Well, the new issue of PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICAL SCIENCE is out. It features diverse and deep symposia on two outstanding recent books: PLATO’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY by Mark Blitz and our Ralph Hancock’s THE RESPONSIBILITY OF REASON.
Commentators on Ralphism include Ralph himself (twice), Susan Shell, Alan Levine, Jim Stoner, David Walsh, and Steven McGuine. These aren’t brief comments or mere reviews, but real–extended and provocative–theoretical engagements. What other journal can offer anything like THAT?
The issue also includes a sympathetically critical Calvinist engagement with Ralph’s Calvin book by our Carl.
Tocqueville, according to Ralph, “sees as clearly as Heidegger or Strauss the threat to meaningful human existence…contained in the modern emancipation of individual freedom from political or socially authorized virtues. Unlike Strauss, however, he does not imagine that this threat can be contained by replacing aristocrats with serenely detached academic philosophers, and, unlike Heidegger, he has no interest in vaguely and irresponsibly evoking the ‘Being’ from which all hierarchies mysteriously emerge, but which authorizes none of them.”
According to Susan Shell, “an alternative [to Ralph's] reading of Strauss might spend less time on the noble and more on the question of whether science (or philosophy) in the original sense = knowledge of necessity = is possible.”
Alan Levine can’t figure out whether “Hancock is…a Straussian friend of religion or a Christian friend of Strauss.”
David Walsh sees more than Ralph resources in modernity itself to overcome our lostness and nihilism. (Walsh’s essay is stunningly original and often unexpectedly persuasive.) But Ralph replies: “Modernity cannot respond to the crisis of modernity from purely modern resources….To the degree that modern founders founded well, they either knew the uses of premodern resources, or they founded better than they knew.”
I would say more, but I have something akin to a real job.
January 16th, 2013 | 3:06 pm
[...] Well, the new issue of PERSPECTIVES ON POLITICAL SCIENCE is out. It features diverse and deep symposia on two outstanding recent books: PLATO’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY by Mark Blitz and Source: Postmodern Conservative [...]
January 17th, 2013 | 12:04 am
I don’t understand Susan Shell’s point on “whether science (or philosophy) in the original sense = knowledge of necessity = is possible.”
What does that mean? I checked out the full article and still couldn’t figure out what she’s saying. Is she talking about whether the NATURAL or NORMATIVE necessity in animals and human beings? Or just “necessity” in general?Necessity has made quite a comeback in mainstream philosophy. With regard to necessity in general, the logical positivists who ignored or cut necessity out of symbolic logic were pretty much completely refuted by Saul Kripke’s “Naming and Necessity.” With regard to natural necessity there have been some powerful arguments in recent Virtue Ethics books that seem to prove that too- especially Philippa Foot’s “Natural Goodness.”
What either of those types of necessity have to do with the question of Faith and Reason as Shell claims, I don’t know. Maybe a Christian synthesis of faith and reason requires natural necessity, in its discussion of our souls?
Another thing I don’t get is Shell’s hang up with Ralph’s use of “analogy” as a description. She thinks Ralph is bringing that in from Aristotle (Categories?), but I’d be willing to bet that Ralph is using “analogy” in a Thomistic sense, and that’s where Shells’ criticism should have begun if there were a problem. As the other Ralph (McInerny) argued in “Aquinas and Analogy,” analogy is absolutely key to understanding metaphysics, the relationship of God to man, and the connections we draw between things using our common sense all the time. Though a Shell might not realize it, Straussians like herself explore analogies to do philosophy alot
January 17th, 2013 | 10:36 am
good points.
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