Category: ethics

• 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;…
• 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 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 4, 2012

  Being in love with living

  Over dinner last night she spoke of being in love with living. This morning there is no mist surrounding the hilltop, no rain falling on the opal rocks. The sun is neither out nor hiding and the trees are looking calm. There is a calmness to the morning, our final one here, a steadiness that…