Recent centuries have seen a mysterious retreat from the mainstream of modern thought on the part of Catholic clergymen and also Catholic laymen whose intellectual work is oriented directly to the needs of Christianity. I’m far from being a well-read historian but I’ve read enough survey works to see the retreat of Catholic thinkers into … [Read more…]
While reading, Ernst Cassirer’s The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, I realized I’ve been guilty of a major oversight in my discussions of ‘hellenistic metaphysics’. Cassirer doesn’t speak much of Christianity or the Church in that book, but he does speak of swings between various forms of Hellenistic metaphysics. And there are indeed … [Read more…]
I have put a completed book, not published in paper, on this website for free downloading. I’ve only put an informal copyright and no legally binding license on the work. See Unpublished Books for Download for details.
In the December, 2007 edition of Brain in the News published by the Dana Foundation, there is a reprint of an article from Salon.com: I Feel Your Pain. It seems that specific brain-cells have been found which respond to distress on the part of a nearby creature. True pain is felt. What is empathy? It’s … [Read more…]
Way back in the mid-1970s before the sexy term ‘chaos theory’ had ever driven books onto the best-seller lists, I took a course with a decidedly unsexy title: The Qualitative Analysis of Ordinary Differential Equations. In that course, we learned how to analyze potentially unstable systems such as a planet orbiting the sun so that … [Read more…]
I’m being somewhat unfair in titling this series of blog posts as if Pope Benedict were responsible for the lack of response by Christian thinkers to the opportunities and problems presented by modern empirical knowledge. It’s creative thinkers who’ve failed over the past five centuries or so, perhaps because of the general cultural decay narrated … [Read more…]
Where do I go from here? I probably should go more slowly than I did in my previous entry: Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: The Ascent of the Human Mind. In that posting, I was unleashing my mind and imagination, trying to map the entire path from here to there in one image. … [Read more…]
Minutes after posting a critique of Pope Benedict in which I claimed he needs to develop a stronger appreciation for modern empirical knowledge (see Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: The Need for Respectful Criticism), I received a newsletter from the Vatican News Service in which the Holy Father spoke in complimentary terms about … [Read more…]
I’m currently reading The Principles of Quantum Mechanics by P.A.M. Dirac, though I’m missing more than I’m getting. With a weak educational background and a lack of the toughness to dig in and learn how to learn on my own, I’d abandoned my physics major in college more than 30 years ago. I made up … [Read more…]
Pope Benedict has an appropriate respect for the human mind and its products, cultural and intellectual and spiritual. Yet, there’s a big gap in his thought that could be filled only by a proper appreciation for modern empirical knowledge, including in a very explicit way the problem areas of mathematics, physics, and evolutionary biology. I … [Read more…]