An interesting text from James Weisheipl, OP (1961)

Part of my longterm effort at cleaning my office has me grabbing documents that I've Xeroxed over the past thirty-years in academe and scanning them for inclusion in my computer's bibliography program; a well-done PDF takes up less space than a wad of papers in my file cabinet.

Hunting through some folders containing papers from my beloved James A. Weisheipl, OP—the thirtieth anniversary of whose death will be upon us at the end of this year, 2014—I came upon a copy of some lectures he delivered to the Thomist Association in Chicago in 1961 (the year of my birth!). Actually there were two lecture series, and I don't as yet have the first. But the second series, generally on "The Formation of the Modern Mind," dealt specifically with the topic "The Philosophy of Communism"—a fascinating read since communism's fall in the late 1980's, but always interesting at a time when the debate on the nature, role, and reach of government continues.

I removed the lectures from the serlox-bound volume that I had put together so carefully thirty years ago, and fed the pages through our multifunction printer/scanner here at Marquette University. Once I was sure that the scan "took" I assembled them into one big PDF, OCR'd and cleaned the document. You can find the document here. I tossed the pages.

Happy reading...and thinking.