By most standards, I have a funny definition of creativity. We shape our minds, our entire persons, by responding actively and properly to what lies around us, below us, above us, and in us, where all prepositions — `around’, `below’, `above’, and `in’ — should be understood in both spatial-temporal terms and also metaphysical terms. … [Read more…]
One of the worst things one generation can do is trap future generations in one specific way of life or one way of solving problems. There is perhaps more than some think to the witticism by someone whose name I can’t recall: “I refused to be a radical when I was young because I didn’t … [Read more…]
I hope that William James was his usual good-natured and tolerant self when he wrote: [T]he scholastic philosophy … is only common sense grown pedantic. [The Meaning of Truth, page 44 of the Dover reprint edition] He’s right, in general, but it’s sad that Catholic neo-scholastics in recent centuries seem to be pedantic without having … [Read more…]
I’m coming to the end of this scattered series of essays inspired by Kenneth Minogue’s profound book on modern politics, The Liberal Mind. My thoughts have developed so that my understanding of liberalism has taken on a surprising form, but no form of liberalism seems to me plausible or rational. I’ve taken a position that … [Read more…]
The bishops of the American Catholic Church are upset with President Obama’s mandate that all participants in regulated health-care programs should have coverage for contraceptives, abortions, and perhaps some other services and products considered immoral by Catholics and many others. But this Catholic layman has a question: What right have the bishops to object in … [Read more…]
In an essay I recently posted to this blog, Let’s Hear It for Amateurs, That Is, for Lovers, I used a quote from The Liberal Mind by Kenneth Minogue, to argue along a slightly different line than Professor Minogue had intended. This is the quote from The Liberal Mind which was the beginning of my … [Read more…]
Not one to accept the mishmash of ideas which is the modern worldview, Professor Minogue reminds us: A free State is one in which there is a strong resistance to professionalization; it is marked by that “versatility” which Pericles claimed for Athens. [page 150] This is not to argue that professionalization is bad. Minogue was … [Read more…]
In reading Richard Gregory’s Mind in Science, I find that he raises a seemingly plausible objection to those thinkers who `regress’ to seeing abstractions, including knowledge, in the objective world. He states his objection in a short and loaded way: [The psychologist Kenneth] Craik is suggesting that human inference has its validity and logical power … [Read more…]
I’m still dealing with the intellectual aftermath of Kenneth Minogue’s The Liberal Mind. In that book, he tells us: War is habit-forming, and peace is confusing to many people who cannot deal with conflicting standards and feelings of guilt. [page 111] I’m aware of others who made comments about the eerie and morally disedifying attractiveness … [Read more…]
The state as we know it in the United States and most countries in this year of 2011 can’t be limited without destroying that state. This is because — in Jeffersonian terms — the state as it currently exists in most countries is an instrument of a vague group of human beings which we could … [Read more…]