Böcker av Thomas Molnar

Thomas Molnar's Bernanos is an illuminating study of the personal evolution of the French Catholic novelist Georges Bernanos from a reactionary royalist to a religiously principled anti-fascist. It also provides a detailed account of the intellectual divisions within the French Catholic Right and suggests a number of parallels with intellectual and literary figures on the secular and religious left including Zola, Peguy, and Simone Weil. But, as Molnar points out, the significance of Bernanos is not exhausted by his writings. Bernanos the man is as deserving of attention as is Bernanos the novelist, essayist, and social critic.Molnar shows Bernanos against the troubled political-religious background of modern France: the Dreyfus case, the disillusionment following World War I, the Franco regime, Vichy, and the beginnings of the cold war. Whatever touched France touched Bernanos, and he flung himself into each crisis, not armed with a political system nor an academically sanctioned philosophy, but with a peasant's respect for what is and a Christian's sense of what might be. The portrait that Molnar draws is that of a passionately concerned Christian who knows that truth is hard to come by, but who is ready to follow it wherever it leads, regardless of the consequences.A crucial theme covered by Molnar is Bernanos' long and conflicted relations with Charles Maurras and the Action Francaise. He makes clear the extent to which Bernanos' fervent Catholicism set him apart from Maurras whose positivistic inspiration and passion for order helped lay the groundwork for the political collapse that led to the Vichy regime. Thomas Molnar's book is a fascinating account of Georges Bernanos' stature as both a political thinker and an important novelist. Bernanos will be enjoyed by historians, political scientists, philosophers, theologians, and scholars of literature.

From its earliest beginnings and through much of its history, the philosophical enterprise has rooted its intellectual procedures in common sense. Ordinary discourse is what the pre-Socratic thinkers did at the dawn of speculation. The same approach was characteristic of the medieval mystics, Pascal in the seventeenth century, and Gaston Bachelard in the twentieth century. However with the ascendency of the physical sciences, mathematics, and depth psychology as influences in contemporary thought, philosophical language and forms of expression became increasingly distant from ordinary language. This created estrangement and confusion in the learner's mind. In Return to Philosophy Thomas Molnar diagnoses the verbal derailment of philosophy shows how it might be reconnected to the realities of human life. Return to Philosophy is a unique endeavor. Molnar's book unmasks the modern derailment and shows that many leading philosophers do not so much philosophize, but merely elaborate verbal-technical instruments in what may be little more than trivial language games. This volume will be of interest to philosophers, cultural historians, and sociologists.

In Archetypes of Thought, originally published in 1991 with the title Philosophical Grounds, Thomas Molnar follows seven basic themes of Western philosophical speculation from their development in the earliest times of systematic thought through their evolution through the centuries and civilizations to the present

From its earliest beginnings and through much of its history, the philosophical enterprise has rooted its intellectual procedures in common sense. Ordinary discourse is what the pre-Socratic thinkers did at the dawn of speculation. The same approach was characteristic of the medieval mystics, Pascal in the seventeenth century, and Gaston Bachelard in the twentieth century. However with the ascendency of the physical sciences, mathematics, and depth psychology as influences in contemporary thought, philosophical language and forms of expression became increasingly distant from ordinary language. This created estrangement and confusion in the learner's mind. In Return to Philosophy Thomas Molnar diagnoses the verbal derailment of philosophy shows how it might be reconnected to the realities of human life. Return to Philosophy is a unique endeavor. Molnar's book unmasks the modern derailment and shows that many leading philosophers do not so much philosophize, but merely elaborate verbal-technical instruments in what may be little more than trivial language games. This volume will be of interest to philosophers, cultural historians, and sociologists.

In perhaps his most famous book, The Decline of the Intellectual, Thomas Molnar launches into a fundamental critique of the intellectual class

Ideological warfare against authority, especially in the world of higher education, broke out in the 1960s, and continues into the 1990s

In perhaps his most famous book, The Decline of the Intellectual, Thomas Molnar launches into a fundamental critique of the intellectual class

Ideological warfare against authority, especially in the world of higher education, broke out in the 1960s, and continues into the 1990s. No source or symbol of authority escaped untouched-neither parents nor teachers nor the cop on the beat. While the hippies have gone underground or disappeared entirely, the assault on legitimate authority continues unabated. As familiar institutions crumble before our eyes, befuddled liberals and conservatives alike throw up their hands in despair. In Authority and Its Enemies, Thomas Molnar asserts that the Western world is reeling from an overdose of freedom without order or authority.

In Archetypes of Thought, originally published in 1991 with the title Philosophical Grounds, Thomas Molnar follows seven basic themes of Western philosophical speculation from their development in the earliest times of systematic thought through their evolution through the centuries and civilizations to the present

First published in 1981. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.