Philosophy
Showing all 19 results
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Doing Christian Ethics From The Margins (Revised)
$45.00Add to cartIn this revised edition of an established classroom text, De La Torre furthers his argument that the pain and suffering of people who have been marginalized continues to inform a perspective that holds a greater grasp of reality than those who are more privileged by power and profit. He continues the method of theory and case studies from earlier editions, updating the cases for the 3rd edition. In Part IV, the chapter entitled “Private Property” that appeared in the 2nd edition has been removed in the 3rd edition. Also in that part, the chapters on affirmative action and sexism have been re-ordered so that the chapter entitled “Affirmative Action” is the last chapter before the conclusion. In the 3rd edition, there is a fuller conclusion than the 2nd edition’s epilogue.
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Universe We Think In
$24.95Add to cartThe Universe We Think In arises from a tradition of realism, both philosophical and political, a universe in which the common sense understanding of things is included in our judgement about them. The scope is both vast and narrow – vast because it is aware of the reality of things, narrow because it is the individual person who can and wants to know them.
The abiding undercurrent of this book is that the cosmos, the universe, does not look at us human beings, but we look at it, seek to understand it, and do understand much of it. Why is this so? The book seeks to begin with the basic question that we each ought to pose to ourselves; namely: “Why do I exist?” Nothing is more immediate than the relation of what is not ourselves to ourselves.
We have the strange experience that we cannot even ‘know ourselves’ unless we know something that is not ourselves. In a sense, we have two related worlds, the one that exists, a universe, as it were, that includes each of us, and the same world that we think about. What is so striking about our personal existence is that we can know what is not ourselves. Indeed, we not only want to know what is not ourselves, but this knowledge of what is not ourselves is also, in part, the reason for our existence in the first place.
Our thinking about the world is not unrelated to the world that is. Yet, once we understand what is in the world, both systematically and casually, we find ourselves free in a world of others who also think and communicate with one another. Thus, to know ourselves includes knowing what is not ourselves in its own diversity. Ultimately, we seek to know why it all is rather than is not, why it all belongs together in the same universe.
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Introduction To Personalism
$34.95Add to cartMuch has been written about the great personalist philosophers of the 20th century – including Jacques Maritain and Emmanuel Mournier, Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, Dietrich von Hildebrand and Edith Stein, Max Scheler and Karol Wojtyla (later Pope John Paul II) – but few books cover the personalist movement as a whole. An Introduction to Personalism fills that gap.
Juan Manuel Burgos shows the reader how personalist philosophy was born in response to the tragedies of two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s. Through a revitalization of the concept of the person, an array of thinkers developed a philosophy both rooted in the best of the intellectual tradition and capable of dialoguing with contemporary concerns.
Burgos then delves into the potent ideas of more than twenty thinkers who have contributed to the growth of personalism, including Romano Guardini, Gabriel Marcel, Xavier Zubiri, and Michael Polanyi. Burgos’s encyclopedic knowledge of the movement allows for a concise and well-rounded perspective on each of the personalists studied.
An Introduction to Personalism concludes with a synthesis of personalist thought, bringing together the brightest insights of each personalist philosopher into an organic whole. Burgos argues that personalism is not an eclectic hodge-podge, but a full-fledged school of philosophy, and gives a dynamic and rigorous exposition of the key features of the personalist position.
Our times are marked by numerous and often contradictory ideas about the human person. An Introduction to Personalism presents an engaging anthropological vision capable of taking the lead in the debate about the meaning of human existence and of winning hearts and minds for the cause of the dignity of every person in the 21st century and beyond.
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I Burned For Your Peace
$18.95Add to cartPopular author and philosopher Peter Kreeft delves into one of the most beloved Christian classics of all time–Augustine’s Confessions. He collects key passages and offers incisive commentary, making Confessions accessible to any reader who is both intellectually curious and spiritually hungry.
The Confessions is a dramatic personal narrative of a soul choosing between eternal life and death, an exploration of the timeless questions great minds have been asking for millennia, and a prayer of praise and thanksgiving to God. I Burned for Your Peace is not a scholarly work but an unpacking of the riches found in Augustine’s text. It is existential, personal, and devotional, as well as warm, witty, and thought-provoking. With Kreeft to guide them, readers of the Confessions can overhear and understand the intimate conversation between a towering intellect and the God whose peace he at last humbly accepts.
