A Philosophy of Work, Leisure, and Catholic Culture

Professor Paul Blaschko on March 20, 2025 at Butterfield Country Club. In his well-known and influential essay, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper claims that we in modern western society have come to inhabit a “world of total work,” and that an essential precondition for escape is recapturing a more ancient notion of “leisure” (in Greek: scholê, in Latin: otium). While much has been said in support of this claim, especially in Catholic intellectual circles, the focus has typically centered on the nature of leisure, which much of this dialogue takes as the starting point. In this lecture, Prof. Blaschko, who studies the philosophy of work at Notre Dame, will proceed in a different direction, asking “What kind of culture, and what kind of work culture, would we create if we wanted to incorporate genuine leisure into our lives?”