- Home
- philosophy
- religion
- Becoming What We Are
Preparing your PDF for download...
There was a problem with your download, please contact the server administrator.
Becoming What We Are
Classical and Christian Readings of Modernity
Imprint: Catholic University of America Press
Becoming What We Are is a collection of essays and reviews written in the last decade by the late Jude Dougherty, which covey a perspective on contemporary events and literature, written from a classical and Christian perspective. These essays convey a worldview much in need of restating when, according to Dougherty, Western society seems to have lost its bearings, in its legislative assemblies and in its judicial systems as well. Dougherty writes as a philosopher, specifically as one who has devoted most of his life to the study of metaphysics.
In these pages Dougherty examines the Jacobians, the empirical world of Hume, Locke and Hobbes, and Kant, the metaphysics of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics and Aquinas that opens one to God and provides on with a moral compass, and critiques the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and John Dewey.
Becoming What We Are spends some time inquiring into the character of a few great men viz. George Washington, Charles De Gaulle and Moses Maimonides. Dougherty draws upon and shows respect for numerous contemporary authors who are engaged in research and analysis similar to his. The intent is, with the aid of others to restate some ancient but neglected truths. But more than that to show that true science is possible, that nature and human nature yield to human enquiry, that science is not to be confused with description and prediction.
Jude P. Dougherty (1930-2021) was Dean Emeritus of the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, and served as Editor-in-Chief of The Review of Metaphysics for forty-four years.
"Serves as a model for personal reflection, coming from a formidable scholar, both on an impressive range of academic studies, literature, and also on contentious current events."
~James G. Hanink, editor of In Search of Harmony: Metaphysics and Politics
"This collection of 28 reviews and essays reveals the flashes of ethical, political, and metaphysical insight that characterized the mind of Jude P. Dougherty, the late great Dean of the School of Philosophy at the Catholic University of America. It is a volume well worth reading in order to glean the wisdom gained from his engagement with numerous contemporary authors on the great figures and issues of intellectual life through the centuries. This book is a fitting tribute to Dougherty’s breadth of philosophical pursuits and the acumen of his cultural criticism."
~John P. Hittinger, University of St. Thomas
"For three decades Jude Dougherty’s sure hand steered Catholic University’s School of Philosophy through the rough seas of American academic and cultural life. But through all of his practical labors Dean Dougherty never stopped reading and thinking. During his very active retirement years, the fruit of that reflection appeared in a dizzying flow of essays and books. This last volume contains 28 pieces that exemplify his constant concern to elucidate the classical and Christian roots of Western civilization for a world increasingly neglectful of its inheritance. His thinking in these essays unfolds, as it often did, in dialogue with important figures from the tradition, both philosophers and statesmen including Cicero, Maimonides, Durkheim, Maritain, De Gaulle, and Santayana, as well as recent thinkers like Remi Brague and Pierre Manent. Dean Dougherty’s central intellectual commitment concerned the importance of metaphysics to human affairs, a commitment crystalized in the ancient injunction that gives this volume its apt title: ‘become what you are.'"
~V. Bradley Lewis, The Catholic University of America
"Jude Dougherty is truly a man for all seasons, an exemplar of just the sort of person Catholic education in its highest form should produce. Dougherty is very much a Renaissance man, a humanist in the Ciceronian and Erasmian tradition. Through and through a student of St. Thomas in the best sense of the word. While celebrated for his decades-long work as editor of the Review of Metaphysics and trusted for his reliability to produce scholarly work of the highest caliber, Jude is more than a scholar. He is an original thinker, a Christian philosopher, who, like Gilson and St. Thomas, mines the work of the ancients to discover the truth about things and share it with others."
~Peter Redpath, Founder and CEO, Aquinas School of Leadership
Related Books
