Rosenzweig and Rosenstock-Huessy were all about names, and so set themselves against philosophy as it came from Socrates and Plato. Critaudo ( Religion, Redemption and Revolution: The New Speech Thinking Revolution of Franz Rozenzweig and Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy ) summarizes Rosenstock’s . . . . Continue Reading »
Kevin Hector offers this clarification in response to my summary of his Theology Without Metaphysics: God, Language and the Spirit of Recognition: “A crucial component of what I call ‘essentialist-correspondentist metaphysics’ is that it fits objects into predetermined categories or a . . . . Continue Reading »
It’s common to tell the history of philosophy as a calm passing-on of concepts or at least of questions. There are arguments, sometimes vigorous, but they take place in the proverbial ivory tower designed just to house philosophers. Rosenstock thinks otherwise. Philosophy arises from shock, . . . . Continue Reading »
Neither Rosenstock nor Rosenzweig were moralists. They did not believe that evil could be fought by urging people to do better, as the moralist thinks. Instead, evil is fought by creative, timely speech and action: “St. Francis did not call for others to act 0 he himself acted, and his action . . . . Continue Reading »
Cristaudo’s book is not only the best available introduction to Rosenstock-Huessy (and perhaps Rosenzweig), it is full of Cristaudo’s own insightful analyses of philosophical and cultural phenomena. This, for instance: “When the spirits of modernity were in their preliminary . . . . Continue Reading »
Moshe Halbertal reviews the late Ronald Dworkin’s final book, Religion without God, in The New Republic . Dworkin’s position is “religious” first in the sense that it is non-naturalist, and for this he gives, Halbertal says, two main lines of argument, moral and aesthetic. . . . . Continue Reading »
Fran O’Rourke’s What Happened in and to Moral Philosophy in the Twentieth Century?: Philosophical Essays in Honor of Alasdair MacIntyre is a collection of essays from a 2009 University College Dublin conference assessing and responding to the achievement of Alasdair MacIntyre’s . . . . Continue Reading »
The essays collected in Thomas Howard’s Imago Dei: Human Dignity in Ecumenical Perspective represent a spectrum of approaches to the question of human nature and human dignity. All the essays are rewarding. John Behr offers an Orthodox perspective that emphasizes the eschatological realization of . . . . Continue Reading »
The title of Mark Edwards’s Origen Against Plato bluntly gives the gist of the book. Contrary to the popular wisdom, Origen was not a Platonist, denying all of the premises of the Platonism of his time - that objects are defined because they participate in forms that dwell in an incorporeal . . . . Continue Reading »
In a 2004 article in JETS, Henri Blocher examines how recent philosophers have attempted to use metaphor to break through the “flatism” of Positivism. He agrees that Positivism must be opposed, but argues that it is best opposed on the grounds of a biblical ontology: “Under the . . . . Continue Reading »
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