From the back cover: “One of the great Catholic philosophers of our day reflects on the way language has been abused so that, instead of being a means of communicating the truth and entering more deeply into it…it is being used to control people and manipulate them to achieve practical ends.

Reality becomes intelligible through words.  Man speaks so that through naming things, what is real may become intelligible. This mediating character of language, however, is being increasingly corrupted.  Tyranny, propaganda, mass-media destroy and distort words.  They offer us apparent realities whose fictive character threatens to become opaque.  Josef Pieper shows with energetic zeal, but also with ascetical restraint, the path out of this dangerous situation.  We are constrained to see things again as they are and from the truth thus grasped to live and work.”

It must not be forgotten that reason too needs to be sustained in all its searching by trusting dialogue and sincere friendship. A climate of suspicion and distrust, which can beset speculative research, ignores the teaching of the ancient philosophers who proposed friendship as one of the most appropriate contexts for sound philosophical enquiry.