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Renewing The Mind
$29.95Add to cartNo other living tradition has been thinking about thinking longer than the Catholic Church. With carefully selected readings from classical, patristic, medieval, modern, and contemporary sources, Renewing the Mind proposes the Catholic tradition as the noblest and best hope for a recovery of humane learning in our time. Edited by theologian and philosopher Ryan N.S. Topping, this anthology draws from a range of classical and contemporary philosophers – from Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Newman to Chesterton to Benedict XVI – to reconstruct and illustrate the enduring vitality of the Catholic tradition of thinking about thinking. Parts One, Two, and Three take up the essential characteristics which define all learning activity: its purpose (or end), its form and content (or curriculum), and its method (or pedagogy). With an eye to meeting the challenge of the present crisis in education, Part Four illustrates the contemporary renewal of Catholic education. Included are selections that speak not only to liberal or general education but to a variety of contexts in which Catholics are called to study or teach: at home, at school, in college, or in the seminary. Renewing the Mind includes an introductory essay on the history and renewal of Catholic education, followed by 38 selections each with an introduction, biography, and study questions; adorning the text throughout are illustrations from the National Gallery of Art. Educators of children and college students will find this an essential guide to the best of what has been said about what it means to be conformed to the mind of Christ.
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Knowing The Natural Law
$34.95Add to cartRecent discussions of Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of natural law have focused upon the “self-evident” character of the first principles, but few attempts have been made to determine in what manner they are selfevident. On some accounts, a self-evident precept must have, at most, a tenuous connection with speculative reason, especially our knowledge of God, and it must be untainted by the stain of “deriving” an ought from an is. Yet Aquinas himself had a robust account of the good, rooted in human nature. He saw no fundamental difference between is-statements and ought-statements, both of which he considered to be descriptive. Knowing the Natural Law traces the thought of Aquinas from an understanding of human nature to a knowledge of the human good, from there to an account of ought-statements, and finally to choice, which issues in human actions. The much discussed article on the precepts of the natural law (I-II, 94, 2) provides the framework for a natural law rooted in human nature and in speculative knowledge. Practical knowledge is itself threefold: potentially practical knowledge, virtually practical knowledge, and fully practical knowledge. This distinction within practical knowledge, typically overlooked or underutilized, reveals the steps by which the mind moves from speculative knowledge all the way to fully practical knowledge. The most significant sections of Knowing the Natural Law examine the nature of ought-statements, the imperative force of moral precepts, the special character of per se nota propositions as found within the natural law, and the final movement from knowledge to action.
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Suspended Middle : Henri De Lubac And The Renewed Split In Modern Catholic
$28.99Add to cartHas been called “the most exciting book ever written on de Lubac”
French Jesuit Henri de Lubac (1896-1991) was arguably the most revolutionary theologian of the twentieth century. He proposed that Western theology since the early modern period had lost sight of the key to integrating faith and reason – namely, the truth that all human beings are naturally oriented toward the supernatural.
Originally published in 2005, John Milbank’s Suspended Middle defends de Lubac’s provocative thesis and rebuts its many critics. In this second edition Milbank has expanded and clarified his argument throughout to take greater account of new critiques of de Lubac. The future of the Christian faith is at stake, says Milbank, as he urges his readers to recover and reinvigorate de Lubac’s biblical-theological-philosophical vision.
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Catholicity Of Reason
$36.99Add to cartAn original argument for the recovery of a robust notion of reason and truth in response to modern rationalism and postmodern skepticism
The Catholicity of Reason explains the “grandeur of reason,” the recollection of which Benedict XVI has presented as one of the primary tasks in Christian engagement with the contemporary world.
While postmodern thinkers — religious and secular alike — have generally sought to respond to the hubris of Western thought by humbling our presumptuous claims to knowledge, D. C. Schindler shows in this book that only a robust confidence in reason can allow us to remain genuinely open both to God and to the deep mystery of things. Drawing from both contemporary and classical theologians and philosophers, Schindler explores the basic philosophical questions concerning truth, knowledge, and being — and proposes a new model for thinking about the relationship between faith and reason.
The reflections brought together in this book bring forth a dramatic conception of human knowing that both strengthens our trust in reason and opens our mind in faith.
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Living The Good Life
$24.95Add to cartLiving the Good Life presents a brief introduction to virtue and vice, self-control and weakness, misery and happiness. The book contrasts the thought of Aquinas with popular views, such as moral relativism, values clarification, utilitarianism, Kantian deontology, and situation ethics. Following the Socratic dictum “know thyself,” Steven J. Jensen investigates the interior workings of the human mind, revealing the interplay of reason, will, and emotions. According to Aquinas, in a healthy ethical life, reason guides the emotions and will to the true human good. In an unhealthy life, emotional impulses distort the vision of reason, entrapping one in futile pursuits. In the human struggle to gain self-mastery, a person must overcome the capricious desires that enslave him to false goods.
