So far as I know, Engels never rode the Underground, but he understood its spirit. In The Condition of the Working Class in England , he wrote: “Hundreds of thousands of people from all classes and ranks of society crowd each other [on the streets] . . . . Meanwhile it occurs to no one that others are worth even a glance. The brutal indifference, the unfeeling isolation of each individual person in his private interest becomes the more repulsive... Read more
According to an article by the nineteenth-century Slaophil philosopher Ivan Kireevsky, the classical world represented a “triumph of formal human reason” that determined the shape of Western Europe through the Middle Ages and into the modern period. In Western Christendom, “the pope [became] the head of the church instead of Jesus Christ . . . the whole totality of faith was supported by syllogistic scholasticism; the Inquisition, Jesuitry, in one word, all the peculiarities of Catholicism developed through the power... Read more
According to an article by the nineteenth-century Slaophil philosopher Ivan Kireevsky, the classical world represented a “triumph of formal human reason” that determined the shape of Western Europe through the Middle Ages and into the modern period. In Western Christendom, “the pope [became] the head of the church instead of Jesus Christ . . . the whole totality of faith was supported by syllogistic scholasticism; the Inquisition, Jesuitry, in one word, all the peculiarities of Catholicism developed through the power... Read more
Atheist philosophy Quentin Smith notes in a 2001 article that the theistic arguments of Plantinga, Wolterstorff, Alston, and others opened the door for God to return to philosophy. Plantinga’s work in particular made it “apparent to the philosophical profession that realist theists were not out-matched by naturalists in terms of the most valued standards of analytic philosophy: conceptual precision, rigor of argumentation, technical erudition, and an in-depth defense of an original worldview . . . . In philosophy it became,... Read more
What my sons do in their spare time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8JL7073_gk Read more
My colleague Jonathan McIntosh points to the Aristotelian source for Thomas’s views on touch: “we have a more precise sense of taste because it is a certain type of touch, and that is the most precise sense a human being has. For in the other sense, the human being is left behind by many of the animals, but with respect to touch he is precise in a way that greatly surpasses the rest, and this is why he is the... Read more
Knowing is like tasting and eating. Where does that get us? If knowing is like eating, then we know things other by taking them into ourselves. Knowing is a kind of participation, union, indwelling. If knowing is seeing, we keep everything at a distance. If knowing is like eating, what we know becomes part of our bloodstream. If knowing is like eating, we can’t know and leave the world unchanged. It will show our teeth marks. (more…) Read more
Thomas says that “excellence of mind is proportionate to fineness of touch” rather than sight. Why? ”In the first place touch is the basis of sensitivity as a whole; for obviously the organ of touch pervades the whole body, so that the organ of each of the other senses is also an organ of touch, and the sense of touch by itself constitutes a being as sensitive. Therefore, the finer one’s sense of touch, the better, strictly speaking, is one’s... Read more
Angel F. Mendez Montoya’s The Theology of Food: Eating and the Eucharist (Illuminations: Theory & Religion) is an explosive little book. His “alimentary theology” is not just a theology of food; like Jeremy Begbie’s “theology with music,” Mendez Montoya gives us a theology and philosophy with food. Food is a doorway into epistemology, ontology, ethics, politics. One thought inspired by his summary of Carolyn Korsmeyer’s work (briefly noted in an earlier post) is the fact that food “exemplifies the qualities... Read more
Carolyn Korsmeyer ( Making Sense of Taste: Food and Philosophy ) questions the traditional hierarchy of the senses that places vision and hearing at the top of the heap. Why do they come out on top? Korsmeyer says that the issue is distance; distance keeps the thing perceived (seen, heard) an object, keeps it at arm’s length, and distance is the precondition of objectivity. Taste, touch, smell require proximity, even intimacy, and so these senses are considered subjective. Now, on... Read more
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