We have to learn to move forward in our thought by trying to honestly perceive reality and to openheartedly respond to it while becoming aware of the distortions of the preconceptions we always bring to such tasks. This is a logical development of the insight we have inherited from Aquinas and a few of his … [Read more…]
We’re told that David Hume proved that values can’t be drawn from facts. Most recently, I read of this alleged proof in an interesting and mostly unobjectionable book about the relationship between Protestant ways of reading texts and the origins of science: The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science by Peter Harrison [Cambridge … [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…]
In one of his novels about the American Empire, Gore Vidal quotes the American-English novelist Henry James as claiming, circa 1900, that it was the United States which was corrupting political systems around the world. The Irish political scientist, William E.H. Lecky, wrote in the 1890s of the great divide in American morality, the citizens … [Read more…]