This book challenges the presupposition among professional philosophers that René Descartes is the Father of Modern Philosophy. It demonstrates by intensive textual analysis of Descartes's _Discourse_ and _Meditations_ that he inaugurated a new type of sophistry rather than a new way of conducting philosophy. Transcendental Sophistry is a synthesis of Renaissance humanism and Christian theology, especially the theology of creation. This striking re-evaluation of the achievement of Descartes opens the history of Western philosophy to radical reinterpretation.

This book, written by well-known students of Étienne Gilson and especially dedicated to Armand A. Maurer, helps inaugurate a long-overdue special series in philosophy honoring Gilson’s legendary scholarship. It presents wide-ranging expositions of Thomist realism in the tradition of Gilsonian humanism covering themes related to philosophy in general, historical method, aesthetics, metaphysics, epistemology, and politics.

This collective volume offers the radically new thesis that, generically-considered, philosophy and science are identical and great because they are mainly psychological forms of wondering about organizational formation and operation, forms of behavioral organizational and leadership psychology.

Through a radical reinterpretation of classical philosophy as an organizational psychology, The Moral Psychology of St. Thomas: An Introduction to Ragamuffin Ethics just as radically reinterprets St. Thomas Aquinas's moral teaching to be a behavioristic psychology chiefly designed to synthesize right reason and right pleasure to help a person excel at living life as a whole. In the process of so doing, this work demonstrates how the skill of prudential living is a necessary condition for becoming a grand master of (...) leadership in any and every profession. (shrink)

Mass ideology is unique to modern society and rooted in early modern philosophy. Traditionally, knowledge had been viewed as resting on metaphysics. Rejecting metaphysical truth evoked questions about the source of "truth." For nineteenth-century ideologists, "truth" comes either from dominating classes in a progressively determined history or from a post-Copernican freedom of the superior man to create it. In From Physics to Politics Robert C. Trundle, Jr. uncovers the relation of modern philosophy to political ideology. And in rooting truth in (...) human nature and Nature by modal reasoning, he resolves the problem of politicized truth. Our concepts of scientific truth, logic, and necessity are essentially connected. Modern philosophy restricts our understanding of necessity to the political dreams and aspirations of Enlightenment intellectuals. As a result, these intellectuals refuse to acknowledge as factual or meaningful whatever is not intelligible within the practical goals of establishing science as a system of enlightened ideas. The effect of these ideas is that in our time metaphysical principles, speculative truths, our understanding of science, and the nature of logic have become subordinated to ideological dreams. Fascism, Nazism, Marxism, political correctness, and moral relativism are not historical aberrations but essential consequences. Trundle's work is groundbreaking and daring, and his underlying thesis demonstrates why scientific truth demands a modal defense. The defense not only integrates science, ethics, and politics, but shows how "truth" may be ascribed to moral and scientific principles in contrast to a modern philosophical tradition. Since this tradition is the origin of political ideology, it has led to an irrational politicization of truth. The book will appeal particularly to those interested in political history, histories of philosophy, the philosophy of sciences, and ethics. Robert C. Trundle, Jr. is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences and the Scientific Research Society of Sigma Xi, an affiliate scholar for Idealistic Studies, and has served as reader for University de Laval's Laval Theologique et Philosphique. His publications include over three dozen articles in Res Publica, Logique et Analyse, Thought, Philosphy in Science, and New Horizons in the Philosophy of Science. His books include Beyond Absurdity (with R. Puligandla), Ancient Greek Philosophy, and Medieval Reasoning. He is currently professor in the department of social sciences and philosophy at Northern Kentucky University. (shrink)

Through extensive textual analysis, this book concludes that the prevailing opinion about the nature of modern and contemporary philosophy is wrong. It maintains that almost all modern and contemporary philosophy is deconstructed, secularized, Augustinian theology, not philosophy. The work is divided into eight chapters, a guest Foreword by Herbert I. London notes, bibliography, and an index. Chapter 1 considers Cartesian thought, Hobbes, and Newton. Chapter 2 examines Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Chapter 3 investigates Lessing and Rousseau. Chapters 4 and 5 (...) treat Kant. Chapters 6 and 7 deal with Hegel. Chapter 8 concludes that a lack of philosophical and historical experience coupled with a widespread inability to read philosophical texts according to the intention of the author causes us to mistake secularized theology for philosophy and is a main cause for the decline of contemporary universities. (shrink)

