Focusing on the Summa theologiae, Nicholas Lombardo contributes to the recovery, reconstruction, and critique of Aquinas's account of emotion in dialogue with both the Thomist tradition and contemporary analytic philosophy

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.

“A remarkable book capable of reshaping what one takes philosophy to be.”
—Cora Diamond, Kenan Professor of Philosophy Emerita, University of Virginia

Could there be a logical alien—a being whose ways of talking, inferring, and contradicting exhibit an entirely different logical shape than ours, yet who nonetheless is thinking? Could someone, contrary to the most basic rules of logic, think that two contradictory statements are both true at the same time? Such questions may seem outlandish, but they serve to highlight a fundamental philosophical question: is our logical form of thought merely one among many, or must it be the form of thought as such?

From Descartes and Kant to Frege and Wittgenstein, philosophers have wrestled with variants of this question, and with a range of competing answers. A seminal 1991 paper, James Conant’s “The Search for Logically Alien Thought,” placed that question at the forefront of contemporary philosophical inquiry. The Logical Alien, edited by Sofia Miguens, gathers Conant’s original article with reflections on it by eight distinguished philosophers—Jocelyn Benoist, Matthew Boyle, Martin Gustafsson, Arata Hamawaki, Adrian Moore, Barry Stroud, Peter Sullivan, and Charles Travis. Conant follows with a wide-ranging response that places the philosophical discussion in historical context, critiques his original paper, addresses the exegetical and systematic issues raised by others, and presents an alternative account.

The Logical Alien challenges contemporary conceptions of how logical and philosophical form must each relate to their content. This monumental volume offers the possibility of a new direction in philosophy.

Michael Dummett’s new book is the greatly expanded and recently revised version of his distinguished William James Lectures, delivered in 1976. Dummett regards the construction of a satisfactory theory of meaning as the most pressing task of contemporary analytical philosophy. He believes that the successful completion of this difficult assignment will lead to a resolution of problems before which philosophy has been stalled, in some instances for centuries. These problems turn on the correctness or incorrectness of a realistic view of one or another realm—the physical world, the mind, the past, mathematical reality, and so forth. Rejection of realism amounts to adoption of a variant semantics, and often of a variant logic, for the statements in a certain sector of our language. Dummett does not assume the correctness of any one logical system but shows how the choice between different logics arises at the level of the theory of meaning and depends upon the choice of one or another general form of meaning-theory. In order to determine the correct shape for a meaning-theory, we must attain a clear conception of what a meaning-theory can be expected to do. Such a conception, says Dummett, will form “a base camp for an assault on the metaphysical peaks: I have no greater ambition in this book than to set up a base camp.”

"This is a short but excellent introduction to modal, temporal, and dynamic logic....It manages to cover, in highly readable style, the basic completeness, decidability, and expressability results in a variety of logics of the three kinds considered." -Rohit Parikh, reviewing the first edition in the Journal of Symbolic Logic. Now revised and significantly expanded, this textbook introduces modal logic and examines the relevance of modal systems for theoretical computer science. Golblatt sets out a basic theory of normal modal and temporal propositional logics, including issues such as completeness proofs, decidability, first-order defiability, and canonicity. The basic theory is then applied to logics of discrete, dense, and continuous time; to the temporal logic of concurrent programs involving the connectives henceforth, next , anduntil; and to the dynamic logic of regular programs. New material for the second edition extends the temporal logic of concurrency to branching time, studying a system of Computational Tree Logic that formalizes reasoning about behavior. Dynamic logic is also extended to the case of concurrency, intorducing a connective for the parallel execution of commands. A seperate section is devoted to the quantificational dynamic logic. Numerous excercises are included for use in the classroom. Robert Goldblatt is a professor of pure mathematics at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Center for the Study of Language and Information- Lecture Notes, Number 7

“What does it mean to be lonely?” Thomas Dumm asks. His inquiry, documented in this book, takes us beyond social circumstances and into the deeper forces that shape our very existence as modern individuals. The modern individual, Dumm suggests, is fundamentally a lonely self. Through reflections on philosophy, political theory, literature, and tragic drama, he proceeds to illuminate a hidden dimension of the human condition. His book shows how loneliness shapes the contemporary division between public and private, our inability to live with each other honestly and in comity, the estranged forms that our intimate relationships assume, and the weakness of our common bonds.

