How do we sense objects? Our instincts tell us that objects are just there, waiting for us to come along to sense them. Augustine’s instincts were otherwise. He admitted that “the sense does not proceed from the body that is seen but from the body of the sentient living . . . . Continue Reading »
Hegel wants to rebut the Enlightenment dismissal of Christianity. He doesn’t do this by reaching back to pre-critical forms of faith, but by ingesting criticism, deconstructing traditional theology, and reconstructing what he claims is a purer form of faith. Rowan Williams . . . . Continue Reading »
Summarizing “logic and spirit” in Hegel, Rowan Williams describes the pressure toward relationality that is inherent in any act of thought: “We think in relation to particulars; but we cannot, quite strictly cannot, think particulars simply as particulars, because we can’t . . . . Continue Reading »
Peter Singer ( Hegel: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) ) gives a neat summary of the paradoxes of desire in Hegel: “Desire appeared as the expression of the fact that self-consciousness needs an external object, and yet finds itself limited by anything that is outside . . . . Continue Reading »
A web summary of Lacan’s negative account of desire says, “In constructing our fantasy-version of reality, we establish coordinates for our desire; we situate both ourselves and our object of desire, as well as the relation between. As Slavoj Zizek puts it, ’ through fantasy, we . . . . Continue Reading »
In his treatise Contra Gentiles , Athanasius reproduces an argument from the Phaedrus that provides the immortality of the soul. Anything that has to be moved by something else is mortal and finite; whatever moves of itself is immortal, and immortally mobile. What is most fully mobile . . . . Continue Reading »
Heidegger got it exactly right: “We never really first perceive a throng of sensations, e.g., tones and noises, in the appearance of things . . . rather we hear the storm whistling in the chimney, we hear the three-motored plane, we hear the Mercedes in immediate distinction from the . . . . Continue Reading »
Hegel arranges art, religion, and philosophy on a scale. Art, bound to sensuous external stuff, is the lowest self-expression of Geist , religion’s representation ( Vorstellung ) climbs a bit higher, but the peak comes with the pure, transparent, total conceptual clarity achieved in . . . . Continue Reading »
Can effects double as causes? Kant, still working with some form of final causality, thinks so: There are cases when “the thing that for the moment is designated effect deserves none the less, if we take the series regressively, to be called the cause of the thing of which it was said to be . . . . Continue Reading »
Augustine, of course, says that pride is the beginning of revolt and sin. A prideful soul is one that refuses to recognize that “the whole quality of the soul’s existence is from God” and therefore that it is “enlivened in mental activity and in self-consciousness by . . . . Continue Reading »
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