Dealing with the metaphysical foundations of modern physical science, this book demonstrates that not only is classical metaphysics not in conflict with the principles of modern experimental science but that, when analogously transferred to the different divisions of modern science, the metaphysical principle of unity makes intelligible all the laws of modern science. This revolutionary book provides the means for reestablishing the unity of science by interpreting the whole of modern experimental science from the perspective of an analogous transfer of (...) the metaphysical principle of unity rather than in terms of efficient causality. (shrink)

This book challenges the presupposition among professional philosophers that René Descartes is the Father of Modern Philosophy. It demonstrates by intensive textual analysis of Descartes's _Discourse_ and _Meditations_ that he inaugurated a new type of sophistry rather than a new way of conducting philosophy. Transcendental Sophistry is a synthesis of Renaissance humanism and Christian theology, especially the theology of creation. This striking re-evaluation of the achievement of Descartes opens the history of Western philosophy to radical reinterpretation.

V.1 Re-establishing an initial union among philosophy, science, and wisdom by recovering our understanding of philosophy, science : how philosophy, science, is, and always has been, chiefly a study of the one and the many -- v.2. An introduction to ragamuffin Thomism.

This book is a devastating and anomalous critique of analytic philosophy. It is devastating, because of its detailed exposition of analytic philosophy as a failed project. It is anomalous, because the exposition involves writing a detailed history of the analytic movement, an activity that analysts have scrupulously avoided. According to Capaldi, while analytic philosophy pretends to express a timeless explanation about everything, the movement has always sought to justify its existence by ultimate appeal to a progressive historical account, and rests (...) on the presumption that science is the final historical form of a timeless truth, thereby subsuming the history of…. (shrink)

In this paper, I take for granted that, today, something is radically wrong metaphysically with Western culture. I maintain that this problem arises, as Marcelsays, from the very depths of our being. This paper’s purpose is to consider some aspects of Marcel’s metaphysical teaching, especially about our need tostart philosophizing in the concrete, not the abstract, situation, to battle against the spirit of abstraction, and use these reflections for the practical purpose ofconsidering what sorts of steps we need to take (...) at the present moment to recover philosophical practice in the postmodern age. Within the context of this paper,I argue that Marcel is a realist humanist in the tradition of Plato and Aquinas whose battle against the spirit of abstraction is fundamentally a fight againstnominalism and sophistry. (shrink)

Modern philosophy assumes that tolerance is part of modernity's essence. It views tolerance as humanity's voice of conscience, nature's moral law, through which the human spirit progresses. As such, tolerance is one of modernity's sacred cows, a conflated metaphysical and moral principle. Weissberg is an arch-defender of thoughtful tolerance, who finds intolerable the growing misunderstanding of tolerance. His general thesis is that, properly understood, tolerance is a political, not an attitudinal concept. He contends that, increasingly during this century, Americans have (...) replaced political tolerance with a Utopian ideal of tolerance as the psychological acceptance of endless differences. He maintains that…. (shrink)

ExcerptThe new world “order” is a complicated, emerging political “disorder” with remote historical roots in Cartesian and Enlightenment sophistry and secularized Protestant theology, not in philosophy.1 Because the “new world order” is complicated, understanding justice in the new world order is also complicated. Proximately, the new world order began as the brainchild of some well-meaning Western intellectuals just after the end of World War II, as a means to heal what at least one leading Catholic philosopher of the time, Jacques (...) Maritain, described to be a “world broken by postwar distress and the weight of rival economic, political, and ideological…. (shrink)