A reading of the relationship between Cordelia and her father in Shakespeare’s King Lear points to the most basic dynamic of modern loneliness—how it is a response to the problem of the “missing mother.” Dumm goes on to explore the most important dimensions of lonely experience—Being, Having, Loving, and Grieving. As the book unfolds, he juxtaposes new interpretations of iconic cultural texts—Moby-Dick, Death of a Salesman, the film Paris, Texas, Emerson’s “Experience,” to name a few—with his own experiences of loneliness, as a son, as a father, and as a grieving husband and widower.

Written with deceptive simplicity, Loneliness as a Way of Life is something rare—an intellectual study that is passionately personal. It challenges us, not to overcome our loneliness, but to learn how to re-inhabit it in a better way. To fail to do so, this book reveals, will only intensify the power that it holds over us.

In The Long Emancipation Rinaldo Walcott posits that Black people globally live in the time of emancipation and that emancipation is definitely not freedom. Taking examples from across the globe, he argues that wherever Black people have been emancipated from slavery and colonization, a potential freedom has been thwarted. Walcott names this condition the long emancipation—the ongoing interdiction of potential Black freedom and the continuation of the juridical and legislative status of Black nonbeing. Stating that Black people have yet to experience freedom, Walcott shows that being Black in the world is to exist in the time of emancipation in which Black people must constantly fashion alternate conceptions of freedom and reality through expressive culture. Given that Black unfreedom lies at the center of the making of the modern world, the attainment of freedom for Black people, Walcott contends, will transform the human experience worldwide. With The Long Emancipation, Walcott offers a new humanism that begins by acknowledging that present conceptions of what it means to be human do not currently include Black people.

In Looking Away, Rei Terada revisits debates about appearance and reality in order to make a startling claim: that the purpose of such debates is to police feelings of dissatisfaction with the given world.

Focusing on romantic and post-romantic thought after Kant, Terada argues that acceptance of the world “as is” is coerced by canonical epistemology and aesthetics. In guilty evasions of this coercion, post-Kantian thinkers cultivate fleeting, aberrant appearances, perceptual experiences that do not present themselves as facts to be accepted and therefore become images of freedom. This “phenomenophilia,” she suggests, informs romanticism and subsequent philosophical thought with a nascent queer theory.

Through graceful readings of Coleridge’s obsession with perceptual ephemera, or “spectra,” recorded in his Notebooks; of Kant’s efforts in his First and Third Critiques to come to terms with the given world; of Nietzsche’s responses to Kant and his meditations on ephemeral phenomenal experiences; and of Adorno’s interpretations of both Nietzsche and Kant, Terada proposes that the connection between dissatisfaction and ephemeral phenomenality reveals a hitherto-unknown alternative to aesthetics that expresses our right to desire something other than experience “as is,” even those parts of it that really cannot be otherwise.

Historically, it has been assumed that war is violence and declarations of war are simply public announcements that serve to initiate combat. Brien Hallett denies both assumptions and claims that war is policy, not violence.

The Lost Art of Declaring War analyzes the crucial differences between combat and war and convincingly argues that the power to "declare" war is in actuality the power to compose a text, draft a document, write a denunciation. Once written, the declaration then serves three functions: to articulate the political purposes of the war, to guide and direct military operations, and to establish the boundary between justified combat and unjustified devastation.

Hallett sounds a clarion call urging the people and their representatives to take up the challenge and write fully reasoned declarations of war. Then, and only then, can a civilized nation like the United States lay claim to being fully democratic, not only in peacetime, but in wartime as well.

