Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837) is considered Italy’s greatest modern poet, and one of its greatest philosophers. The latter reputation is built mainly on the thousands of pages of his notebooks, the Zibaldone or “hodgepodge,” which he began writing when he was a teenager and which . . . . Continue Reading »
Michael Edward Moore’s A Sacred Kingdom: Bishops and the Rise of Frankish Kingship, 300-850 is a detailed, deeply researched study of the formation of the political theology of the Frankish Kingdom from the collapse of Rome through the fragmentation of the Carolingian dynasty. Moore traces . . . . Continue Reading »
The essays reprinted in Keith Corrigan’s collection, Reason, Faith and Otherness in Neoplatonic and Early Christian Thought , are dense and learned explorations of, among other things, the Christian uses of varieties of Greek philosophy. In several essays Corrigan returns to the body-soul . . . . Continue Reading »
Psalm 29 uses the phrase “voice of Yahweh” ( qol YHWH ) seven times (vv. 3, 4 [2x], 5, 7, 8, 9). Yahweh’s thunderous sevenfold voice creates and destroys, kills and makes alive. It breaks cedars but also enlivens Lebanon to skip like a calf. It shakes the wilderness but also makes . . . . Continue Reading »
Like most verses of the Psalms, Psalm 28:8 is structured in parallelism: “Yahweh to them strength // and a fortress saving His anointed He.” Here the parallel is chiastic: A. Yahweh B. to them C. Strength C’. A fortress saving B’. His anointed ( meshiach ) A’. He ( . . . . Continue Reading »
Focus , says author Daniel Goleman, is “utter receptivity to whatever floats into the mind.” And it’s the state of mind that facilitates our most creative thoughts., As Nicholas Carr explains in his NYTBR review, focus goes beyond “‘orienting,' in which we . . . . Continue Reading »
Computers can beat people at chess, but the most powerful intelligence doesn’t come from “thinking machines” on their own, but from a symbiotic interaction between computers and people. In Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better , Clive Thompson . . . . Continue Reading »
Kierkegaard regularly “moans about his fellow human beings being in a rush, as thought life were a matter of getting through a calculus course or something,” writes Gordon Marino in the introduction to his The Quotable Kierkegaard (xix). As Kierkegaard himself puts it, “Most . . . . Continue Reading »
In his The Species Problem, Biological Species, Ontology, and the Metaphysics of Biology , David Stamos explores various theories of species, and concludes that none of the existing theories suffice. In their place, he proposes, drawing on but modifying the work of Bertrand Russell, a relational . . . . Continue Reading »
At the beginning of her new Repetition and Identity: The Literary Agenda , Catherine Pickstock lays out her Kierkegaardian agenda: “To say that every thing, every res, only exists when it has already been (nonidentically) repeated is to say that all beings flow unpredictably forwards in . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
