The tradition of natural law is one of the foundations of Western civilization. At its heart is the conviction that there is an objective and universal justice which transcends humanity's particular expressions of justice. It asserts that there are certain ways of behaving which are appropriate to humanity simply by virtue of the fact that we are all human beings. Recent political debates indicate that it is not a tradition that has gone unchallenged: in fact, the opposition is as old as the tradition itself. By distinguishing between philosophy and ideology, by recalling the historical...

From the Foreward by Mortimer J. Adler Of all the question or issues concerning human freedom, none is more fundamental in itself and in its consequences than the problem of free choice; and none has been the subject of more persistent and, at the same time, apparently irresolvable controversy.This book.is the perfect antidote for the errors, the misunderstandings - or worse, the ignorances - that beset the modern discussion of free choice. Even the reader who comes to this book with little or no knowledge of the philosophical literature on the subjects that it treats cannot fail to...

This book has its origin in a course on 'Virtues' given by Yves R. Simon in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago in the fall quarter of 1957.

The present volume is the product of several years of collaboration at a distance between two people who both knew Yres R. Simon personally and admired his work. The question raised by Simon more than half a century ago, when this book was first published, are still with us: What is the nature of knowledge? What kind of activity is it to know? What is involved in the development of human knowledge? If one had to describe Simon's accomplishment by reducing it to a single point, what he succeeded in showing was that an ontology of knowledge based on common experience disproves all idealism and...

For Yves R. Simon, philosophy has an affinity to science, not in the sense that philosophy is a mere metascience, a commentary on the sciences, but rather because it shares the same aim as science: the search for explanation. The philosophy Simon espouses is philosophical realism which, following Jacques Maritain, he prefers to call critical realism. Against the prejudice that only some version of philosophical idealism, be it critical or absolute, is capable of understanding positive science. Simon, in Foresight and Knowledge, develops a philosophy of science form a realistic perspective....