Robert Jenson ( Essays in Theology of Culture ) gives this clever summary of the work of Alasdair McIntyre: “MacIntyre ended [After Virtue] by saying that what our civilization must have to survive is something like the Benedictine order. Many who read this wondered how there could be . . . . Continue Reading »
My colleague Jonathan McIntosh writes the following in response to my post quoting Aristotle’s statement about wonder as the beginning of philosophy: “on your quote from Aristotle on wonder, I like to juxtapose this with another passage from a little later in the Metaphysics in . . . . Continue Reading »
Near the beginning of the Metaphysics , Aristotle notes that “it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; they wondered originally at the obvious difficulties, then advanced little by little and stated difficulties about greater matters . . . . A . . . . Continue Reading »
“All men by nature desire to know. An indication of this is the delight we take in our senses.” So Aristotle. Jonathan Lear glosses: “That we take pleasure in the sheer exercise of our sensory faculties is a sign that we do have a desire for knowledge.” . . . . Continue Reading »
Levin again: “Since, for Descartes, the senses are nothing but a source of deception and the body is nothing but perishable matter - that is to say, they are challenges, in both cases, to the power of the ego cogitans , the ego must ‘abandon’ them; the Cartesian ego is a cogito . . . . Continue Reading »
Levin interestingly explores the question of whether human beings are completely determined by history by emphasizing human embodiment. He plays off of Heidegger, who abandoned the “analytic of Dasein” in his later work because he had come to see it as a continuation of the . . . . Continue Reading »
Terry Eagleton suggests in his Terry Lectures ( Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (The Terry Lectures Series) ) that existentialism “was for the most part an ontologically imposing way of saying that one was nineteen, far from home, feeling rather blue, and like a . . . . Continue Reading »
On the First Things web site today, they’ve posted a little article of mine on Rosenstock-Huessy, in memory of his death, February 24, 1973. You can find it here: http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2010/02/fathers-and-sons . . . . Continue Reading »
Deleuze and Guattari chide Lacan for assuming, with most of the Western philosophical tradition, that desire expresses a lack. They suggest instead that desire is productive, that we are “desiring machines.” Why would everyone think that desire expresses lack? Calvin would . . . . Continue Reading »
In his recent book on Dostoevsky: Language, Faith, and Fiction (Making of the Christian Imagination) , Rowan Williams notes Dostoevsky’s “diagnosis of the pathology of fantasies of absolute freedom” that he likens to those of Hegel’s Phenomenology : “‘the freedom . . . . Continue Reading »
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