The Book: Christianity and Western Thought, Volume One: From the Ancient World to the Age of Enlightenment by Colin Brown:10 — The Gist: Outlines the changes in preconceptions, worldviews, and paradigms that have affected the ways in which people have thought about religion in general and . . . . Continue Reading »
We are what we will be. We are what the Father will make of us in His Son and by His Spirit. So too the creation is what it will be. Biblical ontology is an ontology of promise. That is: a) Being is conferred from outside; b) being is temporal/eschatological; c) being is personally gifted. . . . . Continue Reading »
Heidegger argues that we discover nature in use of useful things: “nature must not be understood as what is merely objectively present, nor as the power of nature . The forest is a forest of timber, the mountain a quarry of rock, the river is water power, the wind is wind ‘in the . . . . Continue Reading »
According to Heidegger, Descartes represents an effort at pure idealism. Knowledge comes to a detached subject gazing inward, without any attention to the world outside. Heidegger doesn’t believe that Descartes can do it, since we need some knowledge of the phenomenal world if we are going to . . . . Continue Reading »
In an essay on the philosophical significance of modern science, Heidegger insists that Descartes did not “subjectivize” knowledge or metaphysics with his cogito . Much more the opposite, since Descartes was guided, Heidegger says, by the prior conviction that mathematics provided both . . . . Continue Reading »
Brad Green is a friend, but even if he weren’t, I would be recommending his freshly published The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life . He keeps things focused on basics - creation and eschatology, the cross, the nature of language, and the nexus between ethics . . . . Continue Reading »
In his excellent Christian Ethics in a Technological Age , Brian Brock argues that despite modernity’s best efforts, “the Father of Jesus Christ has not allowed a secularizing West to succeed in erasing the heritage of centuries of divine judgment and reshaping of Western . . . . Continue Reading »
Nietzsche again (Daybreak, 483): ” Weariness of mankind, —A: Know thou! Yes! But always in the human form! How? Am I always to watch the same comedy, act in the same comedy, without ever being able to see the things with other eyes than these? And yet there may bo innumerable species of . . . . Continue Reading »
In The Gay Science (39), Nietzsche comments on the importance of changes in taste in philosophy and science: “The alteration of the general taste is more important than the alteration of opinions; opinions, with all their proving, refuting, and intellectual masquerade, are merely symptoms of . . . . Continue Reading »
Jim Rogers of Texas A&M writes this rebuttal to my post summarizing Godbout’s book on gift. Jim quotes these sentences: “First, the dominant paradigm of human behavior is utilitarian. People act out of self-interest, and in that context the gift seems impossible, other-worldly, . . . . Continue Reading »
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