First Things RSS Feed - John Haldane

Remembering Nicholas Rescher, a Gentle Giant

Tue, 23 Jan 2024 12:05:00 -0500

Nicholas Rescher, who died on January 5 at age ninety-five, was the most extensively published philosopher of the last century, with a hundred books and four hundred articles to his name. He was so prolific that the philosopher Daniel Dennett once wittily defined a “rescher” as “ Rescher , n. A unit for measuring the volume of printed pages, equal to the collected works of Francis Bacon (hence, a rescher of Bacon).”

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The Queen in Scotland

Tue, 01 Nov 2022 00:00:00 -0400

The death of Queen Elizabeth II was in no sense tragic, particularly as it occurred in her beloved Balmoral home amid the Cairngorm moors and mountains. Nor was it a surprise. Elizabeth had been ailing for some while, and particularly since the celebration of her Platinum Jubilee in June. I did not expect her to return from this visit to Balmoral, nor do I suspect she wanted to, for Balmoral is where she had hoped to die. From the ballroom, where in younger days she had danced highland reels, six Balmoral gamekeepers carried her coffin, draped not in the Sovereign’s Union Standard but in the Royal Standard of Scotland. So began her journey to Edinburgh to lie in state at St. Giles’ Cathedral, before proceeding to London.

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The Power of Reality

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 06:00:00 -0400

In Goethe’s poetic play Faust , the titular erudite scholar debates with his young assistant Wagner. While Wagner is an enthusiast for enlightenment and progress, urging the transformative power of new ideas and of science, Faust prefers to trust in human experience and spiritual reflection. At one point, he asks,

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The Cure for Ignorance

Tue, 09 Nov 2021 06:00:00 -0500

Every age has its moral problems and perplexities, but we seem to live in especially troubled times. Sketching a graph with the temporal axis running from 1950 to the present and plotting the number of contested moral issues, old and new, across that period, one would see a rising line over recent decades. Drawing another graph, mapping the number of common ethical resources in the form of shared principles, values, and moral conceptions across the same period, one would see a falling line. Place one graph over another and the two lines cross somewhere in the 1970s.

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When Campion Met Miss Anscombe

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Edmund Campion (1540–81) and Elizabeth Anscombe (1919–2001) were among the most brilliant of their generations of Oxford students: he at St. John’s College, she at St. Hugh’s. Later, each held fellowships in the university and delivered sermons in the university church of St. Mary the Virgin. Both converted to Roman Catholicism at some personal cost and wrote powerfully in defense of its teachings. She, who even after her marriage to Peter Geach insisted on being addressed as “Miss Anscombe,” came to hold the Chair of Philosophy at Cambridge previously occupied by her teacher Wittgenstein. After a period of private tutoring and theological education in Douai and Rome, Campion was made Professor of Rhetoric and then of Philosophy at the Jesuit Novitiate in Prague.

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Roger Scruton: Burkean and Bohemian

Sat, 18 Jan 2020 10:35:00 -0500

The death of Sir Roger Scruton has deprived academic aesthetics of one of its most creative, insightful, and wide-ranging practitioners. Roger was one of a kind: poetic, courageous, and funny. We have lost a truly great figure, but his writings remain to nourish, encourage, and educate those who value the humane conversation of mankind and the wisdom philosophy can bring to it.

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MacIntyre Against Morality

Mon, 01 May 2017 00:00:00 -0400

Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity:
An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrative
by alasdair macintyre
cambridge, 332 pages, $49.99

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A Tale of Two Cities—And of Two Churches

Fri, 23 Oct 2015 00:00:00 -0400

You will recall the lapidary opening of Dickens’s famous novel of London and Paris in the period of the French Revolution. Headed ‘Book I—Recalled to Life: Chapter I: The Period” it begins: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. . . .” For reasons that will quickly become clear, I want to present the full passage with every second line put in emphasis:

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Why Scotland and Ireland Went Different Ways

Fri, 26 Sep 2014 00:00:00 -0400

In St. Andrews on Thursday, September 18, I voted in the Scottish referendum and the following morning flew to Ireland to give a lecture in the International Centre for Newman Studies at University College Dublin. The subject was Religion, Science and Philosophy , but it was hardly possible not to begin with a few remarks about the previous day’s “No” to Scottish Independence vote (55.3 percent). Whatever the significance for those in Scotland, and whatever the interest across the world, for many politicians and commentators in Ireland this was a surprise and a disappointment.

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Scotland on the Eve of the Referendum

Fri, 05 Sep 2014 00:00:00 -0400

The Road to the Present

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