This series provides a forum for the critical review of enduring issues concerning ethics and society. The text of the debate between Herbert Marcuse and Sir Karl Popper which follows in this volume raises many important issues. The crucial issues between the two participants are (1) their anthropological-axiological positions with respect to the “nature” of man, society, and the practical functions of democracy as a mode of self-government; (2) the conceptions of science and of philosophy...

Written simply yet comprehensively, Molnar's anlaysis of the history of philosophy and false mysticism leads him to conclude that a return to a moderate realism will save the philosophical enterprise from a series of epistemological and societal absolutes that are embodied in contemporary rationalism and mysticism alike. Issues that have been systematically excluded from discourse will have to be reintroduced into the discussion of person and providence Molnar divided the philosophical sys...

Ideological warfare against authority, especially in the world of higher education, broke out in the 1960s, and continues into the 1990s. No source or symbol of authority escaped untouched neither parents nor teachers nor the cop on the beat. While the hippies have gone underground or disappeared entirely, the assault on legitimate authority continues unabated. As familiar institutions crumble before our eyes, befuddled liberals and conservatives alike throw up their hands in despair. In

From its earliest beginnings and through much of its history, the philosophical enterprise has rooted its intellectual procedures in common sense. Ordinary discourse is what the pre-Socratic thinkers did at the dawn of speculation. The same approach was characteristic of the medieval mystics, Pascal in the seventeenth century, and Gaston Bachelard in the twentieth century. However with the ascendency of the physical sciences, mathematics, and depth psychology as influences in contemporary ...

In perhaps his most famous book, The Decline of the Intellectual, Thomas Molnar launches into a fundamental critique of the intellectual class. He sees it as a group that had lost its way, collapsing a sense of vision into political activism, social engineering, and culture manipulation, and abandoning the writing, philosophizing, and scholarship that had occupied their predecessors. Universities began to produce factory-like, faceless citizens, as the job market became the arbiter of educ...

Thomas Molnar's Bernanos is an illuminating study of the personal evolution of the French Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos from a reactionary royalist to a religiously principled anti-fascist. It also provides a detailed account of the intellectual divisions within the French Catholic Right and suggests a number of parallels with intellectual and literary figures on the secular and religious left including Zola, Peguy, and Simone Weil. But, as Molnar points out, the significance of Berna...

In Archetypes of Thought, originally published in 1991 with the title Philosophical Grounds, Thomas Molnar follows seven basic themes of Western philosophical speculation from their development in the earliest times of systematic thought through their evolution through the centuries and civilizations to the present. Some of the themes are origin and its reflection, guilt of being, one and the multiple, the temptation of mechanization, and nocturnal man. The book is neither a chronological ...

"Succinct and accessible" this international bestselling survey is "perfect for anyone who wants to dip their toe into the waters of philosophy" (Matt Haig, Washington Post).From the timeless wisdom of the ancient Greeks to Christianity, the Enlightenment, existentialism, and postmodernism, Luc Ferry's instant classic brilliantly and accessibly explains the enduring teachings of philosophy—including its profound relevance to modern daily life and its essent...

The imminent philosopher and theologian examines religion in light of science and philosophy in modern society.Originally published more than fifty years ago, The Courage to Be has become a classic of twentieth-century religious and philosophical thought. The great Christian existentialist thinker Paul Tillich describes the dilemma of modern man and points a way to the conquest of the prob-lem of anxiety. This edition includes a new introduction by Harvey Cox that s...

Alexander Dugin's Political Platonism offers a seminal analysis of the contemporary philosophical crisis from one of the best-known writers and political commentators in post-Soviet Russia. Through a series of essays, course transcripts, and a single long interview—each remarkable for the depth of its learning and the boldness of its vision—Dugin exposes the profoundest roots of the Western philosophical tradition, offering his view of why it has reached its final terminus, and hi...

A militant Marxist atheist and a “Radical Orthodox” Christian theologian square off on everything from the meaning of theology and Christ to the war machine of corporate mafia.“What matters is not so much that Žižek is endorsing a demythologized, disenchanted Christianity without transcendence, as that he is offering in the end (despite what he sometimes claims) a heterodox version of Christian belief.”—John Milbank“To put it even more bluntly, my claim is ...

Peter Sloterdijk turns his keen eye to the history of western thought, conducting colorful readings of the lives and ideas of the world's most influential intellectuals. Featuring nineteen vignettes rich in personal characterizations and theoretical analysis, Sloterdijk's companionable volume casts the development of philosophical thinking not as a buildup of compelling books and arguments but as a lifelong, intimate struggle with intellectual and spiritual movements, filled with as many p...