Gilbert Meilaender

War, like the poor, we have always with us. Continued reflection upon warfare is, therefore, one of the first things that must occupy the public life of any people. And anyone needing to engage in such reflection could scarcely find a better place to start than Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust . . . . Continue Reading »

Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues by Alasdair MacIntyre, Open Court. 166 pp. $26.95 The MacIntyre Reader edited by Kelvin Knight, University of Notre Dame Press. 300 pp. $40 It would be hard to think of any book of moral phi“losophy written in the last fifty years . . . . Continue Reading »

When John Lawlor became a student at Magdalen College of Oxford University in October of 1936, he found that C. S. Lewis was to be his tutor. At that time, of course, he knew nothing in particular of Lewis, but over the next three years as student”and more years after that as friend and . . . . Continue Reading »

How refreshing and intellectually stimulating it is to read a philosopher”and one as smart as Thomas Nagel”say a favorable word on behalf of Descartes. In a time when “Cartesian” has almost become a pejorative term, Nagel invites us to have second thoughts. He does so in order . . . . Continue Reading »

Among the “first things” of life in the classical world of Greece and Rome was friendship. As an intimate, affectionate, and loyal bond between two (or a few) persons, a bond unlike those of kin or tribe in that it is not simply given with birth, friendship will always have about it something a . . . . Continue Reading »

Over the past several decades both philosophers and theologians within the academy have participated in a revival of interest in what is generally called “virtue ethics”-an ethic that focuses not so much upon what we ought to do, but upon character, upon the sort of persons we ought to . . . . Continue Reading »

The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy by J.B. Scheewind Cambridge University Press, 624 pages, $69.95 cloth, $24.95 The autonomy whose invention J. B. Schneewind explores in this long and magisterial history of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century moral philosophy is Kantian . . . . Continue Reading »

Choosing the Right College: The Whole Truth about America’s Top 100 Schools Compiled by the Staff of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute. Introduction by William J. Bennett. Eerdmans, 680 pages, $25 In February 1997 the Chicago Tribune carried a front-page article on recent moves in some . . . . Continue Reading »

Human Cloning: Religious Responses Edited By Ronald Cole-Turner. Westminister/ John Knox. 151 pp. $15 The nature of public policy debates in the United States in recent years has tended to exclude-or, at least, to suggest that we ought to exclude-religious considerations. They are suspect in the . . . . Continue Reading »

“One is sometimes (not often) glad not to be a great theologian. One might so easily confuse it with being a good Christian.” Thus C. S. Lewis wrote in Reflections on the Psalms . Similarly, Lewis’ religious writings are full of asides to the effect that he is not a theologian and . . . . Continue Reading »