Dr. James A. Harold's Book:

An Introduction to the Love of Wisdom: An Essential and Existential Approach to Philosophy, published by University Press of America (ISBN 0761830065)

This text investigates the objects and method of the discipline of philosophy, as distinct from the objects and methods of the empirical sciences. The objects philosophy studies-person, truth, value, God, meaning, evil, obligation, freedom, among others-are inherently interesting to persons whose lives are awakened. Furthermore, in modern academia and in life there is so much analysis and compartmentalization that people can come to confuse the forest for the trees. Philosophy is in a unique position to help people synthetically make connections across disciplines, as well as to order truths within the context of the whole of reality. One of the goals of this text is to help students see the different disciplines they are studying within the context of their own life experience and within the unity of all truth. Another goal of the text is to help students think for themselves, that is, to help them discover truth via their own intellectual powers of insight and deductive proof, as opposed to all kinds of ideology and propaganda. Thinking for one's self is one mode of growing up as a person. Not only should a person learn to think for one's self, but also to think according to what is true. Philosophy is not about making things up, but rather in discovering the way things are in truth. The ultimate goal of this text is not merely to help students discover the discipline of philosophy, but also to help them apply these philosophical insights to their own experience of life. For after all, to be in a right relation to truth, goodness and beauty is a mode of happiness.

Book Co-Authored by Dr. Jonathan J. Sanford

Categories: Historical and Systematic Essays
Michael Gorman and Jonathan J. Sanford (eds.).

Without categories we would be speechless and thoughtless. But what are categories? How exactly are they used in speaking and thinking? What role do they play in our moral deliberations? Why are there different sorts of categories? And are categories independent of our thinking and speaking, giving objective form to the world we aim to think and speak about? These and other questions have been part of philosophy from the very beginning, and they raise foundational issues in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and other branches of philosophy. But pursuing answers to these questions has proven difficult, because investigations into categories push us to the very limits of what we can know.

The essays in this volume, written by a mix of well-established and younger philosophers, bridge divides between historical and systematic approaches as well as divides between analytical, continental, and American traditions. They offer new interpretations of Aristotle, Confucius, Aquinas, Buridan, Kant, Pierce, Husserl, and Wittgenstein, and they challenge received views on normativity, the value of set theory, the objectivity of category schemes, and other topics. The volume should be of interest to professional philosophers, graduate students, and anyone interested in how the world is divided.