Month: May 2012

• May 14, 2012

  Life is not like water (VI)

  VI We have been following nature’s course through modernity with a view to solving an enigma. How could it be so self-evident during earlier epochs that the virtuous person would, without question, live according to nature when it became just as self-evident in our time that the morally upright person would have to act contrary…
• May 12, 2012

  Kant’s tribunal (V)

  V One of Hegel’s enigmatic theses from the Preface to The Philosophy of Right is that the actual is rational. The contemporary scholar Robert Pippin glosses this proposition–rightly, in my view–as a demand that being be intelligible. As human beings, we long for order in reality so much so that is scarcely conceivable that we…
• May 11, 2012

  Locke’s qualities (IV)

  IV The sober minded Englishman John Locke read the Frenchman Descartes’ work approvingly, finding the “way of ideas” especially edifying for his empirical pursuits into the question of what we can know. Just as we must first examine our instruments before we can attend to what the instruments are measuring, so, Locke insisted, we must…
• May 10, 2012

  Descartes’ materalism (III)

  III The medieval worldview effected a happy if strenuous synthesis between Aristotelian cosmology and Christian theology. The appeal of Aristotle’s conception of the cosmos was that it made nature intelligible to human comprehension. The cosmos was anthropocentric in design, finite in size, spherical in shape, and interconnected in and out, top to bottom–from the mutable…
• May 9, 2012

  Pascal’s dread (II)

  II Blaise Pascal was a mathematician and a Catholic apologist. C.S. Lewis was a converted Christian and a scholar of medieval literature. Both turned their eyes toward the cosmos. The medieval cosmos, they would have seen, was a delicate synthesis of Aristotelian cosmology and Christian theology. Aristotelianism insisted on the finite scope and spherical design;…