Curing Mad Truths

Medieval Wisdom for the Modern Age

Rémi Brague

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780268105709, 9780268105693
• eBook ISBN: 9780268105716
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: European Medieval History

In his first book composed in English, Rémi Brague maintains that there is a fundamental problem with modernity: we no longer consider the created world and humanity as intrinsically valuable. Curing Mad Truths, based on a number of Brague's lectures to English-speaking audiences, explores the idea that humanity must return to the Middle Ages. Not the Middle Ages of purported backwardness and barbarism, but rather a Middle Ages that understood creation—including human beings—as the product of an intelligent and benevolent God. The positive developments that have come about due to the modern project, be they health, knowledge, freedom, or peace, are not grounded in a rational project because human existence itself is no longer the good that it once was. Brague turns to our intellectual forebears of the medieval world to present a reasoned argument as to why humanity and civilizations are goods worth promoting and preserving.

Curing Mad Truths will be of interest to a learned audience of philosophers, historians, and medievalists.

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• ONE The Failure of the Modern Project
• TWO Atheism at the End of the Tether
• THREE The Necessity of Goodness
• FOUR Nature
• FIVE Freedom and Creation
• SIX Culture as a By-Product
• SEVEN Values or Virtues?
• EIGHT The Family
• NINE Civilization as Conservation and Conversation
• Notes
• Index