So far as I know, Engels never rode the Underground, but he understood its spirit. In The Condition of the Working Class in England , he wrote: “Hundreds of thousands of people from all classes and ranks of society crowd each other [on the streets] . . . . Meanwhile it occurs to no one . . . . Continue Reading »
According to an article by the nineteenth-century Slaophil philosopher Ivan Kireevsky, the classical world represented a “triumph of formal human reason” that determined the shape of Western Europe through the Middle Ages and into the modern period. In Western Christendom, “the . . . . Continue Reading »
Atheist philosophy Quentin Smith notes in a 2001 article that the theistic arguments of Plantinga, Wolterstorff, Alston, and others opened the door for God to return to philosophy. Plantinga’s work in particular made it “apparent to the philosophical profession that realist . . . . Continue Reading »
What my sons do in their spare time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8JL7073_gk . . . . Continue Reading »
My colleague Jonathan McIntosh points to the Aristotelian source for Thomas’s views on touch: “we have a more precise sense of taste because it is a certain type of touch, and that is the most precise sense a human being has. For in the other sense, the human being is left behind by . . . . Continue Reading »
Knowing is like tasting and eating. Where does that get us? If knowing is like eating, then we know things other by taking them into ourselves. Knowing is a kind of participation, union, indwelling. If knowing is seeing, we keep everything at a distance. If knowing is like eating, . . . . Continue Reading »
Thomas says that “excellence of mind is proportionate to fineness of touch” rather than sight. Why? ”In the first place touch is the basis of sensitivity as a whole; for obviously the organ of touch pervades the whole body, so that the organ of each of the other senses . . . . Continue Reading »
Angel F. Mendez Montoya’s The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist (Illuminations: Theory & Religion) is an explosive little book. His “alimentary theology” is not just a theology of food; like Jeremy Begbie’s “theology with music,” Mendez Montoya . . . . Continue Reading »
Carolyn Korsmeyer ( Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy ) questions the traditional hierarchy of the senses that places vision and hearing at the top of the heap. Why do they come out on top? Korsmeyer says that the issue is distance; distance keeps the thing perceived (seen, . . . . Continue Reading »
Lisa Heldke writes, “For theories like Descartes’ [which] conceive of my body as an external appendage to my mind, and see its role in inquiry as merely to provide a set of (fairly reliable) sensory data on which my reasoning faculty then operates to produce objects of knowledge. . . . . Continue Reading »
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