Josef Pieper

One of the most important philosophy titles published in the twentieth century, Josef Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture is more significant, even more crucial, today than it was when it first appeared fifty years ago. Pieper shows that the Greeks understood and valued leisure, as did the medieval Europeans. He points out that religion can be born only in leisure -- a leisure that allows time for the contemplation of the nature of God. Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture. He maintains that our bourgeois world of total labor has vanquished leisure, and issues a startling warning: Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for nonactivity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture -- and ourselves. These astonishing essays contradict all our pragmatic and puritanical conceptions about labor and leisure; Josef Pieper demolishes the twentieth-century cult of "work" as he predicts its destructive consequences.

Leisure, the Basis of Culture

Four Cardinal Virtues

The popular and highly regarded Josef Pieper speaks of the necessity for human persons to be able to contemplate and appreciate beauty to develop their full humanity. Pieper expresses succinctly that the foundation of the human person in society is leisure, free time in which one can contemplate, be receptive to being and its beauty.

Art and Contemplation

Only the Lover Sings

One of the most important philosophy titles published in the twentieth century, Josef Pieper's Leisure, the Basis of Culture is more significant, even more crucial, today than it was when it first appeared more than fifty years ago. This edition also includes his work The Philosophical Act. Leisure is an attitude of the mind and a condition of the soul that fosters a capacity to perceive the reality of the world. Pieper shows that the Greeks and medieval Europeans, understood the great value and importance of leisure. He also points out that religion can be born only in leisure - a leisure that allows time for the contemplation of the nature of God. Leisure has been, and always will be, the first foundation of any culture. Pieper maintains that our bourgeois world of total labor has vanquished leisure, and issues a startling warning: Unless we regain the art of silence and insight, the ability for non-activity, unless we substitute true leisure for our hectic amusements, we will destroy our culture - and ourselves.

The Basis of Culture

Leisure

One of the great Catholic philosophers of our day reflects on the way language has been abused so that, instead of being a means of communicating the truth and entering more deeply into it, and of the acquisition of wisdom, it is being used to control people and manipulate them to achieve practical ends. Reality becomes intelligible through words. Man speaks so that through naming things, what is real may become intelligible. This mediating character of language, however, is being increasingly corrupted. Tyranny, propaganda, mass-media destroy and distort words. They offer us apparent realities whose fictive character threatens to become opaque. Josef Pieper shows with energetic zeal, but also with ascetical restraint, the path out of this dangerous situation. We are constrained to see things again as they are and from the truth thus grasped, to live and to work.

Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power

This volume, three separate books in one edition, is a collection of Josef Pieper's famous treatises on the three theological virtues of Faith, Hope, and Love. Pieper is perhaps the most popular Thomist philosopher of the twentieth century.

Faith, Hope, Love

One of the great philosophers of the 20th Century, Josef Pieper, gives a penetrating introduction and guide to the life and works of perhaps the greatest philosopher ever, St. Thomas Aquinas. Pieper provides a biography of Aquinas, an overview of the 13th century he lived in, and a wonderful synthesis of his vast writings. Pieper shows how Aquinas reconciled the pragmatic thought of Aristotle with the Church, proving that realistic knowledge need not preclude belief in the spiritual realities of religion. According to Pieper, the marriage of faith and reason proposed by Aquinas in his great synthesis of a "theologically founded worldliness" was not merely one solution among many, but the great principle expressing the essence of the Christian West. Pieper reveals his extraordinary command of original sources and excellent secondary materials as he illuminates the thought of the great intellectual Doctor of the Church.

Guide to Thomas Aquinas

The interpretation offered here focuses on Plato's thesis, which at first sight appears strange and unrealistic, that those experiences that advance human life to its true fullness are bestowed on us only during a "god-given" state of "being-beside-oneself". This thesis is then resolutely confronted with our contemporary and above all psychoanalytical knowledge of man's nature, as well as with the Christian conception of man's existence, thus revealing its amazing, unexpected relevance.

Plato's Case Against Secular Humanism

"Divine Madness"

"This is a masterpiece of a forgotten virtue by one of the great Christian philosophers of the twentieth century"--Publisher's description.

