The Right Way to Live: Plato’s Republic for Catholic Students

by Richard Geraghty

TESTIMONIALS

“Does it matter if a virtue is a means or an end? Geraghty masterfully shows how Plato’s Republic framed the answer to that question two and a half millennia ago in a way that still makes sense for us in today’s modern world.” – Dr. Sebastian Mahfood, OP, co-author with Ronda Chervin of Catholic Realism: A Framework for the Refutation of Atheism and the Evangelization of Atheists

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

As a professor of philosophy for many decades, Richard Geraghty has been rated the most popular of teachers because of his gift not only for simplifying difficult concepts, but also for expounding them with brilliance and humor.

Until his death in 2017, Richard served as a professor of philosophy at St. Joseph’s House of Studies, the college-level facility of the Franciscan Missionaries of the Eternal Word at EWTN.

Over the course of his career, Richard taught philosophy at the University of Dayton, Providence College, St. John’s College Seminary, and Holy Apostles College & Seminary.

OTHER CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHY BOOKS

Soulful Organizational Leadership

by Arthur William McVey

TESTIMONIALS

“Similar to all Western organizations today, all the institutions within the Catholic Church are suffering from a leadership deficit. Most often, like their secular counterparts, when confronted by the problem of leadership training within the organizational Church, Church leaders get their philosophy and psychology of organizational leadership from secular “philosophers” and “psychologists” whose understanding of the human person is one that denies the reality of the human soul and is, therefore, soul-less. Hence, when attempts are made to apply them to reality, these principles tend to generate anarchy. As an alternative to this, Catholic philosopher Bill McVey provides readers with

 

• an in-depth understanding of Thomistic faculty psychology of the human soul, in which human habits and intellectual and moral virtues (principles of leadership excellence) are situated and develop, and
• the means of concrete leadership examples and case studies, and how to apply these within the context of for-profit and non-profit organizations.

Thomistic organizational psychology is an organizational metaphysics that explains Thomistic metaphysics, moral psychology, and faculty psychology in a way that not only fills in the gaps in the teachings of contemporary great organizational, seminal scholars like Chester Bernard, W. Edwards Deming and Peter Drucker, but transcends them!” – Dr. Peter Redpath, author of The Moral Psychology of St. Thomas Aquinas and A Not-So-Elementary Christian Metaphysics, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2.

“McVey’s application of organizational metaphysics and behavioral psychology in such a practical manner has been a game changer for me in my rethinking my work in both educational technology leadership, a field in which I’ve developed many courses for the benefit of teacher preparation programs, and priestly and lay ministerial leadership, a field I’ve helped frame through my contributions to standards revision and assessment processes. If I can see these applications in my two fields, then I can surmise the absolute value McVey’s soulful organizational leadership may have on all fields.” – Dr. Sebastian Mahfood, OP, author of Among the Marvelous Things: The Media of Social Communications and the Next Generation of Pastoral Ministers

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Arthur William McVey graduated from St. Paul’s College, University of Ottawa, Canada, with a Bachelor of Scholastic Philosophy and Theology. He completed his MA in Religion and Culture, focusing particularly on the subject matter of social behavior, symbolic interactionism, and secular rituals, at the school of Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Lauier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. After graduation, McVey left Canada, and moved to the USA. After a major spiritual experience, he returned to Christ and became an Episcopal priest. Over time, he began a study of Charles Sanders Peirce that guided him back to a serious study of Thomas Aquinas. Eventually, he became more and more dedicated to Thomistic philosophy and theology, being especially motivated by the scholarship of Peter Redpath and deciding to do a Ph.D. in Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical psychology at Abat Oliba University in Barcelona, Spain. McVey did his doctoral research and dissertation on organizational leadership and the nature of Aristotelian-Thomistic Behavioral Organizational Psychology. After he received his Ph.D., McVey answered the call to revert back to Rome, the Church of his birth.

