Not Wesleyan Methodism, but against the methodism attacked by Gadamer. As Anthony Thiselton notes (in his essay in The Promise of Hermeneutics ), Gadamer’s life work is summed up in this sentence from a late essay: “It is the Other who breaks into my ego-centredness and gives me . . . . Continue Reading »
In the same 2005 Critical Inquiry article where he quotes Freud on kissing, he gives a brief, provocative phenomenology of kissing. The mouth, he asserts, is the most intimate part of the body that is generally public. Eyes traditionally reveal the soul, but the mouth is a yawning entry into the . . . . Continue Reading »
In his Hegels Trinitarian Claim: A Critical Reflection , Dale Schlitt lays out Hegel’s effort to derive Trinitarian theology conceptually, rather than from revelation and redemptive history. In part, this is an argument about the structure of logic. For Hegel, the traiadic structure of the . . . . Continue Reading »
Behold, the fruit of class warfare rhetoric. This is what happens when you teach that “rich people” became rich at your expense and they owe you their property. The end of respect for private property and a person’s right to have what he’s earned is the end of . . . . Continue Reading »
Is an adulterous one-night stand the same action as a night of marital love with one’s wife? If we say Yes, what have we assumed? We have assumed that the determinative dimensions of actions are the physical actions of sex. To an outsider who didn’t know that one woman is a mistress and . . . . Continue Reading »
In his introduction to Plato: Timaeus (Focus Philosophical Library) , Peter Kalkavage writes that Timaeus’ “likely story . . . depicts making, poiesis , as an activity that starts with the highest things and proceeds to the lower.” In that is contained all the pathology and pathos . . . . Continue Reading »
The subtitle of Benjamin Crowe’s Heidegger’s Religious Origins: Destruction and Authenticity (Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion) highlights the twin themes of his book, both of which, he argues, were shaped by Heidegger’s study of Christian theology. The notion that . . . . Continue Reading »
Richard Wolin has an extended review of several books by Tzvetan Todorov in a recent issue of TNR that provides a neat window into the workings of French theory in the middle of the twentieth century. Todorov came to Paris from Bulgaria in 1963 at the age of 24, already trained in Slavic theory by . . . . Continue Reading »
Pickstock still: Plato notes the sensory associations of various arts. Painting renders the visual, music the sound. But language is synaesthetic. A word or combination of words combines the senses, and engenders thought and so, Plato says, gets to the “essence” iof a things that is . . . . Continue Reading »
Pickstock points to this passage on the Cratylus, where Socrates connects heroes with desire through an etymological connection with Eros: “All of them sprang either from the love of a God for a mortal woman, or of a mortal man for a Goddess; think of the word in the old Attic, and you will . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
