Modern Enlightenment And The Rule Of Reason

Intro -- Contents -- Introduction -- 1. Alan Charles Kors / Just and Arbitrary Authority in Enlightenment Thought -- 2. Richard Kennington / Bacon's Reform of Nature -- 3. Pamela Kraus / Method and Metaphysics: The Foundation of Philosophy in the Discourse on Method -- 4. Robert P. Kraynak / Hobbes and the Dogmatism of the Enlightenment -- 5. John C. Mccarthy / Pascal on Certainty and Utility -- 6. Paul J. Bagley / Spinoza, Biblical Criticism, and the Enlightenment -- 7. Philippe Raynaud / Leibniz, Reason -- and Evil -- 8. F.J. Crosson / Hume's Unnatural Religion (Some Humean Footnotes) -- 9. Terence E. Marshall / Poetry and Praxis in Rousseau's Emile: Human Rights and the Sentiment of Humanity -- 10. Kenneth L. Schmitz / Lessing at God's Left Hand -- 11. John R. Silber / Kant and the Mythic Roots of Morality -- 12. Nicholas Capaldi / The Enlightenment Project in Twentieth-Century Philosophy -- Contributors -- Bibliography -- Index

“Phenomenal . . . A must read for us who desire to topple the dictatorship of relativism and culture of death and replace it with the only alternative” (The Imaginative Conservative). Especially concerned with the public nature of religion, historian Glenn W. Olsen—author of Christian Marriage: A Historical Study and On the Road to Emmaus: The Catholic Dialogue with American and Modernity—sets forth an exhaustively researched and persuasive account of how religion has been reshaped in the modern period. The Turn to Transcendence traces both the loss of transcendence and attempts to recover it while making its own proposals. Neither reactionary nor modernist, it questions how—under conditions of modern life—some form of the sacred and some form of the secular might both flourish at the same time. But it also provides a warning that a religion unable to maintain itself with its own overt architecture, language, and calendars against an enveloping secular culture is destined for oblivion. “Glenn Olsen’s book could hardly be more pivotal or insightful. Confronting the growing amnesia regarding culture’s religious origin and transcendent purpose, Olsen proves both a masterful cartographer of modernity and a visionary of a culture that encourages and enables us to seek beyond ourselves.” —Carl A. Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus “A brilliant book. It rests on an amazing amount of scholarship that is wide-ranging in history, literature, art, science, music, theology, and philosophy.” —James Hitchcock, professor of history, St. Louis University

A complete translation in English of this modern text, with substantive apparatus to allow the student and serious reader to grapple in a meaningful way with this seminal text. The text includes ample footnotes, Spinoza’s annotations, an interpretative essay, glossary and other indices. Focus Philosophical Library translations are close to and are non-interpretative of the original text, with the notes and a glossary intending to provide the reader with some sense of the terms and the concepts as they were understood by Spinoza’s immediate audience. This is the paperback edition.

The World We Want compares the future world that Enlightenment intellectuals had hoped for with our own world at present. In what respects do the two worlds differ, and why are they so different? To what extent is and isn't our world the world they wanted, and to what extent do we today still want their world? Unlike previous philosophical critiques and defenses of the Enlightenment, the present study focuses extensively on the relevant historical and empirical record first, by examining carefully what kind of future Enlightenment intellectuals actually hoped for; second, by tracking the different legacies of their central ideals over the past two centuries. But in addition to documenting the significant gap that still exists between Enlightenment ideals and current realities, the author also attempts to show why the ideals of the Enlightenment still elude us. What does our own experience tell us about the appropriateness of these ideals? Which Enlightenment ideals do not fit with human nature? Why is meaningful support for these ideals, particularly within the US, so weak at present? Which of the means that Enlightenment intellectuals advocated for realizing their ideals are inefficacious? Which of their ideals have devolved into distorted versions of themselves when attempts have been made to realize them? How and why, after more than two centuries, have we still failed to realize the most significant Enlightenment ideals? In short, what is dead and what is living in these ideals?

This Handbook introduces scholars and students to the history, philosophy, and evidence of global constitutionalism. Contributors provide their insights from law, politics, international relations, philosophy, and history, drawing on diverse frameworks and empirical data sets. Across them all, however, is a recognition that the international order cannot be understood without an understanding of constitutional theory. The Handbook will define this field of inquiry for the next generation by bringing together some of the leading contemporary scholars.

This is a new view of the role of power in social evolution. It shows how, as human societies evolved, intersocietal conflicts necessarily developed, and how humanity can choose peace over war.

Concerned with the trendy, technocratic, and at times sophistical character of contemporary education at all levels, both public and private, the authors of this collection seek to reinvigorate a Thomistic approach to education appropriate to the problems of our day. With its main inspiration taken from the work of Jacques Maritain, especially his 1943 Education at the Crossroads, the volume presents a trenchant critique of the "privacies" of contemporary education, with its emphasis upon the conventional and useful. At the same time, the essays present the outlines of the proper alternative, an education which helps students draw out from themselves the desire for truths which transcend the contingencies of culture and utility. Such an education seeks to guide students to "the common things" available to all human beings. The essays uphold an account of man's intellectual and affective capacities which understands these capacities as naturally ordered to truth. The essays approach the task in different but complementary ways: in critiques of contemporary theories of education, in speculative accounts of knowledge and learning, in applications of theory to specific institutional settings, and in discussions of the political contexts governing modern education. In this rich variety of ways, the essays in The Common Things not only point the way back to the crossroads Maritain spoke of fifty years ago; they go on to indicate something of the landscape along the road not taken by contemporary education. ABOUT THE EDITOR: Daniel McInerny is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of St. Thomas/Center for Thomistic Studies in Houston, Texas. THE CONTRIBUTORS: In addition to the editor, the contributors to the volume are: Benedict M. Ashley, O.P., Romanus Cessario, O.P., Charles Dechert, Donald DeMarco, Curtis L. Hancock, Gregory J. Kerr, Joseph W. Koterski, S.J., Robert Lauder, Herbert I. London, Robert J. McLaughlin, Daniel McInerny, John M. Palms, Jerome Meric Pessagno, Ernest S. Pierucci, Alice Ramos, Mario Ramos-Reyes, Walter Raubicheck, Peter A. Redpath, Gregory M. Reichberg, James V. Schall, S.J., Francis Slade, Michael W. Strasser, and Henk E. S. Woldring. PRAISE FOR THE BOOK: "These essays are a considerable addition to Thomistic thought about education."--Review of Metaphysics

In the United States at the height of the Cold War, roughly between the end of World War II and the early 1980s, a new project of redefining rationality commanded the attention of sharp minds, powerful politicians, wealthy foundations, and top military brass. Its home was the human sciences—psychology, sociology, political science, and economics, among others—and its participants enlisted in an intellectual campaign to figure out what rationality should mean and how it could be deployed. How Reason Almost Lost Its Mind brings to life the people—Herbert Simon, Oskar Morgenstern, Herman Kahn, Anatol Rapoport, Thomas Schelling, and many others—and places, including the RAND Corporation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the Cowles Commission for Research and Economics, and the Council on Foreign Relations, that played a key role in putting forth a “Cold War rationality.” Decision makers harnessed this picture of rationality—optimizing, formal, algorithmic, and mechanical—in their quest to understand phenomena as diverse as economic transactions, biological evolution, political elections, international relations, and military strategy. The authors chronicle and illuminate what it meant to be rational in the age of nuclear brinkmanship.