During the Second World War, an unprecedented number of families were torn apart. As the Nazi empire crumbled, millions roamed the continent in search of their loved ones. The Lost Children tells the story of these families, and of the struggle to determine their fate. We see how the reconstruction of families quickly became synonymous with the survival of European civilization itself.

Even as Allied officials and humanitarian organizations proclaimed a new era of individualist and internationalist values, Tara Zahra demonstrates that they defined the “best interests” of children in nationalist terms. Sovereign nations and families were seen as the key to the psychological rehabilitation of traumatized individuals and the peace and stability of Europe.

Based on original research in German, French, Czech, Polish, and American archives, The Lost Children is a heartbreaking and mesmerizing story. It brings together the histories of eastern and western Europe, and traces the efforts of everyone—from Jewish Holocaust survivors to German refugees, from Communist officials to American social workers—to rebuild the lives of displaced children. It reveals that many seemingly timeless ideals of the family were actually conceived in the concentration camps, orphanages, and refugee camps of the Second World War, and shows how the process of reconstruction shaped Cold War ideologies and ideas about childhood and national identity. This riveting tale of families destroyed by war reverberates in the lost children of today’s wars and in the compelling issues of international adoption, human rights and humanitarianism, and refugee policies.

Since the mid-1980s, Taiwan and mainland China have witnessed a sustained resurgence of academic and intellectual interest in ruxue—“Confucianism”—variously conceived as a form of culture, an ideology, a system of learning, and a tradition of normative values. This discourse has led to a proliferation of contending conceptions of ruxue, as well as proposals for rejuvenating it to make it a vital cultural and psycho-spiritual resource in the modern world.

This study aims to show how ruxue has been conceived in order to assess the achievements of this enterprise; to identify which aspects of ru thought and values academics find viable, and why; to highlight the dynamics involved in the ongoing cross-fertilization between academics in China and Taiwan; and to examine the relationship between these activities and cultural nationalism.

Four key arguments are developed. First, the process of intellectual cross-fertilization and rivalry between scholars has served to sustain academic interest in ruxue. Second, contrary to conventional wisdom, party-state support in the PRC does not underpin the continuing academic discourse on ruxue. Third, cultural nationalism, rather than state nationalism, better explains the nature of this activity. Fourth, academic discourse on ruxue provides little evidence of robust philosophical creativity.

Love and Friendship in the Western Tradition comprises a collection of essays written over a 25 year period by the late Rev. Professor James McEvoy on the theme of friendship. The book traces the genesis and development of philosophical treatments of friendship from Greek philosophy, through the Middle Ages, to modern and postmodern philosophy. The collection’s three major concerns are: (1) the history of philosophical discussions of friendship; (2) the role of friendship in the cultivation of the philosophical life; (3) the marginalization of friendship as a theme for philosophical reflection and practice in the modern period. As the author was primarily a medievalist, a great deal of the focus of the essays is on the development of the theme of friendship in the Middle Ages (in the thought of Augustine, Aquinas, Aelred of Rievaulx, Henry of Ghent, Robert Grosseteste, etc.). However, this focus, while a value in itself, also serves to connect philosophical perspectives on friendship from before and after the middle ages. It connects to the time before inasmuch as much of the work done on friendship in the Middle Ages is anchored in interpretations of Aristotle and Plato, and it connects to the time after by providing a counterpoint to the modern paradigm of what constitutes the philosophical life. The collection combines historical with thematic approaches to scholarship on this issue and is one of the only books of its kind to do so. It is, perhaps, unique in its historical sweep and will prove to be a canonical source for further research on this topic.