Scholars who have engaged in the process often refer to editing as a “thankless job.” While preparing their encyclopedic A Companion to Philosophy in the Middle Ages, Jorge J. E. Gracia and Timothy B. Noone might well have had this sort of feeling. They might still have it. The task they undertook was much needed, enormous, one might reasonably call it “overly ambitious,” and virtually impossible to fulfill. Few contemporary editors could match their achievement. Yet they are likely to receive (...) criticism from their colleagues for what they have failed to do, not the praise they richly deserve for what they have done. (shrink)

David Haslett divides this work into a preface and six chapters, followed by references and an index. In order of appearance, the chapter titles are the following: "Is There a Correct Answer?"; "Libertarianism"; "Central-Planning Socialism"; "Worker Control"; "Capitalism without Poverty"; and "Capitalism with Equal Opportunity." Within each chapter there are a number of subdivisions in which specific topics are discussed in detail.

Roger Kimball is managing editor of The New Criterion, an art critic for the London Spectator, and a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal. Not the sort of credentials we might expect from a metaphysician. Still, since many modern and contemporary “metaphysicians” are actually poets masquerading as philosophers, Kimball’s metaphysical analysis is an instance of the delicious irony that philosophy’s history often plays on hubristic intellectuals: the nonprofessional must enter the scene to show the so-called experts how to do (...) their job. (shrink)

“With the boundless arrogance of a man of the Enlightenment, Kant claimed in the introduction to Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that ‘he who undertakes to judge or, more, to construct a system of metaphysics must satisfy the demands here made, either by applying my solution or by thoroughly refuting it and substituting another. To evade it is impossible’”. With this startling and accurate estimation of Kant’s hubris, Jorge Gracia begins his concluding chapter of Metaphysics and Its Task. Evidently, Gracia (...) does not concur with Kant’s glowing estimation of Kant’s achievements. Nor does Gracia agree with Kant that people who, despite their efforts, find the Prolegomena unclear, must “give up the investigation altogether, and apply themselves to other enterprises, for not everyone has the talent to engage in the analysis of abstract concepts”. (shrink)

The title of Walker's book gives a felicitous summary of the content of the work as a whole. The book is mainly an analysis of contemporary difficulties in constitutional theory which, the author contends, rest upon some foundation in morals; and it proposes a solution to these difficulties purported to be found in the thought of St. Augustine. The chapter titles are, "Normative Impasses in Contemporary Constitutional Theory," "The Moral Anatomy of Contemporary Constitutional Theory," "Augustine's Political Ethics: Skepticism, Ultimacy, and (...) the Good in Politics," "Augustinian Insight and Current Problems in Constitutional Thought," "Augustinian Tensions and the Constitution of Liberalism.". (shrink)

Vittorio Possenti’s Terza Navigatione is a much welcome and needed ado about nothing. More precisely, it is much ado about the nihilism that presently smothers Western philosophy and culture. Mired in nihilism, contemporary philosophy and culture attempt to comprehend themselves, and get lost in a nihilistic smog. Instead of recognizing the essentially nihilistic nature of the intellectual confusion that confronts them, contemporary philosophy and culture tend to see this nihilism in accidental forms, such as consumerism, moral relativism, technocracy. As Possenti (...) rightly understands, the West’s current intellectual malaise is much deeper, and more difficult to eradicate, than these accidental instantiations might suggest. Possenti’s central question is: How can philosophy and Western culture transcend nihilism when it surrounds us, like the air we breathe? (shrink)

In Charles Taylor: Meaning, Morals and Modernity, Nicholas H. Smith, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, presents a comprehensive introduction to the scholarship of Charles Taylor. The body of the text is divided into an introduction, eight chapters, and a conclusion. The introduction subdivides into “Style” and “Life in Politics.” The eight chapters are: “Linguistic Philosophy and Phenomenology” ; “Science Action and the Mind” ; “The Romantic Legacy” “The Self and the Good” ; “Interpretation and the Social (...) Sciences” ; “Individual and Community” ; “Politics and Social Criticism” ; “Modernity, Art and Religion”. Smith follows the conclusion with annotated endnotes, a rich bibliography, and an index. (shrink)

