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This chapter discusses the first of the major themes to emerge from research data: how senior administrators understand the Catholic intellectual tradition, and the role it plays in the academic life of their institutions across all disciplines. It looks at various issues such as Catholic cultural illiteracy, hiring for mission, and the role of theology and philosophy in the curriculum. Desired characteristics of faculty, be they Catholic or non-Catholic, at Catholic institutions are identified. The heart of a university is academic content and, to be genuinely Catholic, Catholic institutions have to emphasize their academic content in an appropriate way. Philosophy may have been the central content welcomed by students at Catholic institutions in the first half of the 20th century. An important issue is what the modern “Catholic content” ought to be. The major threats to Catholic cultural inheritability and distinguishability in the academic sector are examined. The implications of present practice within all four collegiate models for the vitality of Catholic culture in the academic sector are also explored. Finally, the chapter suggests strategic approaches to enhance distinguishability without posing a market threat to inheritability.

This chapter provides a brief introduction to three umbrella terms: the Catholic intellectual tradition, the Catholic moral tradition, and Catholic social teaching. It begins with a historical look at the emergence of universities and the position of theology, philosophy, and the other liberal arts in these institutions. Using this as a foundation, it highlights what is meant by “Catholic intellectual tradition”. The Catholic intellectual tradition is further specified by identifying four theological or philosophical themes that recur in a Catholic analysis of academic areas. The Catholic moral tradition is invoked through a brief presentation of natural law, which is then used to suggest approaches Catholic institutions should take toward substance abuse and sexual intimacy on campus. Catholic universities are encouraged to become clearer about policy, and more specific about the amount and type of Catholic content students are expected to learn and retain during their years in a Catholic college or university. The concluding section explores the significance of cultural illiteracy and shadow cultures.

The public perception of Catholicism does not always incline toward a scholastic tradition. For some, the Catholic intellectual tradition is the most engaging aspect of the religious heritage, boasting such famed thinkers as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. For others, the combination of “Catholic” and “intellectual” yields little more than a paradox. Depending on whom you ask both inside and outside the faith, the Catholic intellectual tradition can seem a vital and lasting part of this religion or a nonsensical contradiction of terms. Is there Catholic intellectualism? Is it a religious practice? How does intellectual work function within ecclesiastical structures? This chapter explores the Catholic intellectual tradition from Augustine through Thomas Aquinas. It envisions Catholic Studies as a mode of encounter with these canonical authors marked by openness and intellectual charity, driven by concerns of the present but engaged with the very different horizons of authors past.

This chapter attempts to provide a ‘reader’s guide’ to nationalism in British politics. It explores some of the major trends in the British study of nationalism and relates these to broader substantive and methodological concerns within the social sciences. The chapter focuses on most important comparative and conceptual studies of nationalism as a general political and historical phenomenon, rather than research limited to particular countries or periods. The defining features of British political studies, including a respect for methodological eclecticism and historically grounded research, have made British writers uniquely attuned to the importance of nationalism at times when many of their American colleagues dismissed it as the residuum of retarded modernization. The chapter concludes with some reflections on possible future directions for research and modest proposals for thinking about the study of nationalism and its relationship to broader debates within political science.

During a celebration of the University of Dayton's (UD) sesquicentennial in the year 2000, the singer-songwriter alumnus who headed the university's Center for Social Concern performed a song he had written for the occasion, “Do Whatever He Tells You.” This song has rich resonance not only for those committed personally and spiritually to Catholic tradition and its Marianist embodiment, but also for a compelling vision of intellectual life and university purpose. This chapter articulates the ideas that have both shaped and resulted from UD's practices, aimed at enlivening Catholic intellectual tradition on campus in service of sustaining and extending the university's Catholic mission. It explains why the university has chosen its particular approach to Catholic Studies, including some consideration of the benefits and risks. UD's Catholic identity pervades the university's curricular and extracurricular life, in the spirit of its founders, French priests of the Society of Mary, a religious order dedicated to education in all fields.

This chapter examines the conceptions of statecraft and international order in the ancient Chinese traditions of Taoism, Buddhism, Legalism, and bingjia, and how these impact the social and political philosophy of modern China as it relates to the rest of the world. It is shown that the Chinese intellectual tradition is suffused with a monist political ideology that conceives of international order in fundamentally hierarchical terms and idealizes interstate order as tending toward universal hegemony or actual empire. Hence, it lacks a meaningful concept of coequal, legitimate sovereignties pursuant to which states may coexist over the long term in nonhierarchical relationships. With the exception of Buddhism, such conceptions of international order may be seen in all the major philosophical currents that are examined. In a country as obsessed as China is with canonical texts and the present-day legitimacy that literary-historical precedent is felt to convey, this legacy of hierarchical assumptions about international order may also provide cause for concern to students of modern-day international relations.

This concluding chapter reviews how the book reconstructed the political vision offered in the three Classical Confucian texts: the Analects, Mencius, and Xinzu. For a long time, the Chinese intellectual tradition did not receive academic interest in its own right similar to that received by the Western tradition. While the urgency of the renewed interest in it is both timely and welcome, it has meant that the Confucian texts are now mined with a view to contemporary concerns. Many of the political discussions in the early texts have thus been ignored for being irrelevant today. As a result, the book's interpretation of early Confucianism meshes with the recent trend in the discipline of political theory, which critiques the post-Kantian approach that takes ethics as a basis.

