and from observables was leading to dramatic advances in fields like optics, chemistry and theory of gases". (shrink)

William A. Wallace’s credentials as a Galileo scholar are well established. With seven books to his credit, notably Prelude to Galileo, Galileo and His Sources and Galileo’s Logic of Discovery and Proof, he is certainly one of the world’s foremost students of Galileo and his period. It is this period, that of late medieval and sixteenth-and seventeenth-century science, that most interests him. Hence the title of this work. Wallace’s extensive knowledge of what was being accomplished in philosophy and science at (...) university centers such as Salamanca, Coimbra, Oxford, Paris, Padova, and Rome are here brought to bear on the years spanning Soto and Galileo. Wallace moves from late scholasticism with its high confidence in intellect and is ability to achieve certitude in science, through the eclecticism spawned by the nominalism of Ockham and the Oxford “Calculators,” to the resurgence of confidence in intellect and scientific certitude claimed again in the Iberian Peninsula and in Italy, and that at the very time it was being questioned in England. (shrink)

Taking its title from its opposition to relativism, subjectivism, and skepticism, the book has two parts: the first seeks to determine the nature of morality, the second addresses the question, why should I be moral? "The core of morality," writes Rescher, "is benevolence". A moral code is a body of norms governing actions where the legitimate interests of others is concerned. It requires the moral agent to act in view of the genuine needs of others. These can be ascertained because (...) claims regarding moral matters are predominantly factual and objective in character. Reasons can be given for preferring one course of action over others. Thus morality is not just about actions, but about reasons and motivations as well. For an act to be moral, the moral agent must not only be aware of the needs of others but deliberate in his attempt to take them into consideration. Acting out of habit or from custom does not make an act moral. (shrink)