It is common, perhaps especially among Christians, to reduce cultural history to intellectual history and to trace intellectual history by hopping from philosopher to philosopher. Hume poses problems that Kant tries to solve, and Heidegger tries to undo Descartes. Not false, but very one-sided. . . . . Continue Reading »
It’s often said that modernity begins with thinkers of purity like Descartes. At the First Things site, I review a book that tells a more complex and interesting story about early modern English culture . . . . . Continue Reading »
Procreation, Aristotle said, is like building a house. The carpenter’s role in house-building helps us understand “how the male makes its contribution to generation.” The semen males emit in sexual generation “is not part of the fetation as it develops,” just as a . . . . Continue Reading »
Locke begins the third book of An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by arguing that knowledge is founded on fairly certain simple ideas that represent sensible qualities. So far, it seems, so Cartesian. But Locke is also aware that the mind freely constructs certain concepts out of the simple . . . . Continue Reading »
It has long been said that virtue is its own reward. This notion is particularly set against any “instrumentalization” of virtue, any notion that virtue is a means to achieve some other end. We are good because it is good to be good, not because being good is rewarded with some other . . . . Continue Reading »
In his 2010 Divine Complexity: The Rise of Creedal Christianity , Paul Hinlicky presents a nuanced summary of both the commonalities and the differences between Middle Platonism and early Christian thought. Citing C.J. De Vogel, he lists several shared assumptions: visible things don’t exist . . . . Continue Reading »
Since Mendel, virtually no one has believed in the the Lamarckian idea of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. This means that inherited properties are considered biological, and specifically genetic. An organism with a certain genetic makeup will acquired new properties during its . . . . Continue Reading »
Plato excludes poets, yet he is a poet. It’s an old problem. Schindler ( Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic , 304ff) argues that it’s a mistake to see it as a contradiction. Rather, there is an ambivalence (two-sidedness) to Plato’s . . . . Continue Reading »
Analyzing Plato’s critique of poetry, Schindler ( Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic , 295) notes that the critique in the last book of the Republic is “not in the first place a moral one . . . but primarily ontological.” Schindler . . . . Continue Reading »
Skepticism is, DC Schindler argues, self-refuting ( Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic ). Pointing that out, though, doesn’t convince the skeptic, who is not so much a hater of reason but someone who “has simply grown numb to the claims of . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
