Category: philosophical counseling

• 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;…
• 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…