What follows is an oblique contribution to a debate between my friends Doug Wilson and James Jordan. Doug has recently addressed an issue - regeneration - on which he and Jim have disagreed for a number of years. I hope that the brief discussion below will untangle the debate somewhat. In my view, . . . . Continue Reading »
In her wonderful The Gift of Thanks: The Roots and Rituals of Gratitude , the incomparable Margaret Visser contrasts the freedom of modern gift-giving with the obligatoriness of gifts in “Gift societies”: “In our culture, once a gift is given, it belongs entirely to the receiver. . . . . Continue Reading »
In a 1981 article in the Journal of Religious Ethics , Paul Camenisch points to the paradox of gifts. On the one hand, a gift is only a gift if the recipient “has no right or claim upon” the thing given. It the thing or payment is compensation, it is wages and not gift. Gifts are free. . . . . Continue Reading »
Patrick Fitzgerald argues in an extensive and careful analysis of “Gratitude and Justice” in a 1998 issue of Ethics that recent philosophy has treated gratitude as too narrowly an issue of justice, asking the question “When is gratitude owed ?” Fitzgerald argues compellingly . . . . Continue Reading »
In his stimulating new volume, Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy , Adrian Pabst offers a fresh (to me) assessment of Plato and his differences from Aristotle. Focusing on the problems of individuation, he argues that Plato offers a “relational” metaphysics that affirms rather than . . . . Continue Reading »
In his study of Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge (p. 11), Lawrence Kramer describes the shift from modern to postmodern in terms of speech-act theory. Modernism privileged the constative and subordinated the performative; postmodernism deconstructs the hierarchy and especially highlights . . . . Continue Reading »
Phenomenology, especially in its Heideggerian variety, attempts to overcome the modern obsession with epistemology and return us to being, to ontology. What Heidegger in fact seems to do is overcome the divide between epistemology and ontology so that philosophy is both at the same time, but . . . . Continue Reading »
Medieval Christian thinkers were sometimes aware of the tensions between Aristotle’s ideal of magnanimity and Christian virtues like humility. According to Tobias Hoffmann’s essay in Virtue Ethics in the Middle Ages: Commentaries on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, 1200-1500 . . . . Continue Reading »
In his Habermas and Theology , Nick Adams sums up Habermas’s project as an effort to answer this question: “how can there be moral debate between members of different traditions?” Habermas’s answer, Adamss says, is “simple in conception”: “Habermas argues . . . . Continue Reading »
I summed up Gadamer’s discussion of beauty and light a few days ago, but here is Gadamer himself speaking to the subject ( Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) , pp. 482-7). Following Aristotle and Aquinas, he argues that “‘Radiance’ . . . is not only one of the qualities of . . . . Continue Reading »
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