Category: Series
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The Weltbild of Justin Martyr, pt. 2
As previously discussed, Justin developed intellectually in a rather free-wheeling philosophical milieu, a ferment just prior to the emergence of the schools that would come to dominate the next few centuries, indeed the next millennium, of thought. Consequently and particularly because of his own rather eclectic journey through various philosophical schools on his way to…
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The Weltbild of Justin Martyr, pt. 1
One of the earliest (surviving) apologetic writers of the early church, Justin Martyr was born to a pagan family in Samaria during the early second century. Seeking wisdom, he studied a variety of philosophical schools before becoming a variety of Middle Platonist–though he still retained principles from his training in Stoicism, Pythagoreanism, and the Peripatetic…
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Small is Beautiful, pt. 6
My final post on Small is Beautiful. Other posts on Schumacher can be found here. Schumacher includes another section, on Social Organization, that I won’t survey in detail, primarily because I found it to be the least interesting in the book. I imagine there’s quite a bit of sophistication that I missed, therefore, and don’t…
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Small is Beautiful, pt. 5
An attempt to get back to writing regularly here, perhaps futile. My last post on Schumacher was in January, so I’ve lost the thread a bit, please bear with me. Previous posts can be found here. One of the things I most appreciate about Schumacher is that he takes the challenge of technology seriously. The…
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Small is Beautiful, pt. 4
[previous entries in the series: part 1, part 2, and part 3] Not content to offer mere diagnosis, Schumacher dedicates considerable space in Small is Beautiful to concrete proposals for reform. Recognize the importance of education, technology, and social organization (here, he is primarily thinking of large scale organizations, corporations, government, etc.) to modern society,…
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Small is Beautiful, pt. 3
[Part 1], [Part 2] Schumacher was an economist, and thus some of his most penetrating analysis comes in his section on economics and the evils attendant therein. First, in keeping with the materialistic orientation of the world discussed in the previous post, we see that, in a materialist world, the gravest error is to fail…
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Small is Beautiful, pt. 2
[part 1] Been busy and only going to get more so through the month of November, so this series on Schumacher is likely to be pretty spread out. Apologies. One of Schumacher’s key insights is that the problem of the modern economic system is not simply a crisis in the distribution and use of resources,…
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Small is Beautiful
Beginning another series of posts, this time concentrating on E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful. Schumacher was a mid-20th century economist, a student of Keynes, who advised the British National Coal Board (a far bigger deal than the name alone indicates) for decades. Influenced by his study of philosophy, particularly the traditional social thought of the Catholic…
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The Captive Mind, pt. 4
[part 1, part 2, part 3] In previous posts, we’ve seen the tremendous appeal of the totalitarian ideology to the intellectual as a means of overcoming social alienation and the terrific social pressure on doubters that ensues after the ideology has become ascendant. This ascendancy is unstable, however, because the totalitarian ideology is, ultimately, a lie.…
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The Captive Mind, pt. 3
[Part 1], [Part 2] In the previous two posts, we’ve explored the social alienation afflicting the intellectual and the allure of the newly ascendant totalitarian ideology as a means of overcoming that alienation. I think it’s important to note that this alienation is a very real and serious thing. We are social beings and to…
Dan Yingst 