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In The Four Cardinal Virtues, Joseph Pieper delivers a stimulating quartet of essays on the four cardinal virtues. He demonstrates the unsound overvaluation of moderation that has made contemporary morality a hollow convention and points out the true significance of the Christian virtues.
“Dr. Pieper, with his grounding in Scholastic thinking, especially Thomas Aquinas, brings to the reader an interpretation of this classical tradition that has things to say about the human person today. He attempts to make what could become a list of requirements for ethical behavior into a human quest for the wisdom that enables one to become the kind of person one strives to be.” —Studies in Formative Spirituality
“Oddly tantalizing. . . The discussion is historically broad (Platonism to Heidegger), and the parallels drawn are often surprisingly sharp.” —Kirkus Reviews
"The inalienable rights of the individual...consist of the freedom to enjoy one's gifts and dignity as a creature as they are employed within and directed toward the social whole. Since all of this is based, not upon ethnicity, but upon common human nature, Pieper does not hesitate to point out that the totalitarian state emerges wherever human nature is denied." –Theological Studies
Josef Pieper (1904-1997) was a distinguished twentieth-century Thomist philosopher. Schooled in the Greek classics and in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, he studied philosophy, law, and sociology, and taught for many years at the University of Münster, Germany.