I’m re-reading Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper. As Pieper plausibly, and I think correctly, discusses matters, the loss of leisure and the consequent loss of culture is bound up, at least in this age of men, with the process of proletarianization, that is, the limitation of men to their laboring aspects. Pieper … [Read more…]
I have revised my book, Four Sorts of Knowledge, correcting some errors and maybe clarifying some points. There were some places where my prose was especially opaque, even more so than is necessary while I struggle to use a dumbed-down and rigid language to creatively explore reality. There were also places where I was a … [Read more…]
I haven’t read Stephen Hawking’s most recent book where he’s said to argue that a Creator-God is unnecessary nor have I read more than summaries of the efforts of certain Christian theologians to shoot down those arguments. I’ve read that Hawking argues gravity fills the need for such a God, but that’s irrelevant to the … [Read more…]
I saw this quote on the Internet recently: I keep the subject of my inquiry constantly before me, and wait till the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light. [Sir Isaac Newton] Newton knew how to think. In Thomistic terms, serious thinking is an intentional process, that is … [Read more…]
We do need to pass by those limitations of scientific materialism and to do it without falling into the temptation of dualisms which invoke hand-waving to explain immaterial phenomena. My very working method, as well as my respect for the totality of human experience and human knowledge, rejects any possibility of scientific materialism or reductionistic … [Read more…]
There are those who passively accept what they’re taught and they are those who rebel as if instinctively, denying traditional beliefs and outlooks by denying conclusions without remembering that human thought is a process. It remains a process even when dealing with truths revealed by God — which are far fewer in number than many … [Read more…]
This entry is a supplement to Not Monism and Not Dualism but Unity of Creation. One form of dualism, strongly supported by Aristotle, is particularly attractive at first contact: the idea that things come into being when form is impressed upon substance. What’s wrong about this, and perhaps the real error underlying all dualisms, is … [Read more…]
In a number of writings, I deny both the monisms of matter and spirit or thought. I also deny the dualism of body/soul, brain/mind, etc. Yet, I use the terms ‘soul’ and ‘mind’ on a regular basis. What gives? I think of being as richer than ‘mere’ matter, yet, I see no reason to speak … [Read more…]
Pilgrims travel paths, journeying from one location on earth to another, sometimes those places are fictional but usually quite concrete. To be sure, Dante’s pilgrim found (as some of the more recent translations of The Inferno attest) that the path could wander away from him, a strange event from a fully concrete view of paths. … [Read more…]
The lead paragraph of this article, Genomic Changes Found In Brains Of People Who Commit Suicide, asks questions which I’ve been handling in my first book and my blogs for the past two years: Are genes destiny? Alternatively, are we simply the products of our environment? There is a growing sense that neither of these … [Read more…]