Jensen ably guides readers through Aquinas’s philosophy and explains the distinction between the moral and intellectual virtues. The moral virtues train our various desires toward the true good, helping us discard our misguided cravings and teaching us to enjoy what is truly worth pursuing. The virtue of justice directs our hearts to the good of others, freeing us from egoism in order to seek a good shared with others. The intellectual virtues train the mind toward the truth, so that we can find fulfillment in human understanding. Most important, the virtue of prudence directs our deliberations to discover the true path of
life.Intended as a text for students, beginners of philosophy will gain access to a key aspect of Aquinas’s thought, namely, that true happiness is realized not in the animal life of passion and greed but only in the reasonable pursuit of human goods, in which we find true peace and rest from the distractions of this world.
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Courage Of Faith
$15.95Add to cartLiving a courageous life is not easy. It requires a person to find the balance between fearlessness and cowardice. In The Courage of Faith Steven Ostovich encourages readers to wrestle with their questions of belief in order to find a way to choose faith. He shows that belief, promise, hope, love, responsibility, and thinking demand courage. Ostovich helps readers to reflect on their understandings of these topics by using the writings of philosophers from Plato to Hannah Arendt, Rene Descartes to Simone de Beauvoir. By engaging philosophy, theology, and the Bible, he challenges readers to courageously think from and through faith. The result of such thinking is a commitment to belief.
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Image And Likeness Of God In Bernard Of Clairvauxs Free Choice And Grace
$29.50Add to cartWe are made in the image and likeness of God. Bernard of Clairvaux, the versatile troubadour of Christian love, is no naive romantic. He understands that a series of moral changes must precede any exercise of this love. For him, the seat of love is the faculty of the human will (the Image). On the other hand, the uninhibited action of free choice (the Likeness) constitutes the perfection of the faculty. The Image, because of sin and consequent misery, has lost its Likeness to God. Only divine intervention, through the efficacy of grace, can restore Likeness and cleanse the blemished Image. The text is not a polemic, but rather and apologia rooted in Bernard”s personal experience. The ardour of love springs from a flourishing freedom, the direct result of a double cause: divine grace and the restored union of Image and Likeness. Without free choice there is nothing to be saved; while without grace there is no salvation.
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Newmans Approach To Knowledge
$17.95Add to cartThis book is probably the most extensive and in-depth analysis of Newman’s philosophy to be published in the last forty years. It shows beyond doubt the importance of Newman’s contribution to contemporary philosophy and will certainly go to furthering his cause for recognition as one of the more significant philosophers of the nineteenth century.
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Images Of The Human
$24.95Add to cartNow available in paperback, “Images of the Human” addresses the questions human beings have been asking for centuries. Each chapter focuses on the writings of a different philosopher–from Plato to Nietzsche, St. Augustine to Simone de Beauvior. As a distinctive feature, commentaries explore the unique relationship between what philosophers say and what religion teaches.
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What Is Lonergan Up To In Insight
$29.95Add to cartMany consider Bernard Lonergan the outstanding Catholic philosopher of the twentieth century, and his Insight: A Study in Human Understanding (1957) is a brilliant but difficult work that has challenged innumerable readers. What Is Lonergan Up to in Insight? is an accessible introduction to the leading ideas of Lonergan’s massive and major achievement in which he focuses on the dynamics of scientific method.
Using Plato’s Myth of the Cave as the guiding metaphor, Father Tekippe, who studied under Lonergan, introduces readers to the main ideas of Lonergan’s magnum opus. He does not comment, summarize, nor substitute for Insight, but instead communicates faithfully Lonergan’s own leading inspirations. Having studied Lonergan for thirty years, Father Tekippe brings the reader into the intricacies of the inner mind.
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Mujerista Theology : A Theology For The 21 Century
$24.00Add to cartMujerista Theology is a comprehensive introduction to Hispanic woman’s liberation theology written from the heart and convictions of experience. Continually drawing on her Cuban roots, Isasi Diaz focuses on the life journey and struggles of Hispanic women as she develops a theology to support and empower their daily struggles for meaning. With her own life journey always firmly connected to the grassroots experience of Hispanic women and to the struggle for liberation, Isasi-Diaz is a major spokesperson for the continuing need for liberation theology today.
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Woman To Woman
$24.95Add to cartThe women whose writings are included in this anthology are all different colors in a kaleidoscope of history. Spanning nearly one thousand years in the history of spirituality, these works, arranged chronologically, begin with Hildegard of Bingen in the eleventh century and move to Ita Ford in our own. Their authors are mystics, contemplatives, actives, intellectuals, poets, and dreamers. They are portraits of women through the centuries who loved deeply their families, their communities, their careers, or their causes, but who, most of all, loved God.
Some women whose writings are included: Beatrice of Nazareth, Dorothy Day, Edith Stein, Mary Ward, Jessica Powers, Ita Ford, Hildegard of Bingen, Julian of Norwich, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Avila, Simone Weil, and Elizabeth Anne Seton. The editor introduces each selection.