OTHER CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHY BOOKS

A Reader in Recent Catholic Philosophy: The Twentieth Century

Ed. by Alan Vincelette

5. Existentialism

Lavelle
Marcel
Ulrich

6. Analytical Philosophy

Duhem
Geach
Anscombe
Dummett
MacIntyre
Taylor
Van Fraassen

7. Postmodernism

De Certeau
Caputo
Marion
Lacoste
Kearney

INTERVIEWS

REVIEW

Recent Catholic Philosophy:

The Twentieth Century

by Alan Vincelette

En Route Books & Media

 

What a wonderful resource this turned out to be, along with Dr. Vincelette’s accompanying work A Reader in Recent Catholic Philosophy. For the purposes of this review I will look at some of my own personal favourite recent Catholic philosophers.

 

To begin with, Dr. Dietrich Von Hildebrand. Humanly speaking, I owe him so much. I read his books in the eighties and it made so much sense, especially with regard to the current crisis in the Church. Some might accuse him of an undue pessimism. I think he was right in his analysis. He is surely one of the great defenders of the Catholic Faith in our age. His book Ethics is an attack on moral relativism. Dr. Vincelette notes that the phenomenology adopted by Von Hildebrand is a suitable means to demonstrate the error of relativism, as phenomenology rejects any explanation which fails to do justice to our experiences. We are not limited by the senses as we can also reflect on mental experience. To claim that only what is physically experienced by the senses, as Hume and the Positivists do, is to limit what we mean by experience.

 

For Von Hildebrand, something has value independent of our need for pleasure. To delight in a value is a sort of added extra. A value has intrinsic goodness. It calls us to transcend self-centeredness. Our response to value means being called to reverently submit to something greater than ourselves. We are obliged to give it an adequate response, to do good and avoid evil. Thus morality comes to a fundamental choice which is above the subjectively satisfying. Von Hildebrand is thus a moral realist.

 

I had the privilege of listening to Peter Geach a few years before he died. When I asked him a question after his talk, he responded by quoting from Dr. Faustus! He was one of the earliest Catholic analytical philosophers. He challenged the views of many of his predecessors, including Bertrand Russell. It was Geach who invented the problem of the “stuck potholer.” Is it wrong to intentionally kill a rotund individual blocking the entrance to a cave in order to save other lives? Yes, it is. Geach also wrote a philosophical explanation of why God does not change in himself when he hears our prayers and acts accordingly.

 

Geach was married to Elizabeth Anscombe, one of the most outstanding philosophers of the twentieth century. I attended some of her lectures in the eighties, when she was suitably attired in a manly suit. She was a student of Wittgenstein and his literary executer. She was a courageous defender of the unborn. Her great work Modern Moral Philosophy helped to launch contemporary virtue ethics. Dr. Vincelette notes that the work is often misunderstood by those who claim it rejects natural law theory. Actually, she argues that if you reject the existence of God, you should also give up on concepts like moral obligation. The main problem with modern moral philosophy, according to Anscombe, is in its embrace of a utilitarian point of view that rejects the principle of intrinsically evil acts.

 

Etienne Gilson was an outstanding historian of philosophy in the Thomist tradition, although he did not consider himself a Neo-Thomist. He was critical of the subjectivism of Descartes. If we proceed from thought to the world, we are unable to avoid being trapped in our own minds. We must begin with being. There is no need to make the existence of the world a postulate that needs to be proven. The realist  knows.

 

Like Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre is highly critical of modern moral philosophy as it has focused on utility. Morality must return to the Aristotelian idea of virtue. True virtue requires acting for the sake of a genuine human end. Such a virtue-based ethic requires being situated in a social setting and in a narrative tradition.

Dr. Vincelette has given us a splendid overview of some of the great recent Catholic philosophers. A work to return to again and again.

 

– Pravin Thevathasan, Editor, Catholic Medical Quarterly

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Dr. Alan Vincelette is the Wilfred L. and Mary Jane Von der Ahe Chair of Philosophy at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, California. In addition, he serves as an Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut.

