Peter J. Leithart

Near the beginning of the Metaphysics , Aristotle notes that “it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about greater matters . . . . A . . . . Continue Reading »

“All men by nature desire to know.  An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses.”  So Aristotle.  Jonathan Lear glosses: “That we take pleasure in the sheer exercise of our sensory faculties is a sign that we do have a desire for knowledge.” . . . . Continue Reading »

Frank Smith ( Insult to Intelligence: The Bureaucratic Invasion of Our Classrooms ) says that authors teach children to read: “Not just any authors, but the authors of the stories that children love to read, that children often know by heart before they begin to read the story.  This . . . . Continue Reading »

The Targum on the Song of Songs, deftly translated and annotated by Philip Alexander ( The Targum of Canticles: Translated, With a Critical Introduction, Apparatus, and Notes (Aramaic Bible) ), has its amusing oddities.  The bride in the cleft of the rock in 2:14 is Israel at the Red Sea, . . . . Continue Reading »

In an 1837 exchange on the interpretation of the Song of Songs in The Congregational Magazine , one James Bennett argued that the Song had to be interpreted allegorically because a literal interpretation made the woman sound immodest: “What writer, with the feelings, or the reason, of a man, . . . . Continue Reading »

Stephen D. Moore (in an essay on “The Song of Songs in the History of Sexuality”) notes that the shift from allegorical to literal/sexual interpretations of the Song is connected to shifts in understanding of male love.  Patristic and medieval commentators on the Song easily took . . . . Continue Reading »

Levin again: “Since, for Descartes, the senses are nothing but a source of deception and the body is nothing but perishable matter - that is to say, they are challenges, in both cases, to the power of the ego cogitans , the ego must ‘abandon’ them; the Cartesian ego is a cogito . . . . Continue Reading »

Levin interestingly explores the question of whether human beings are completely determined by history by emphasizing human embodiment.  He plays off of Heidegger, who abandoned the “analytic of Dasein” in his later work because he had come to see it as a continuation of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Merleau-Ponty asks, in Humanism and Terror , “What if it were the very essence of history to impute to us responsibilities which are never entirely ours?” A very Augustinian, covenantal question. . . . . Continue Reading »

False subjectivity has led to nihilism.  To combat the nihilism of modernity, Levin says that we need to challenge the “timeless” Cartesian self by affirming a “self open to changes in itself; a self which changes in response to changes in the world; a self capable of . . . . Continue Reading »