Category: education

• 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;…
• May 8, 2012

  Acting contrary to nature or living according to nature? (I)

  I Somewhere near the passage to modernity, the philosophical tree sprouted some branches and grew dead. How many branches, pray, before it breathed its final breath? The contemporary philosopher Harry Frankfurt holds up his fingers, counts two, and then shades in a third. The first branch is epistemology which, he says, is concerned with “what…
• May 7, 2012

  Loving my body entirely

  A few weeks ago, I asked what a body can do. I wanted to change the question from “What does a body look like when it is at rest?” to “What does a body feel like when it is functioning properly?” The latter question is a very good one, and yet it leaves hanging a more…
• May 5, 2012

  A life of words, a life of quiet actions

  I I want to understand myself more fully, and so I have begun taking pictures of myself. Robert Nozick writes that examining one’s life is like painting a self-portrait; I wrote the same about Jane Austen. I took this screen shot on the morning of April 30 around 7:20 a.m. It was then that the…
• May 3, 2012

  The Wicca hour

  It is entirely possible that we have been hallucinating since we first arrived on Monday. We saw a bearded woman in a cart being pulled up a hill by a bearded man in a cloak. We nodded at a leery, shady man in a robe who was watching the bearded couple. We passed by an…