{"title":"Peter Kreeft","description":"\u003cp\u003ePeter Kreeft’s works invite readers into profound explorations of \u003cem\u003ephilosophy\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003efaith\u003c\/em\u003e, blending rigorous intellectual inquiry with accessible clarity. His books often engage with classical philosophical traditions, examining timeless questions through the lenses of logic, humour, and spirituality.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eFrom the art of Socratic dialogue to Christian reflections on humour and metaphysics, Kreeft’s writings offer thoughtful meditation on both the \u003cstrong\u003ereligious\u003c\/strong\u003e and \u003cstrong\u003ephilosophical\u003c\/strong\u003e dimensions of human existence.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"socratic-logic-31e-socratic-method-platonic-questions-by-trent-dougherty-9781587318085","title":"Socratic Logic 3.1e – Socratic Method Platonic Questions","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis new and revised edition of Peter Kreeft’s \u003ci\u003eSocratic Logic\u003c\/i\u003e is updated, adding new exercises and more complete examples, all with Kreeft’s characteristic clarity and wit. Since its introduction in the spring of 2004, \u003ci\u003eSocratic Logic\u003c\/i\u003e has proven to be a different type of logic text:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e(1) This is the only complete system of classical Aristotelian logic in print. The “old logic” is still the natural logic of the four language arts (reading, writing, speaking, and listening). Symbolic, or “mathematical,” logic is not for the humanities. (How often have you heard someone argue in symbolic logic?)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e(2) This book is simple and user-friendly. It is highly interactive, with a plethora of exercises and a light, engaging style.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e(3) It is practical. It is designed for do-it-yourselfers as well as classrooms. It emphasizes topics in proportion to probable student use: e.g., interpreting ordinary language, not only analyzing but also constructing effective arguments, smoking out hidden assumptions, making “argument maps,” and using Socratic method in various circumstances.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003e(4) It is philosophical. Its exercises expose students to many classical quotations, and additional chapters introduce philosophical issues in a Socratic manner and from a commonsense, realistic point of view. It prepares students for reading Great Books rather than Dick and Jane, and models Socrates as the beginner’s ideal teacher and philosopher.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47000743969004,"sku":"9781587318085","price":75.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/3800983482753.jpg?v=1763301808"},{"product_id":"summa-philosophica-by-peter-kreeft-9781587318252","title":"Summa Philosophica","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNext to the Socratic Method, the best method for organising a logical debate over a controversial philosophical or theological issue is the method St. Thomas Aquinas uses in the \u003ci\u003eSumma Theologiae\u003c\/i\u003e. As the charm of the Socratic dialogue is its dramatic length, uncertainty, and the psychological dimension of a clash between live characters, the charm of the Summa method is the opposite: its condensation, impersonality, objectivity, simplicity, directness, and logical clarity.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eBeginning philosophy students pick up both methods very quickly and write adept imitations of them. It’s both profitable and fun to do it. Yet professionally, philosophers have not followed these tried-and-true roads. Why not? Probably it is pride, the refusal to stoop to conquer, the confusion of “stooped” with “stupid.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003ePeter Kreeft has written over a dozen books of Socratic dialogues, and readers like them – they enjoy the form or format, irrespective of the content. There is no reason that the \u003ci\u003eSumma\u003c\/i\u003e format cannot produce similar results. It is a very simple five-step procedure: (1) the formulation of the question; (2) the opponent’s leading objections to your answer or thesis, formulated as clearly, fairly, and strongly as possible; (3) a short argument from some recognised past authority for your thesis; (4) your own longer, original argument; and (5) a refutation of each objection, “deconstructing” it and showing how and where it went wrong, all in one or two pages, severely condensed, clear, and simple (and therefore usually in syllogisms, the clearest and simplest and most direct form of logical argument).\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eKreeft has taken 110 of the most important and most often argued-about questions in each major division of philosophy and applied this method to them. The answers usually match common sense (and therefore Aristotle’s philosophy and Aquinas’s theology). At the very least, this is a useful philosophical reference book for arguments; not necessarily the elaborate and artificial arguments that might occur to contemporary “analytic” philosophers, but the arguments ordinary people would give, and still give, on both sides of these great questions.