Anyone who enjoys reading Étienne Gilson’s stunning works on the relation between metaphysics and art, such as Painting and Reality and The Arts of the Beautiful, should love Piotr Jaroszynski’s Metaphysics and Art. In my opinion, the book is a masterpiece, deserving of the same level of lofty respect that scholars give to comparable works by Thomistic scholars such as Gilson and Jacques Maritain. Anyone seriously interested in the relationship of metaphysics and art, the way this relationship has developed historically (...) in the West, and the impact it has had historically on Western culture, especially today, should read this book. The author’s mastery of his subject matter and the lucidity of his presentation are hard to match. (shrink)

Neurotechnologies that promise to dampen (via pharmacologicals), disassociate (via electro-convulsive therapy), erase (via deep brain stimulation), and replace (via false memory creation) unsavory episodic memories are no longer the subject of science fiction. They have already arrived, and their funding suggests that they will not disappear anytime soon. In light of their emergence, this essay examines the neurostructure of normative morality to clarify that memory manipulation, which promises to take away that which is bad in human experience, also removes that (...) which enables human beings to be good. Concepts such as free will, moral responsibility, and the neurobiological basis of moral reasoning are explored to underscore the fundamental hubris inherent to the memory manipulation enterprise. (shrink)

Neurotechnologies that promise to dampen (via pharmacologicals), disassociate (via electro-convulsive therapy), erase (via deep brain stimulation), and replace (via false memory creation) unsavory episodic memories are no longer the subject of science fiction. They have already arrived, and their funding suggests that they will not disappear anytime soon. In light of their emergence, this essay examines the neurostructure of normative morality to clarify that memory manipulation, which promises to take away that which is bad in human experience, also removes that (...) which enables human beings to be good. Concepts such as free will, moral responsibility, and the neurobiological basis of moral reasoning are explored to underscore the fundamental hubris inherent to the memory manipulation enterprise. (shrink)

THINK Currency. THINK Relevancy. THINK Critically. THINK Critically is a cutting-edge, self-reflective guide for improving critical thinking skills through careful analysis, reasoned inference, and thoughtful evaluation of contemporary culture and ideas. An engaging visual design developed with extensive student feedback and 15-page chapters makesTHINK Critically the textbook your students will actually read. It delivers the core concepts of critical thinking in a way they can easily understand. Additionally, engaging examples and masterful exercises help students learn to clarify ideas, analyze arguments, (...) and evaluate reasoning. (shrink)

A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind is designed both to provide a selection of core readings on the subject and to make those readings accessible by providing commentaries to guide the reader through initially intimidating material. Each commentary explains technical concepts and provides background on obscure arguments as they arise, setting them in the historical and intellectual milieu from which they emerged. The readings concentrate on providing the student with a solid grounding in the theories of representative figures (...) of the major philosophical movements, from Plato and Aristotle to important recent figures such as Fodor and Dennett. A glossary of key terms is also included. (shrink)

This book introduces students to the principal issues in the philosophy of mind by tracing the history of the subject from Plato and Aristotle through to the present day. Over forty primary-source readings are included. Extensive commentaries from the editors are provided to guide student readers through the arguments and jargon and to offer necessary historical context for the readings. The new third edition examines some of the most exciting recent developments in the field, including advances in theories about the (...) mind’s relation to action and agency. Previous editions of this book, published under the title _A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind_, have been praised and widely taught for more than two decades. (shrink)

In this lucid and penetrating book, Peter A. Schouls considers Locke's major writings in terms of the closely related ideas of freedom, progress, mastery, reason, and education.

While assessment is regarded as integral to enhancing the quality of teaching and learning, it is also a practice fraught with moral and ethical issues. An analysis is made of current assessment practices of teachers in South Africa which seem to straddle the domains of accountability and professional codes of conduct. In the process the position of the teacher as mediator between policies and diverse learner needs is explored in the light of moral and ethical considerations. Based on the notions (...) of ethical caring and caring about, the article suggests the infusing of principles of ubuntu in assessment practices may provide a framework to embed and strengthen morality and ethics in South African school assessment practices. (shrink)