According to D.C. Schindler’s account ( Plato’s Critique of Impure Reason: On Goodness and Truth in the Republic , 42-3), Plato is not an idealist searching for a “pure” starting point. On the contrary, he knows that the search for such a standpoint is chimerical. The . . . . Continue Reading »
Thomas Nagel doesn’t much like John Gray’s latest , The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths , an assault on humanism along these lines. Gray rejects the idea that humans are unique, the notion that the mind reflects the order of the world, and the myth of progress. . . . . Continue Reading »
Wilhelm von Humboldt set out on the ambitious project “to compare the languages of the world and the worlds that they permit us to enter into” (James Underhill, Humboldt, Worldview, and Language , 16). To do so, he had to formulate a novel view of language over against the available . . . . Continue Reading »
Jonathan Edwards was the first, Stephen Holmes claims (in an essay in Jonathan Edwards: Philosophical Theologian ), “on the American continent to have read Newton and Locke, and arguably amongst the first in the world to have appreciated the implications of what they had to say” (101). . . . . Continue Reading »
Time and change are persistent puzzles in metaphysics. How can something be “the same” when all of its properties have changed? A number of philosophers defend a “four-dimensional” metaphysics that incorporates temporal change into the very definition of an object. For . . . . Continue Reading »
Theory, Nietzsche argued, arises from the will to “correct existence.” Taking his cues from Nietzsche, Lyotard describes the difference between “pious” and “pagan” theorizing. The former is guilty of Nietzsche’s charge: Since Plato, Lyotard argues, . . . . Continue Reading »
In Milbank’s view, Augustine violates his own privative doctrine of evil, which gives no “ontological purchase to dominium , or power for its own sake,” when he allows that punishment might take a purely positive form. For Milbank, “in any coercion, however mild and benignly . . . . Continue Reading »
In his Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values: A New Attempt Toward the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism (Northwestern University Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy) , Max Scheler describes the modern attitude that he finds at the heart of the Kantian system: . . . . Continue Reading »
Karol Wojtyla in full anti-Kantian mode ( Love and Responsibility , 125-6): Persons are essentially self-mastering, sui juris , “and cannot be ceded to another or supplanted by another in another in any context where it must exercise its will or make a commitment affecting its freedom.” . . . . Continue Reading »
Yes, answers Charles Taylor ( Dilemmas and Connections: Selected Essays , 50-1). But how? Taylor suggests there are three facets to mystery: (1) It refers to something we cannot explain; (2) it refers to something that we cannot explain that also is “something of great depth and . . . . Continue Reading »
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