Knowing is like tasting and eating. Where does that get us? If knowing is like eating, then we know things other by taking them into ourselves. Knowing is a kind of participation, union, indwelling. If knowing is seeing, we keep everything at a distance. If knowing is like eating, . . . . Continue Reading »
Thomas says that “excellence of mind is proportionate to fineness of touch” rather than sight. Why? ”In the first place touch is the basis of sensitivity as a whole; for obviously the organ of touch pervades the whole body, so that the organ of each of the other senses . . . . Continue Reading »
Carolyn Korsmeyer ( Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy ) questions the traditional hierarchy of the senses that places vision and hearing at the top of the heap. Why do they come out on top? Korsmeyer says that the issue is distance; distance keeps the thing perceived (seen, . . . . Continue Reading »
What does language do? Refer? Communicate concepts? Affect action? Yes, but, according to Merleau-Ponty, with all of these doings of language it never loses its basic link to gesture and sound. Language never loses its affective dimension, never loses its musicality. . . . . Continue Reading »
Imagination, David Abram argues (following Merleau-Ponty), is not “a separate mental faculty” but “the way the senses themselves have of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of things that we do not sense . . . . Continue Reading »
Arians use the words of Scripture, Athanasius acknowledges, but they use them only as a cloak and disguise to deceive and seduce. They are like the devil their father, who used Scriptural language to tempt Eve and attempted to tempt Jesus by quoting Scripture. What’s the difference . . . . Continue Reading »
J. Budziszewski’s The Line Through the Heart: Natural Law as Fact, Theory, and Sign of Contradiction is about the best and most accessible defenses of natural law one could hope for. At the micro level, J. Bud’s arguments, rejoinders, and observations are sharp, often witty. . . . . Continue Reading »
Simon Blackburn has a somewhat surprisingly admiring review of a biography of RG Collingwood in a recent issue of TNR . Collingwood comes off as very contemporary, very stimulating. In what Blackburn calls a “succinct and perspicuous . . . statement of the public nature of the . . . . Continue Reading »
Zbigniew Herbert’s “I Would Like To Describe” is about as good a refutation of subject-object dualisms as you’re going to find. I would like to describe the simplest emotion joy or sadness but not as others do reaching for shafts of rain or sun I would like to describe a . . . . Continue Reading »
Jenson notes that the university arose as a place of discourse, an institution centered on the word, and adds that “Mediterranean antiquity’s specific ideal of knowledge would never by itself have made the university. The organ of truth, in the classic tradition, is the . . . . Continue Reading »
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