As Catholic theology emerged from the crisis of modernity, theologians turned to both patristic and medieval sources to recover lost wisdom from the theological tradition, and adapt it to the challenges of an age that separated reason from faith, the practice of theology from the spiritual life. . In time, Thomas Aquinas and Hans Urs von Balthasar became the patrons of two very different approaches to this challenge. St. Thomas Aquinas offering contemporary theologians an approach rooted in the patristic-medieval Latin synthesis of Augustine and Aristotle that also draws on the East, and von Balthasar offering contemporary theologians a patristic-modern approach rooted in the Eastern theological synthesis of Maximus the Confessor and Erich Przywara, that also draws on the West. Although Aquinas and Balthasar, together with their contemporary followers, sought to unite reason and faith, theology and prayer, contemporary Thomists and Balthasarians have tended to diverge widely from one another, often with a polemical spirit. How should one understand the theological genius of St. Thomas Aquinas and Hans Urs von Balthasar today? How can two of the greatest theologians in the Catholic tradition be brought together in more fruitful and peaceful dialogue? This edited volume comprises contributions from a range of scholars who elucidate the depth and breadth of two of the most prominent figures of the Catholic tradition today. A scholar from each school of thought contributes an essay on a particular theme: Metaphysics, Trinity, Revelation, Christology, Anthropology, Evil, and Eschatology. By presenting the two essays side by side, this volume provides the contemporary reader with an opportunity to better engage both thinkers and understand disagreements and areas for constructive movement forward. The tone of the volume is intentionally irenic, seeking points of constructive dialogue, and opening new pathways to the renewal of sapiential theology through a fruitful synthesis of Thomistic and Balthasarian thought.

Love Song for the Life of the Mind develops the view of comedy that, the author argues, would have been set out in Aristotle's missing second book of Poetics. As such it is both a philosophical and a historical argument about Aristotle; and the theory of comedy it elucidates is meant to be trans-historically and trans-culturally accurate.

The relationship between the soul and the body was a point of contentious debate among philosophers and theologians in late antiquity. Modern scholarship has inherited this legacy, but split the study of the relation of body and soul between the disciplines of philosophy and religion. Lovers of the Soul, Lovers of the Body integrates, with Plato and Aristotle in the background, philosophical and religious perspectives on the concepts of soul and body in the transformative period of the first six centuries CE, from Philo to Olympiodorus. The polyphonic—but not dissonant—philosophical and theological dialogue is recreated and rethought by an international group of leading experts and up-and-coming scholars in ancient philosophy, theology, and religion.

The synthetic approach of the volume presents the understanding of human psychology in late antiquity, without labels and borders. It invites both experts and enthusiasts to crisscross the pathways of philosophy and religion in pursuit of new crossroads and greater common ground.

Love's confusions are legion. We promise to love, but we cannot love at will. Love God, we're commanded, but we cannot love on command. And given the vicissitudes of self-love, even if we could love our neighbors as we love ourselves, would it be a good thing to do so? These are a few of the paradoxes that typically lead philosophers to oversimplify love--and that draw C. D. C. Reeve to explore it in all its complexity, searching for the lessons to be found within love's confusions.

Ranging from Plato, who wrote so eloquently on the subject, to writers as diverse as Shakespeare, Proust, Forster, Beckett, Huxley, Lawrence, and Larkin, Reeve brings the vast resources of Western literature and philosophy to bear on the question of love. As he explores the origins of Western thought on the subject, he also turns to the origins of individual experience--the relationship of mother and child, the template of all possible permutations of love--and to the views of such theorists as Freud, Melanie Klein, and Carol Gilligan. At the same time, he uses the story of the prototypical absent father, Odysseus, to demonstrate the importance of reconciling a desire for tenderness with a desire for strength if we are to make the most of love's potentials.

Looking at love in light of the classical world and Christianity, and in its complex relationship with pornography, violence, sadomasochism, fantasy, sentimentality, and jealousy, Reeve invites us to think more broadly about love, and to find the confusions that inevitably result to be creative rather than disturbing.

A case for literary critics and other humanists to stop wallowing in their aestheticized helplessness and instead turn to poetry, comedy, and love.

Literary criticism is an agent of despair, and its poster child is Walter Benjamin. Critics have spent decades stewing in his melancholy. What if, instead, we dared to love poetry, to choose comedy over Hamlet’s tragedy, or to pursue romance over Benjamin’s suicide on the edge of France, of Europe, and of civilization itself?

