What Plato Advises

Read Schall's columns at:

TheCatholicThing.org

CrisisMagazine.com

FirstPrinciplesJournal.com

Catholicity.com

Schall's IgnatiusInsight.com
columns are archived here

Read Schall on Johnson
and Another Sort of Learning

Catholic Mind:
James V. Schall on
Embracing the Whole of Reality

The mind that is Catholic is open to all sources of information, including what comes from Revelation.

Revelation is not opposed to reason as if it were some blind source.
Revelation has its own intelligibility that can be grasped and compared or addressed to what we know in reason.

Catholicism does not define reason as if it only meant a reason that follows some methodology where the terms of the method decide what we are allowed to see or consider.

The very definition of mind is that power that is open to all that is.

We human beings are not gods.
But we do know and the object of our knowledge is all that is.
It is characteristic of the Catholic mind to insist that all that is knowable is available and considered by us in our reflections on reality.

The Mind That Is Catholic
[Buy the book now]
[Read the review]
[Schall on "Aristotle on Friendship"]

More books by Schall
(and an almost complete bibliography)

What is Political Philosophy?

What is 'Roman Catholic
Political Philosophy'?

Read the book reviews
of James V. Schall's
Roman Catholic Political Philosophy

Review by
Christopher S. Morrissey

Review by
Robert Reilly

Review by
Tracey Rowland

Revelation and Political Philosophy:
An Exchange with James V. Schall, S.J.

An interview with Schall about his article,
James V. Schall, "Revelation and Political Philosophy: On Locating the Best City", Telos 148 (Fall 2009): 16-27.

The Present American Polity
Never forget that freedom not based in truth is license. In Sermon 7 of Subjects of the Day, Newman wrote: "The world has many sins, but its peculiar offence is that of daring to reason contrary to God’s Word and will. It puts wrong aims before itself, and acts towards them. It goes wrong as if on principle, and prefers its own way of viewing things to God’s way." A better description of the present direction of our polity is difficult to find. We go wrong "on principle."

Libraries without Readers
All the books in the world may not be enough for us to know what is worth knowing. There are probably things to know even when we know all the things in our world that are given to us to know. The last lines in the Gospel of John say much the same thing. Seneca said it is better to “give yourself to a few authors than to stray through many.” Existence is not reading but living. Yet the world itself is “word”-oriented. It not only needs to exist but it needs to be spoken into the existence of our active minds.

Read James V. Schall on David Walsh

On the Measure and Conservation of Human Things
Modern Age 43:1 (Winter 2001)

"Attempts are often made to convince people that we have reached the twilight of the age of certainty in the knowledge of truth, and that we are irrevocably condemned to the total absence of meaning, the provisional nature of all knowledge, and to permanent instability and relativity," John Paul II remarked in an address to Rectors of Polish Universities.

"In this situation, it appears imperative to reaffirm a basic confidence in human reason and its capacity to know the truth, including absolute and definitive truth. Man is capable of elaborating a uniform and organic conception of knowledge. The fragmentation of knowledge destroys man’s inner unity. Man aspires to the fullness of knowledge, since he is a being who by his very nature seeks the truth and cannot live without it. Contemporary scholarship, and especially present day philosophy, each in its own sphere, needs to rediscover that sapiential dimension which consists in the search for the definitive and overall meaning of human existence."

Schall on The Not-So-Dark Ages

On the Fragility of Islam

Sylvain Gouguenheim, Aristote au Mont-Saint-Michel