This chapter describes the discovery, perfection, and application of the scientific method as the Scientific Revolution happens. Bacon, Galileo, Harvey, Huygens, and Newton were singularly successful in persuading posterity that they contributed to the invention of a single, transferable, and efficacious scientific method. The treatment of Descartes' method by historians of science and historians of philosophy has been no exception to this pattern. The Discours de la methode has been seen as one of the most important methodological treatises in the Western intellectual tradition, and the Cartesian method has been viewed as doubly successful and significant within that tradition. First, Descartes' method has been taken to mark an early stage in that long maturation of the scientific method resulting from interaction between application of method in scientific work and critical reflection about method carried out by great methodologists, from Bacon and Descartes down to Popper and Lakatos. Second, Descartes' considerable achievements in the sciences and in mathematics during a crucial stage of the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century have been taken to have depended upon his method. This chapter discusses the tendency of historians and philosophers to create a cult of the thoughts of thinkers and revive the link between theorizing about the purported scientific method and requiring a method-centric history of science. It explains further that in all cults, there is a doctrine of truth and it informs us of what we already know and that there is an open ended set of rules.

This chapter departs from a new object of knowledge identified in 1928 by W. E. B. Du Bois in response to a question posed by a young Black high school student. The student asked why the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) would ostensibly reinforce a sense of racial separation/inferiority through the organization's choosing to ‘designate, and segregate us as “Negroes,” and not as “Americans”’. In his response to the student, Du Bois pointed out that, ‘It is not the name — it's the Thing that counts’. That is to say, what counts is the fictively-constructed and epistemically-elaborated system of meanings imposed on the population that in turn evokes the ‘feeling of inferiority’, regardless of what particular names Black Americans choose to call themselves. The chapter traces the way in which Black intellectual tradition has been compelled to confront and/or transform this ‘Thing of being Black:’, as an indispensable part of coming to terms with and theorizing anew the ‘Thing of being Human’.

This chapter focuses on how ‘Greek wisdom’ is treated in Jewish culture. It shows that the term ‘Greek wisdom’ had a long history, and the maskilim (men of letters and thinkers) turned to it to seek support and legitimization for their views in the Jewish intellectual tradition. The term ‘wisdom’ was the main — perhaps even the only positive signal with which the Jews marked part of the Greek-Hellenistic culture, and the one with the longest and most consecutive history; it was generally identified with Greek wisdom. It meant the heritage and legacy of classical antiquity and Hellenism in philosophy, sciences, and the arts; it also symbolized a lost Jewish heritage and the proper relationship between the Jewish world and the world of the Gentiles. Moreover, wisdom became a multipurpose and multivalent concept that in the intellectual utopia of the maskilim was intended to serve as a bridge and intermediary between the Jewish intellectual tradition and the outside world.

Like China, Europe suffered through crucial formative periods of uncertainty and strife, beginning with the “discovery” and conquest of the New World at the close of the fifteenth century. From 1500 to 1800, Europe went through a long and perilous ordeal of identity formation and contestation. These tribulations destroyed the remnant institutions and assumptions of medieval governance and, ultimately, produced a domestic and international order based on entirely new concepts. These dynamics formed a powerfully pluralist conception of world order in which sovereign states existed side by side in relationships of formal equality and independence. The pervasiveness of this concept, called Western pluralism, can be seen in the writings of European scholars, including Francisco de Vitoria, Francisco Suarez, Alberico Gentili, and Hugo Grotius, that touch on the conceptions of international order. This Westphalian notion of world politics forms a powerful and fascinating counterpoint to Sinic universalism. Whereas Europe emerged from feudalism through the crucible of bitter zero-sum warfare into a postimperial world of formally coequal sovereign powers, China—albeit nearly two millennia earlier—drew precisely opposite conclusions from its own period of interstate struggle. An understanding of these sharply contrasting conceptual paths is necessary to appreciate the tensions that lie at the heart of China's ambivalent modern relationship to international law and the states system.

Catholic “threnodists” lament the state of the contemporary pagan (i.e., nonaffiliated with Christian or Jewish tradition) university; “spoliasts” look for and find the goods evident there, eager to discover resources that permit the Church to arrive at a fuller understanding of revelation. Pagan universities can inculcate intellectual virtues and certain moral habits, but they cannot offer students or represent to faculty any shared unitary idea of what intellectual work is or what it is for, because there is no agreement on such an idea. Catholic intellectual tradition can give an account of intellectual life and of how its various specialties relate one to another. Practitioners of Catholic intellectual tradition within the pagan university should celebrate and expropriate—spoliate—the genuine goods that are there.

This chapter provides Liu Zhi's background in the historical development of the Chinese Muslim intellectual tradition. It further examines his sources and influences, as well as his legacy, including the recognition (after Liu Zhi's death) of the Tianfang dianli in the Siku quanshu, the official compendium of state-accepted literature under the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736–1796). As they reconciled the two sides of their dual heritage, Chinese Muslim scholars struggled to maintain a sense of honoring tradition even as they embarked on an enterprise that required significant innovation. Both the Chinese and Islamic traditions have long histories of syncretizing foreign elements, though both Islam and Confucianism assert a pristine transmission of tradition and dogmatically reject the introduction of innovative thought to the teachings of their founders. Examining this internal paradox from two sides, the chapter shows how Chinese Islamic syncretism is an exponentially complicated reality.

This introductory chapter provides a brief overview of the transformation of the Arabo-Islamic intellectual tradition that accompanied the adoption of printing in the Middle East. It brings to light the stories of the hitherto mostly invisible individuals who effected this transformation. Their motivations, goals, and approaches were diverse. All had to contend with the formidable challenges posed by centuries of cultural neglect of the classical literature: locating and obtaining manuscripts in the absence of catalogs, piecing together complete works out of scattered fragments, deciphering texts in spite of errors and damage, and understanding their meaning without recourse to adequate reference material. Their painstaking, frequently solitary, and often innovative efforts opened up the narrow postclassical manuscript tradition into a broad literature of printed, primarily classical works—the literature that today can be considered the essential canon of Islamic texts.