I have many commendations, and one complaint/caveat about Charles Taylor’s discussion of the formation of an “economic” image of society in the early modern period ( A Secular Age , 176-84 ). Kudos for Taylor for his modification of the Weber thesis. Like Weber, he traces the rise . . . . Continue Reading »
Feminists view modern anthropology as hypermasculine. Joan Tronto has said that “The conception of rational, autonomous man has been a fiction constructed to fit with liberal theories” (quoted in Mumford, Ethics at the Beginning of Life: A phenomenological critique , 116). Seyla . . . . Continue Reading »
Pliny the Elder is, James Mumford says, indignant and offended at babies, perhaps especially at the thought that he once was one ( Ethics at the Beginning of Life: A phenomenological critique , 111). In Natural History , he writes, “man alone on the day of his birth Nature casts away naked on . . . . Continue Reading »
James Mumford’s Ethics at the Beginning of Life: A phenomenological critique (Oxford, 2013) is a remarkable piece of work. It is a phenomenological study of the ethical import of how we come into the world. It is phenomenological because it attends “fixedly” to the phenomena. By . . . . Continue Reading »
Proust wrote that artists recreate the world, which survives “until a new artist arises” (quoted in Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy , 200). Polanyi agrees, but thinks that Proust’s admission that this process is “not always pleasant” is too . . . . Continue Reading »
Polanyi points out ( Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy , 5) that the Copernican system had implications that Copernicus himself never knew, but adds that Copernicus and everyone who committed himself to Copernican theory expected “an indefinite range of possible future . . . . Continue Reading »
Copernicus is said to have taught human beings to see how little they are in the great heliocentric universe. He woke us from our anthropocentric Ptolemaic dreams. He taught us to look at the world objectively. Not so, writes Michael Polanyi in the opening pages of his classic Personal Knowledge: . . . . Continue Reading »
God created and organizes time, and as His image we do the same. Some notes toward a biblical theology of time at the Trinity House site. . . . . Continue Reading »
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 »
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