Tag: Philosophy
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Justin’s Old Man
The final part of a series of posts on Justin Martyr. As the months since I read Justin pass, it’s the enigma of the Old Man that remains most strongly impressed on my memory. I’ve come to think that he is the key point around which both Justin’s biography and bibliography crystallizes. The central pillar…
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Justin’s Conversion
The much delayed conclusion to my look at Justin Martyr, other posts on Justin can be found here. A planned excursus on the identity of the Old Man has turned out to be more complex than I first thought, so I’m going to make that it’s own and truly final post. The story of Justin’s…
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Whoops
The intellectual consciousness of modern Europe as commonly delineated and accepted even in our day proclaimed those three ideas: a Nature subsisting in itself; an autonomous personality of the human subject; a culture self-created out of norms intrinsic to its own essence. The European mind believed further that the constant creation and perfection of this…
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Stars and Dust
This is a continuation of the line of thought found in an earlier post. In On the Human Condition, St. Basil writes: If you like, after your contemplation of the soul be attentive also to the structure of the body and marvel at how appropriate a dwelling for the rational soul the sovereign Fashioner has created.…
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Josef Pieper, A Brief Reading on the Virtues of the Human Heart
I’m not a fan of most modern philosophy. No one ever seems to just come out and say what they mean, instead burying their points in a mass of verbiage so difficult to penetrate that when you do, it’s inevitably a disappointment. More, they seem to have forgotten the fundamental duty of philosophy, to inform how…
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Letters to a Diminished Church, Dorothy Sayers
I enjoy Dorothy Sayers and think she’s underrated as a thinker, though I haven’t read all that much. Her suggestions in her article on the Trivium have always struck me as eminently reasonable. Anyway, this is a collection of her essays. Within she offers a number of wonderful insights and images, this is my favorite: But,…
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“Human beings are not different from the fire, scanner, or mother bear; they’re just more complex systems.” But if science discovered that burning were actually as complex as the brain action, or even if there were some Rube Goldberg contraption that was as complex as neuronal firing, would we then have a reason to become confused…
Dan Yingst 