Dr. Vincelette specializes in ethics and the philosophy of love as well as the history of Catholic philosophy, having written on such topics for the New Catholic Encyclopedia, the Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy, and the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Philosophers, among other works, and he continues to teach in these areas for seminarians and laity of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the Diocese of Norwich, and nearby dioceses.

OTHER CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHY BOOKS

Recent Catholic Philosophy: The Twentieth Century

by Alan Vincelette

5. Existentialism

Louis Lavelle (1883-1951)
Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973)
Xavier Zubiri y Apalátegui (1898-1983)
Leonardo Polo (1926-2013)
Ferdinand Ulrich (1931- )

6. Analytical Philosophy

Peter Geach (1916-2013)
Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe (1919-2001)
Michael Dummett (1925-2011)
Nicholas Rescher (1928- )
Alasdair MacIntyre (1929- )
Charles Margrave Taylor (1931- )
Francis Jacques (1934- )
Bas Van Fraassen (1941- )

7. Postmodernism

Michel De Certeau (1925-1986)
John Caputo (1940- )
Jean-Luc Marion (1946- )
Jean-Yves Lacoste (1953- )
William Desmond (1951- )
Richard Kearney (1954- )
Claude Romano (1967- )

INTERVIEWS

REVIEW

Recent Catholic Philosophy:

The Twentieth Century

by Alan Vincelette

En Route Books & Media

 

What a wonderful resource this turned out to be, along with Dr. Vincelette’s accompanying work A Reader in Recent Catholic Philosophy. For the purposes of this review I will look at some of my own personal favourite recent Catholic philosophers.

 

To begin with, Dr. Dietrich Von Hildebrand. Humanly speaking, I owe him so much. I read his books in the eighties and it made so much sense, especially with regard to the current crisis in the Church. Some might accuse him of an undue pessimism. I think he was right in his analysis. He is surely one of the great defenders of the Catholic Faith in our age. His book Ethics is an attack on moral relativism. Dr. Vincelette notes that the phenomenology adopted by Von Hildebrand is a suitable means to demonstrate the error of relativism, as phenomenology rejects any explanation which fails to do justice to our experiences. We are not limited by the senses as we can also reflect on mental experience. To claim that only what is physically experienced by the senses, as Hume and the Positivists do, is to limit what we mean by experience.

 

For Von Hildebrand, something has value independent of our need for pleasure. To delight in a value is a sort of added extra. A value has intrinsic goodness. It calls us to transcend self-centeredness. Our response to value means being called to reverently submit to something greater than ourselves. We are obliged to give it an adequate response, to do good and avoid evil. Thus morality comes to a fundamental choice which is above the subjectively satisfying. Von Hildebrand is thus a moral realist.

 

I had the privilege of listening to Peter Geach a few years before he died. When I asked him a question after his talk, he responded by quoting from Dr. Faustus! He was one of the earliest Catholic analytical philosophers. He challenged the views of many of his predecessors, including Bertrand Russell. It was Geach who invented the problem of the “stuck potholer.” Is it wrong to intentionally kill a rotund individual blocking the entrance to a cave in order to save other lives? Yes, it is. Geach also wrote a philosophical explanation of why God does not change in himself when he hears our prayers and acts accordingly.

 

Geach was married to Elizabeth Anscombe, one of the most outstanding philosophers of the twentieth century. I attended some of her lectures in the eighties, when she was suitably attired in a manly suit. She was a student of Wittgenstein and his literary executer. She was a courageous defender of the unborn. Her great work Modern Moral Philosophy helped to launch contemporary virtue ethics. Dr. Vincelette notes that the work is often misunderstood by those who claim it rejects natural law theory. Actually, she argues that if you reject the existence of God, you should also give up on concepts like moral obligation. The main problem with modern moral philosophy, according to Anscombe, is in its embrace of a utilitarian point of view that rejects the principle of intrinsically evil acts.

