In The Wisdom of Our Ancestors, the authors mount a powerful defense of Western civilization, sketching a fresh vision of conservatism in the present age. In this book, Graham McAleer and Alexander Rosenthal-Pubul offer a renewed vision of conservatism for the twenty-first century. Taking their inspiration from the late Roger Scruton, the authors begin with a simple question: What, after all, is the meaning of conservatism? In reply, they make a case for a political orientation that they call “conservative humanism,” which threads a middle way between liberal universalism and its ideological alternatives. This vision of conservatism is rooted in the humanist tradition (that is, classical humanism, Christian humanism, and secular humanism), which the authors take to be the hallmark of Western civilizational identity. At its core, conservative humanism attempts to reconcile universal moral values (rooted in natural law) with local, particularist loyalties. In articulating this position, the authors show that the West—contra various contemporary critics—does, in fact, have a great deal of wisdom to offer. The authors begin with an overview of the conservative thought world, situating their proposal relative to two major poles: liberalism and nationalism. They move on to show that conservatism must fundamentally take the form of a defense of humanism, the “master idea of our civilization.” The ensuing chapters articulate various aspects of conservative humanism, including its metaphysical, institutional, legal, philosophical, and economic dimensions. Largely rooted in the Anglo-Continental conservative tradition, the work offers fresh perspectives for North American conservatism.

Graham McAleer’s Erich Przywara and Postmodern Natural Law is the first work to present in an accessible way the thinking of Erich Przywara (1889-1972) for an English-speaking audience. Przywara’s work remains little known to a broad Catholic audience, but it had a major impact on many of the most celebrated theologians of the twentieth century, including Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Rahner, Edith Stein, and Karl Barth. Przywara’s ground-breaking text Analogia Entis (The analogy of being) brought theological metaphysics into the modern era. While the concept of "analogy of being" is typically understood in static terms, McAleer explores how Przywara transformed it into something dynamic. McAleer shows the extension of Przywara’s thought into a range of disciplines: from a new theory of natural law to an explanation of how misunderstanding the analogy of being lies at the foundation of the puzzles of modernity and postmodernity. He demonstrates, through Przywara’s conceptual framework, how contemporary moral problems, such as those surrounding robots, Islam and sumptuary laws, Nazism (including fascism and race), embryos, migration, and body modification, among others, are shaped by the failure of Western thought to address metaphysical quandaries. McAleer updates Przywara for a new audience searching for solutions to the failing humanism of the current age. This book will be of interest to intellectuals and scholars in a wide range of disciplines within philosophy or theology, and will appeal especially to those interested in systematic and moral theology.

This first book-length treatment of Thomas Aquinas'stheory of the body presents a Catholic understanding of the body and its implications for social and political philosophy. Making a fundamental contribution to antitotalitarian theory, McAleer argues that a sexual politics reliant upon Aquinas's theory of the body is better (because less violent) than other commonly available theories. He contrasts this theory with those of four other groups of thinkers: the continental tradition represented by Kant, Schopenhauer, Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, Levinas, and Deleuze; feminism, in the work of Donna Haraway; an alternative Catholic theory to be found in Karl Rahner; and the "Radical Orthodoxy" of John Milbank.

Graham McAleer's Erich Przywara and Postmodern Natural Law is the first work to present in an accessible way the thinking of Erich Przywara (1889-1972) for an English-speaking audience. Przywara's work remains little known to a broad Catholic audience, but it had a major impact on many of the most celebrated theologians of the twentieth century, including Hans Urs von Balthasar, Karl Rahner, Edith Stein, and Karl Barth. Przywara's ground-breaking text Analogia Entis (The analogy of being) brought theological metaphysics into the modern era. While the concept of "analogy of being" is typically understood in static terms, McAleer explores how Przywara transformed it into something dynamic. McAleer shows the extension of Przywara's thought into a range of disciplines: from a new theory of natural law to an explanation of how misunderstanding the analogy of being lies at the foundation of the puzzles of modernity and postmodernity. He demonstrates, through Przywara's conceptual framework, how contemporary moral problems, such as those surrounding robots, Islam and sumptuary laws, Nazism (including fascism and race), embryos, migration, and body modification, among others, are shaped by the failure of Western thought to address metaphysical quandaries. McAleer updates Przywara for a new audience searching for solutions to the failing humanism of the current age. This book will be of interest to intellectuals and scholars in a wide range of disciplines within philosophy or theology, and will appeal especially to those interested in systematic and moral theology.