Paul A. Bové challenges young lit critters to throw away their shades and let the sun shine in. Love’s Shadow is his three-step manifesto for a new literary criticism that risks sentimentality and melodrama and eschews self-consciousness. The first step is to choose poetry. There has been since the time of Plato a battle between philosophy and poetry. Philosophy has championed misogyny, while poetry has championed women, like Shakespeare’s Rosalind. Philosophy is ever so stringent; try instead the sober cheerfulness of Wallace Stevens. Bové’s second step is to choose the essay. He praises Benjamin’s great friend and sometime antagonist Theodor Adorno, who gloried in writing essays, not dissertations and treatises. The third step is to choose love. If you want a Baroque hero, make that hero Rembrandt, who brought lovers to life in his paintings.

Putting aside passivity and cynicism would amount to a revolution in literary studies. Bové seeks nothing less, and he has a program for achieving it.

A revolutionary approach to rhetoric that asks why audiences need persuading.

What is persuasion? For some, it is the ideal alternative to violence. For others, persuasion is simply a neutral instrumentality—a valued source of soft power. Both positions rest on a fundamental belief: persuasion is a power that resides in a speaker acting on an audience. Loving the World Appropriately asks a different, more fundamental, question: why does an audience need persuasion? In shifting our focus, James Kastely delivers a provocative new history of rhetoric and philosophy, one that describes rhetoric as more than a matter of effective communication and recasts persuasion as a philosophical concern central to notions of human subjectivity. Ultimately, Kastely insists, persuasion enables us to love the world appropriately.

The Catholic University of America Press is honored to publish the English Critical Edition of the Works of Karol Wojtyła/John Paul II. Under the auspices of an international editorial board, the English Critical Edition will comprise more than 20 volumes, covering all of John Paul’s writings and correspondence in the years before and during his papacy. This collection is essential for several reasons. For one thing, gaining access to the saint’s writings has posed a significant challenge. Except for official papal addresses and documents preserved and disseminated by the Vatican, St. John Paul’s works have been scattered and limited. Many documents need a new translation. Finally, English-language audiences have faced the challenge, even in the case of published texts of dealing with several languages, various translations, and textual idiosyncrasies. The second volume of the series presents Wojtyła’s lectures at the Catholic University of Lublin and his works on Max Scheler. This volume consists of three parts: Karol Wojtyła’s lectures at the Lublin University from 1954 to 1957 (during three academic years); Wojtyła’s articles related to the ethical issues discussed in the Lublin lectures, and his habilitation thesis on Max Scheler from 1953 with other essays related more closely to Scheler’s thought. As was the case with Volume 1, Volume 2 also relies on the original manuscripts and typescripts of Wojtyła’s works. These original texts were compared with the Polish published editions, and the significant differences between them were marked in the scholarly apparatus. Some of the essays in this volume were never published in English, others were never published before.

Sometimes the word “lyric” seems to appear everywhere: either it’s used interchangeably with the word “poetry” or it attaches to descriptions of literature, art, film, and even ordinary objects in order to capture some quality of aesthetic appeal or meaning. Lyric Trade is not yet another attempt to define the lyric, but instead it digs into how poems use lyric in relation to race, gender, nation, and empire.

Engaging with poets such as Gwendolyn Brooks, H.D., Lorine Niedecker, Alice Notley, and Myung Mi Kim, this book asks: What does lyric mean, and why should it matter to poets and readers? Lyric Trade argues that lyric in the postwar long poem not only registers the ideological contradictions of modernism’s insistence on new forms, but that it also maps spaces for formal reimaginings of the subject.
 

Plato, the great philosopher of Athens, was born in 427 BCE. In early manhood an admirer of Socrates, he later founded the famous school of philosophy in the grove Academus. Much else recorded of his life is uncertain; that he left Athens for a time after Socrates' execution is probable; that later he went to Cyrene, Egypt, and Sicily is possible; that he was wealthy is likely; that he was critical of 'advanced' democracy is obvious. He lived to be 80 years old. Linguistic tests including those of computer science still try to establish the order of his extant philosophical dialogues, written in splendid prose and revealing Socrates' mind fused with Plato's thought.