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eWhy no one has written such a book before is mind-boggling. We fully expect that many readers of this book will imitate it, as Kreeft has imitated Aquinas. This book is pregnant with many children.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47000756945132,"sku":"9781587318252","price":84.0,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/3802653482753.jpg?v=1763302289"},{"product_id":"the-platonic-tradition-by-peter-kreeft-9781587316500","title":"The Platonic Tradition","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe Platonic tradition in Western philosophy is not just one of many equally central traditions. It is so much \u003ci\u003ethe\u003c\/i\u003e central one that the very existence and survival of Western civilization depends on it. It is like the Confucian tradition in Chinese culture, or the monotheistic tradition in religion, or the human rights tradition in politics.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn the first of his eight lectures, Peter Kreeft defines Platonism and its “Big Idea,” the idea of a transcendent reality that the history of philosophy has labelled “Platonic Ideas” or Platonic Forms. In the second lecture, he briefly explores Plato’s two basic predecessors or sources, myth and Socrates; and then looks at 12 applications of the Forms in Plato’s own dialogues. The third lecture covers the three most important modifications or additions to Plato himself in the Platonic tradition: Aristotle, Plotinus, and Augustine, each of whom gave the Forms a new metaphysical address.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eThe fourth lecture explores six Christian Platonists, three in the New Testament and three philosophers, Justin Martyr, Bonaventure, and Aquinas. The next three lectures explore the consequences of the modern abandoning of Platonism, beginning with William of Ockham’s Nominalism, as the source of nearly all modern philosophical errors, and its results in the Empiricism of Locke and Hume, the so-called Copernican Revolution in philosophy in Kant, the so-called analytic philosophy, which still dominates English and American philosophy departments.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eIn the sixth essays, Kreeft looks at 13 influential kinds of positivism or reductionism in modern thought: in method, history, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, sociology, politics, logics, linguistics, sex, psychology, and theology, exemplified by Descartes, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Marx, Kant, Comte, Rousseau, Rawls, Ayer, Derrida, Freud, Skimmer, Nietzsche, and Sartre.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eLecture 7 looks at the results of abandoning the Platonic tradition in ethics, the values vacuum, or nihilism, in Ecclesiastes, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoi, Marcel, and Buber. In the last lecture, Kreeft looks at some experiential evidence for Platonism, doors out of the cave that are still open, signals of transcendence.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47433007300844,"sku":"9781587316500","price":45.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9781587316500.jpg?v=1774765827"},{"product_id":"ha-a-christian-philosophy-of-humor-by-peter-kreeft-9781587313189","title":"Ha! – A Christian Philosophy of Humor","description":"\u003cdiv class=\"book-description\"\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis book almost didn't exist. I was about to write a serious, heavy book entitled \u003ci\u003eHow To Save Western Civilization\u003c\/i\u003e, as a sequel to my book \u003ci\u003eHow To Destroy Western Civilization and Other Ideas from the Cultural Abyss\u003c\/i\u003e. But writing it was not making me happy, and reading it was not going to make anybody else happy either. And then I stopped just long enough for my guardian angel to squeeze through that tiny window of opportunity that I had opened up by my silence and to whisper this commonsense question into my subconscious: \"Why not make them happy instead?\" (Angels specialise in common sense.)\u003c\/p\u003e\n\n\u003cp\u003eI started thinking: Western civilization is neither healthy, happy, nor holy. Humor is all three. Humor is not only holy, it's Heavenly. And if you are surprised to be told that humor is Heavenly, you need to read this book because you reveal your misunderstanding of both humor and Heaven. If you ask, \"Is there laughter in Heaven?\" my answer is: \"You can't be serious!\"\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Unknown","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47463081279724,"sku":"9781587313189","price":26.99,"currency_code":"NZD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0705\/7784\/8556\/files\/9781587313189-ha-a-christian-philosophy-of-humor.jpg?v=1775028209"}],"url":"https:\/\/bookhero.co.nz\/collections\/peter-kreeft.oembed","provider":"Book Hero","version":"1.0","type":"link"}