Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Pieper, Josef

  • Strange Anti-Epicurean Bedfellows

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  • Platonism and Christianity: Josef Pieper on Phaedrus 246c

    At the center of the confrontation between Platonism and Christianity on the question of the survival of death lies the tension: immortality of the soul or resurrection of the body? More fully:  immortality of the disembodied soul or resurrection of the en-souled body? Connected with this is the question of whether and to what extent…

  • Beyond Philosophy

    Josef Pieper, Death and Immortality, trs. Richard and Clara Winston, Herder and Herder, 1969, pp. 129-130. Originally in German under the title Tod und Unsterblichkeit in 1968: Thus we have now at last touched, and perhaps overstepped, the boundary which is set for the philosophical enquirer. Really to reach this boundary — therein lies, I…

  • The Uselessness of Stoicism in the Face of Death

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  • The Uselessness of Stoicism in the Face of Death

    Josef Pieper, Death and Immortality (Herder and Herder, 1969), p.101: But the profound discord and hidden infirmity, with which the Stoic doctrine was already infected at its root in classical times, is nowhere revealed so baldly as in its attitude toward death. There is nothing surprising about this. The maxim not to let our hearts…

  • Strange Anti-Epicurean Bedfellows: Josef Pieper, Thomist and David Benatar, Anti-Natalist

    Many find the Epicurean reasoning about death sophistical. Among those who do, we encounter some strange bedfellows. To compress the famous reasoning into a trio of sentences: When we are, death is not. When death is, we are not. Therefore, death is nothing to us, and nothing to fear. The distinguished German Thomist, Josef Pieper,…

  • Ubi Amor, Ibi Oculus

    They say that love is blind.  But if love blinds, is it love?  Or is it rather infatuation?  "Where there is love, there is sight."  I found this fine Latin aphorism in Josef Pieper, Death and Immortality (Herder and Herder, 1969, p. 21).  The translation is mine.  Pieper credits Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences…

  • Incarnation: A Mystical Approach?

    I have been, and will continue,  discussing Trinity and Incarnation objectively, that is, in an objectifying manner.  Now what do I mean by that?  Well, with respect to the Trinity, the central conundrum, to put it in a very crude and quick way is this:  How can three things be one thing?  With respect to the…

  • Knowledge Without Belief: A Dallas Willard-Josef Pieper Connection

    A commenter on the Pieper post notes that Dallas Willard has a understanding of the belief-knowledge relation (or lack of relation) similar to that of Pieper. A little searching brought me to the following passage in Willard's Knowledge and Naturalism which substantiates the commenter's suggestion (I have bolded the parts relevant to my current concerns):

  • A Pieperian Argument for Doxastic Voluntarism

    Josef Pieper (1904-1997) is a 20th century German Thomist. I read his Belief and Faith as an undergraduate and am now [December 2007] re-reading it very carefully. It is an excellent counterbalance to a lot of the current analytic stuff on belief and doxastic voluntarism. What follows is my reconstruction of Pieper's argument for doxastic…