In this book, John M. Rist offers an account of the concept of 'person' as it has developed in the West, and how it has become alien in a post-Christian culture. He begins by identifying the 'mainline tradition' about persons as it evolved from the time of Plato to the High Middle Ages, then turns to successive attacks on it in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, then proceeds to the 'five ways' in which the tradition was savaged or distorted in the nineteenth century and beyond. He ...

The doctrinal and structural revolution currently underway in the Roman Catholic Church is alarming for several reasons, not least because of the arbitrary nature of its imposition and the absence of resistance it has encountered. The reluctance of many to challenge the authority of the pope, tied to the increasing personal veneration by the faithful of each successive incumbent of the Holy See, is arguably a symptom of unresolved unclarity surrounding the nature of authority in the Church...

Augustine established a moral framework that dominated Western culture for more than a thousand years. His partly flawed presentation of some of its key concepts (love, will and freedom), however, prompted subsequent thinkers to attempt to repair this framework, and their efforts often aggravated the very problems they intended to solve. Over time, dissatisfaction with an imperfect Augustinian theology gave way to increasingly secular and eventually impersonal moral systems. This volume tr...

The Reading Augustine series presents concise, personal readings of St. Augustine of Hippo from leading philosophers and religious scholars.John Rist takes the reader through Augustine's ethics, the arguments he made and how he arrived at them, and shows how this moral philosophy remains vital for us today. Rist identifies Augustine's challenge to all ideas of moral autonomy, concentrating especially on his understanding of humility as an honest appraisal of our moral state. He loo...

In their trenchant panoramic overview – ranging from antiquity to the present-day – John and Anna Rist write with authority and ennui about nothing less than the loss of the foundational culture of the West. The authors characterize this culture as the 'original tradition', viewing its erosion as one which has led to anxiety about the entire value of Western thought. The causes of the disintegration are discussed with an intensity rare in academe. Critics of modernity ordinarily concentrat...

Sin dejar de lado los problemas más canónicos de la losofía, sistematizados por Aristóteles, los estoicos tu- vieron la habilidad de vincular la re exión losó ca más profunda con los problemas más cotidianos del ser humano. El destino y la necesidad, el sufrimiento y la muerte, el placer y el dolor, la verdad y el error son rea- lidades que plantean preguntas aún no resueltas. Quizá sea esta la razón por la que la losofía estoica nunca ha pasado de moda.

Originally published in 1940, this book traces the development of theories concerning currency and credit from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the middle of the twentieth. It provides a comprehensive account of the political and economic conditions in which the theories and controversies arose, with the result that the work has become a classic in its field.