In Laches, Charmides, and Lysis, Socrates and others discuss separate ethical conceptions. Protagoras, Ion, and Meno discuss whether righteousness can be taught. In Gorgias, Socrates is estranged from his city's thought, and his fate is impending. The Apology (not a dialogue), Crito, Euthyphro, and the unforgettable Phaedo relate the trial and death of Socrates and propound the immortality of the soul. In the famous Symposium and Phaedrus, written when Socrates was still alive, we find the origin and meaning of love. Cratylus discusses the nature of language. The great masterpiece in ten books, the Republic, concerns righteousness (and involves education, equality of the sexes, the structure of society, and abolition of slavery). Of the six so-called dialectical dialogues Euthydemus deals with philosophy; metaphysical Parmenides is about general concepts and absolute being; Theaetetus reasons about the theory of knowledge. Of its sequels, Sophist deals with not-being; Politicus with good and bad statesmanship and governments; Philebus with what is good. The Timaeus seeks the origin of the visible universe out of abstract geometrical elements. The unfinished Critias treats of lost Atlantis. Unfinished also is Plato's last work of the twelve books of Laws (Socrates is absent from it), a critical discussion of principles of law which Plato thought the Greeks might accept.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of Plato is in twelve volumes.

Platonic forms of love.

Plato of Athens, who laid the foundations of the Western philosophical tradition and in range and depth ranks among its greatest practitioners, was born to a prosperous and politically active family circa 427 BC. In early life an admirer of Socrates, Plato later founded the first institution of higher learning in the West, the Academy, among whose many notable alumni was Aristotle. Traditionally ascribed to Plato are thirty-five dialogues developing Socrates’ dialectic method and composed with great stylistic virtuosity, together with the Apology and thirteen letters.

The three works in this volume, though written at different stages of Plato’s career, are set toward the end of Socrates’ life (from 416) and explore the relationship between two people known as love (erōs) or friendship (philia). In Lysis, Socrates meets two young men exercising in a wrestling school during a religious festival. In Symposium, Socrates attends a drinking party along with several accomplished friends to celebrate the young tragedian Agathon’s victory in the Lenaia festival of 416: the topic of conversation is love. And in Phaedrus, Socrates and his eponymous interlocutor escape the midsummer heat of the city to the banks of the river Ilissus, where speeches by both on the subject of love lead to a critical discussion of the current state of the theory and practice of rhetoric.

This edition, which replaces the original Loeb editions by Sir Walter R. M. Lamb and by Harold North Fowler, offers text, translation, and annotation that are fully current with modern scholarship.

Il y a plaisir à saluer l‘arrivée d’un philosophe tout neuf qui soudain bondit dans le cortège dionysiaque. Plus on est de fous, plus on pense, le proverbe dit vrai et notre temps de misère a plus que besoin de se refaire – s’il se peut – une vigueur spéculative. Il y a plus que du plaisir, une vraie jubilation lorsque le tout neuf philosophe affirme une pensée de la jouissance, de l’abondance et de la dépense au sens de Bataille (ici toujours discrètement mais efficacement présent). Une pensée énergique au sens le plus – oserais-je dire « vitalisant » du terme. L’energeia n’a-t-elle de sens que depuis l’être ? N’y a-t-il pas une autre énergie à penser ? Une énergie non pas de l’être, ni relative à celle extraite de la nature pour des fins productives et économiques, mais une énergie excédentaire, une sorte de « dépense improductive » (Bataille) de la vie ? Une énergie qui serait le luxe biologique du vivant. Ce luxe biologique, Valentin Husson le pense comme – on ne peut plus dire « ontologique » – comme existence en un sens qui se dérobe à Heidegger et à son « sens de l’être » pour affirmer un avoir à être selon lequel l’être se dissipe au-delà de toute consistance tandis que l’avoir à prend toute l’énergie d’une vie en débordante envie d’elle-même. Jean-Luc Nancy