On Hope

"Josef Pieper's account of the centrality and meaning of the virtues is a needed primer to teach us exactly the meaning and relationship of the virtues and how they relate to the faith and its own special virtues. Pieper's attention is ever to the particular virtue, its precise meaning, and to its contribution to the wholeness that constituted an ordered, active, and truthful human life. No better brief account of the virtues can be found. Pieper has long instructed us in these realities that need to be made operative in each life as it touches all else 'that is', as Pieper himself often puts it." — James V. Schall, S.J., Georgetown University "A fine and thought provoking examination of the relationship between the mind, heart, and moral life of the human person." — John Cardinal O'Connor, Archbishop of New York "Pieper's sentences are admirably constructed and his ideas are expressed with maximum clarity. He restores to philosophy what common sense obstinately tells us ought to be found there: wisdom and insight." — T. S. Eliot

A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart

"The ultimate of human happiness is to be found in contemplation". In offering this proposition of Thomas Aquinas to our thought, Josef Pieper uses traditional wisdom in order to throw light on present-day reality and present-day psychological problems. What, in fact, does one pursue in pursuing happiness? What, in the consensus of the wisdom of the early Greeks, of Plato and Aristotle, of the New Testament, of Augustine and Aquinas, is that condition of perfect bliss toward which all life and effort tend by nature? In this profound and illuminating inquiry, Pieper considers the nature of contemplation, and the meaning and goal of life.

Happiness and Contemplation

"Demonstrates the unsound overvaluation of moderation that has made contemporary morality a hollow convention and points out the true significance of the Christian virtues that can and should make morality a dynamic way of life." --Publisher.

The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance

A Theory of Festivity

In Tune With the World

This book is an engagement between a great modern philosopher defending classical philosophy against an army of challengers to the very notion of philosophy as classically conceived. It is written very much in the spirit of the "scholastic disputations" in the medieval universities, which produced the great Summas: a mutual search for truth, a philosophical laboratory, a careful winnowing of each objection. Such objectivity is lamentably rare in contemporary philosophy. In order to combat modern misunderstandings of challenges to the classical concept of philosophy, Pieper shows us the unique and uniquely valuable thing philosophy is as conceived by his masters: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and above all, Aquinas. Along this path he scatters gems of insight, such as: art and religion as Philosophy's defenders; the relationship between philosophy and science; philosophy as "seeing and saying"; and philosophy as rooted in meditation and loving contemplation. Pieper emphasizes that philosophy is something all human beings do, and should be the better for doing.

Classical Wisdom Stands Up to Modern Challenges

In Defense of Philosophy

concept and claim

Tradition

ÊLiving the TruthÊincludes two other Pieper books:ÊTruth of All ThingsÊandÊReality and the Good. This volume presents illuminating treatises of Josef Pieper on Thomistic anthropology and on the principles of right human behavior based on anthropology. With his customary lucidity, Pieper shows how all reality is positioned between the mind of God and the mind of man and is the basis for both man's unquenchable yearning and the measure of all man's knowledge. He then develops the Thomistic position that reality is also the basis for the good and therefore the norm of conscience and ethical action. As Pieper himself expresses in part of the thesis of the second treatise, "An insight into the nature of the good as rooted in objective being, of itself compels us to carry it out in a definite human attitude, and it makes certain attitudes impossible." Josef Pieper was schooled in the Greek classics and the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas. He also studied philosophy, law and sociology, and has been a professor at the University of Munster, Germany. His books have been widely praised by both the secular and religious press.

Living the Truth

"The book closes with Pieper's thoughts on the permanent philosophical and theological significance of scholasticism and the Middle Ages. Once again, wearing his learning lightly, writing with a clarity that delights, Josef Pieper has taken the field from stuffier and more extended accounts."--BOOK JACKET.

Personalities and Problems of Medieval Philosophy

Scholasticism

Concept and Claim

A single theme runs through the three essays on St. Thomas gather in this book. It is the theme of mystery or, more exactly, the response of the searching human intellect to the fact of mystery. Both the fact and the response are suggested in a short biography of St. Thomas that forms the first essay and are then sketched out in detail by a presentation of the "negative element" in his philosophy. The third essay shows that contemporary Existentialism is in basic agreement with the philosophia perennis on this fundamental element of philosophical thinking.

Three Essays

The Silence of St. Thomas

In this stimulating and still-timely study, Josef Pieper takes up a theme of paramount importance to his thinking - that festivals belong by rights among the great topics of philosophical discussion. Pieper exposes the pseudo-festivals, in their harmless and their sinister forms; traditional feasts contaminated by commercialism; artificial holidays created in the interest of merchandisers; holidays by coercion, decreed by dictators the world over; festivals as military demonstrations; holidays empty of significance. And lastly we are given the apocalyptic vision of a nihilistic world which would seek its release not in festivities but in destruction.

Josef Pieper

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