J Budziszewski Popular Books

J Budziszewski Biography & Facts

J. Budziszewski (born 1952) is an American philosopher and professor of government and philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has taught since 1981. He specializes in ethics, political philosophy and the interaction of these two fields with religion and theology. Budziszewski has written widely, in both scholarly and popular venues, about a variety of moral and political issues including abortion, marriage, sexuality, capital punishment, and the role of judges in a constitutional republic. His principal area of publication is the theory of natural law. He has been a leading advocate for natural law theory over the past twenty years. In this context, he has given particular attention to the problem of moral self-deception: what happens when human beings tell themselves that they don't know what they really do. Among his research interests are also virtue ethics and the problem of tolerance. Apart from his scholarly philosophical work, Budziszewski is known for articles and books of Christian apologetics, addressed to a broad audience including young people and college students. Known as one of the prominent evangelical intellectuals in America and former atheist, Budziszewski was received into the Roman Catholic Church on Easter Sunday 2004. After his conversion, he continues to address his writings and lectures on Christian themes to Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox Christians, as well as to those who are uncertain of their beliefs but are sincerely seeking. Education After graduation from high school in 1970, Budziszewski began studies at the University of Chicago, choosing it partly because of its biopsychology program (which in fact he never entered) and partly because of its reputation as a hive of left-wing activity. Intellectually, Budziszewski was then obsessed with mind-body problems; politically, he was far to the left. After two years, however, he quit school in the conviction that he should learn a trade and join the proletariat. Becoming a welder, he worked a variety of jobs, ending up at the Tampa shipyards. When he realized that he belonged in college after all, he earned his BA at the University of South Florida, his MA at the University of Florida, and his PhD at Yale University. He has been teaching at the University of Texas at Austin since finishing his doctoral studies in 1981, where he teaches courses on the American Founding and the natural law tradition of Thomas Aquinas. Research on self-deception One of Budziszewski's research interests has been to analyze what he regards as general human tendency to self-deception. The problem arises from a theoretical tenet defended by Thomas Aquinas, who he said "we must say that the natural law, as to general principles, is the same for all, both as to rectitude and as to knowledge." This claim amounts to saying that the most general principles of right and wrong are not only right for everyone but known to everyone, even though the same cannot be said of their remote implications. According to Budziszewski, Aquinas is right. He argues that often, even when people appear to be ignorant of the moral basics, the hypothesis that they are self deceived provides a better explanation of their actual behavior. This leads to Budziszewski's theory of guilty knowledge, of violated conscience. Following Aquinas, Budziszewski distinguishes between synderesis, which supplies the first principles of practical reason and which he calls "deep conscience," and conscientia, which he calls "surface conscience" and supplies judgments about particular acts. According to Budziszewski, conscience operates in three different modes: In the cautionary mode, it alerts us to the peril of moral wrong and generates an inhibition against committing it. In the accusatory mode, it indicts us for wrong we have already done. In the avenging mode, it punishes the individual who knowingly does wrong but refuses to admit that he or she has done so. Conscience is therefore teacher, judge, or executioner, depending on the mode in which it is working. The most original part of this schema is what Budziszewski says about the avenging mode. The most obvious penalty of guilty knowledge is the feeling of remorse. Remorse is not always present. However, Budziszewski suggests that even when remorse is absent, guilty knowledge generates objective needs for confession, atonement, reconciliation, and justification. Calling these other four "Furies" the "greater sisters of remorse," he argues that they are "inflexible, inexorable, and relentless, demanding satisfaction even when mere feelings are suppressed, fade away, or never come." He argues that [t]he normal outlet of remorse is to flee from wrong; of the need for confession, to admit what one has done; of atonement, to pay the debt; of reconciliation, to restore the bonds one has broken; and of justification, to get back in the right. But if the Furies are denied their payment in [their proper] coin, they exact it in whatever coin comes nearest, driving the wrongdoer's life yet further out of kilter. We flee not from wrong, but from thinking about it. We compulsively confess every detail of our story, except the moral. We punish ourselves again and again, offering every sacrifice except the one demanded. We simulate the restoration of broken intimacy, by seeking companions as guilty as ourselves. And we seek not to become just, but to justify ourselves. Budziszewski holds that the only way to break this vicious circle is to admit that one has done wrong and to repent, in reliance on the grace of God. Failure to break out of the vicious circle leads to a variety of moral pathologies in the individual, the culture, and the body politic. Research on tolerance A second major area of Budziszewski's scholarly work is the problem of toleration. Budziszewski considers toleration one of the virtues. Like the Aristotelian moral virtues, it lies in a mean between extremes. One way to miss the mark is overindulgence, whereby we tolerate what we ought not tolerate. The other way is narrowmindedness, whereby we fail to tolerate what we ought to tolerate. Because "tolerating" means not just putting up with things, but to put up with things that we find false, bad, or offensive, the question may arise why toleration is a virtue at all. According to Budziszewski, the answer is that sometimes the nature of the good itself requires putting up with some evil. Christians, for example, tolerate atheists not because they are in doubt about the truth of Christian beliefs, but because of their conviction that faith, by its nature, cannot be coerced, and that God does not desire unwilling obedience. This analysis of tolerance makes Budziszewski a sharp critic of contemporary liberal theories of toleration, which are commonly based on moral neutrality, on suspension of judgment about goods and evils. Budziszewski insists that if we were to suspend judgment consistently, we could neither defend t.... Discover the J Budziszewski popular books. Find the top 100 most popular J Budziszewski books.