The Intellectual Life

A Dominican priest’s manual for the intellectual vocation, published in French in 1921 as La vie intellectuelle: son esprit, ses conditions, ses méthodes. Sertillanges writes for the person who thinks seriously without a university appointment: he assumes a reader with a job and perhaps two free hours in a day, and treats that constraint as workable rather than fatal. The counsel is concrete — guard the hours ruthlessly, keep the body and the company in order because they determine what the mind can do, read few books slowly and take notes you will actually use, stay with one problem long enough to be changed by it, and understand the work as a service owed rather than a performance given.

Why it’s on the list: It sits in the curriculum’s ethics and personal growth section, among Cicero, Aurelius and Frankl — the practical entry, about the daily discipline that makes the rest of a list like this survivable.

Where I saw it: Brendan McCord’s Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List, in the section on Pursuing the Good Life: Ethics and Personal Growth. The entry carries a ☑️ on the source page; the page gives no legend for that mark, so it is recorded here literally and not interpreted. The full 211-entry transcription is on The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List.

Connections

• Reading — the practice the book is mostly about.
• Learning — its subject in general form.
• Christianity — the Dominican vocation from which it is written.
• The Philosopher-Entrepreneur Reading List — the curriculum this came from.