 

Etienne Gilson was an outstanding historian of philosophy in the Thomist tradition, although he did not consider himself a Neo-Thomist. He was critical of the subjectivism of Descartes. If we proceed from thought to the world, we are unable to avoid being trapped in our own minds. We must begin with being. There is no need to make the existence of the world a postulate that needs to be proven. The realist  knows.

 

Like Anscombe, Alasdair MacIntyre is highly critical of modern moral philosophy as it has focused on utility. Morality must return to the Aristotelian idea of virtue. True virtue requires acting for the sake of a genuine human end. Such a virtue-based ethic requires being situated in a social setting and in a narrative tradition.

Dr. Vincelette has given us a splendid overview of some of the great recent Catholic philosophers. A work to return to again and again.

 

– Pravin Thevathasan, Editor, Catholic Medical Quarterly

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Dr. Alan Vincelette is the Wilfred L. and Mary Jane Von der Ahe Chair of Philosophy at St. John’s Seminary in Camarillo, California. In addition, he serves as an Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at Holy Apostles College and Seminary in Cromwell, Connecticut.

Dr. Vincelette specializes in ethics and the philosophy of love as well as the history of Catholic philosophy, having written on such topics for the New Catholic Encyclopedia, the Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy, and the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Philosophers, among other works, and he continues to teach in these areas for seminarians and laity of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, the Diocese of Norwich, and nearby dioceses.

OTHER CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHY BOOKS

The Destructive Doctrines of Our Age

by Gerard M. Verschuuren

TESTIMONIALS

“A compelling critique of false ideas that disturb our minds even when we don’t even know they are infiltrating them! In 50 years of teaching why the errors refuted in this book are false, I have never come upon a more concise explanation than Verschuuren’s.” – Ronda Chervin, Professor Emerita, Holy Apostles College & Seminary, Cromwell, CT

“Phenomenal engagement of the most relevant issues of our day! A must-read for our students and graduates!” – Dr Sebastian Mahfood, OP, Trustee of Aquinas Institute of Theology, St Louis, MO

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Gerard M. Verschuuren is a human geneticist who also earned a doctorate in the philosophy of science. He studied and worked at universities in Europe and the United States. Currently semi-retired, he spends most of his time as a writer, speaker, and consultant on the interface of science and religion, faith and reason.

Currently, while semi-retired, he writes about issues at the interface of

• science and religion,
• science and creation,
• faith and reason.

All his books can be found at: www.where-do-we-come-from.com

OTHER CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHY BOOKS

Broken Hearts in a Broken World

by Gerard M. Verschuuren

TESTIMONIALS

“The causes and the cures of the brokenness and unhappiness in our broken, unhappy world are obviously many and complex, but this new book reduces the complexity to clarity and then prescribes with great good sense. This is a wise and provocative book that deserves to be read widely and put into effect everywhere.” — Russell Shaw, Consultor of the Pontifical Council for Social Communications, Adjunct professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome. Former Secretary for Public Affairs of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops/US Catholic Conference.

“Verschuuren’s book Broken Hearts in a Broken World is a wonderful treatise, full of fresh insights.  Using philosophy to refute skepticism and relativism, Verschuuren also provides a panoramic view of all that gives us hope in our Christian vision. There is no cliché advice, but instead blunt, witty, realistic and compassionate analysis of the ills of our times and the wounds in our hearts.” – Ronda Chervin, Professor Emerita, Holy Apostles College & Seminary, Cromwell, CT

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Gerard M. Verschuuren is a human geneticist who also earned a doctorate in the philosophy of science. He studied and worked at universities in Europe and the United States. Currently semi-retired, he spends most of his time as a writer, speaker, and consultant on the interface of science and religion, faith and reason.

Currently, while semi-retired, he writes about issues at the interface of

• science and religion,
• science and creation,
• faith and reason.

All his books can be found at: www.where-do-we-come-from.com

OTHER CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHY BOOKS