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Philosophical Ideas: A Historical Study invites the reader to consider central ideas from Plato, Hegel, Vico, and Cassirer from points of view that have not been fully articulated in the most frequently encountered interpretations of their works. It is an examination of the ideas of poetics, dialectics, science, and symbol as they function in their works with focus on the problem of knowledge as present in each of them.
The history of philosophy, approached in this way, is a treasure house of ideas that constitutes the subject matter of the contemplative life.

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This work raises for the contemporary reader the ancient and abiding question of the nature and meaning of human virtue. In Part 1, it draws upon Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero and the works of Renaissance Christian humanists who were influenced by them, such as Pico, Vives, and Erasmus. The moral act guided by the cardinal virtues and the good is seen as the key to human happiness and the formation of character. Character is the basis for the pursuit of self-knowledge, decorum, and dignity, which properly guide human affairs.
Part 2 takes up Hegel's principle of the labor of the negative as applied to three phenomena of modern life: the presence of terrorism, the personality of the psycho-sociopath, and the problems of the technologically dominated life of the modern person. These are the most powerful impediments to the good life in the modern world and pose problems to which the ethical doctrines of utilitarianism and the categorical imperative provide an insufficient response. To confront these phenomena, we are led back to the classical conception of the role of prudence or practical wisdom as the foundation of ethical life.

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Metaphysics and the Modern World makes the abiding questions of the nature of the self, world, and God available for the modern reader. Donald Phillip Verene presents these questions in both their systematic and historical dimensions, beginning with Aristotle's claim in his Metaphysics that philosophy begins in wonder. The first three chapters concern the origin of metaphysics as the transformation of the conception of reality in ancient Greek mythology, the ontological argument as the basis of Christian metaphysics, and the Renaissance cosmology of infinite worlds and the coincidence of contraries. The final four chapters present the central issues of the metaphysics of history through the New Science of Vico, the principle of true infinity of Hegel's Logic, the dialectic of spirit and life in Cassirer's Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms, and the conception of actual entities and God in Whitehead's Process and Reality. In these discussions, the reader will find a lively and learned account of a field of philosophy that is often thought difficult to access, but in this work becomes most accessible and a pleasure to read.

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The Philosophy of Literature: Four Studies puts forth the question of the extent to which philosophers must go to school with the poets. It begins with a new interpretation of the famous Platonic quarrel with the poetic wisdom of Homer. It brings this question forward through the humanism of thinkers of the Italian Renaissance and the German Idealism of Hegel. It then treats the relation of philosophy and literature in four ways by considering philosophy as literature, philosophy of literature, philosophy in literature, and philosophy and literature. In regard to the first of these, it discusses Jorge Luis Borges's The Immortal, to the second James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, to the third Carl Sandburg's epic prose poem The People, Yes, and to the fourth, Sebastian Brant's Ship of Fools. This work demonstrates that in an area of thought often dominated by fashionable doctrines of literary interpretation, the great works of literature and philosophy remain as permanent residents of our thought and imagination.

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The Science of Cookery and the Art of Eating Well is a philosophical and historical reflection on food and dining in human culture. It includes discussions of the nature of the first meals as found in Greek literature and the philosophy of history of Giambattista Vico, the Roman cookbook of Apicius (the first known cookbook), the cookbook of Artusi (the seminal cookbook of Italian cooking), Brillat-Savarin’s Physiology of Taste, Plutarch’s “Dinner of the Seven Wise Men,” and Athenaeus’ work on the Learned Banqueters (the Deipnosophists). These discussions are joined with contemporary observations on the importance of the traditions of home cooking and dining with friends as essential to the promotion of human well-being.

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