On Truth And The Church

"Without truth, it is easy to fall into an empiricist and sceptical view of life, incapable of rising to the level of praxis because of a lack of interest in grasping the values — sometimes even the meanings — with which to judge and direct it. Fidelity to man requires fidelity to the truth, which alone is the guarantee of freedom (cf. Jn 8:32) and of the possibility of integral human development. For this reason the Church searches for truth, proclaims it tirelessly and recognizes it wherever it is manifested."

- Pope Benedict XVI, Caritas in veritate, 2009"

On Metaphysics, Objects, And Phenomenology

The first implies that we move round the object; the second that we enter into it. The first depends on the point at which we are placed and on the symbols by which we express ourselves. The second neither depends on a point of view nor relies on any symbol. The first of knowledge may be said to stop at the relative; the second, in those cases where it is possible, to to attain the absolute.

- Henri Bergeson, La Pensée et le mouvant

On Science And Nominalism

Maritain, an Aristotelian-Thomist roasts the failure of modern science and nominalism

‎The error of pseudo-scientific mechanism clearly supposes the error of nominalism. If the universal doesn't directly or indirectly designate an essence but only a collection of individual cases, its not at all possible to understand how scientific law can be necessarily the succession of singular events contingent.

- Jacques Maritain, Degrees of Knowledge (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999).

On Descartes, Newton, And Mathesis

And therefore our present work sets forth mathematical principles of natural philosophy. The difficulty seems to be to find the forces of nature from the phenomena of motions and then to demonstrate the other phenomena of these forces.

- 1724, Isaac Newton, The Principia: Mathematical Principles for Natural Philosophy, trans. I. Bernard Cohen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)

On Faith, Reason, And Understanding

I acknowledge, Lord, and I thank you, that you have created in me this image of you so that I may remember you, think of you, and love you. Yet this image is so eroded by my vices, so clouded by the smoke of my sins, that it cannot do what it was created to do unless you renew and refashion it. I am not trying to scale your heights, Lord; my understanding is in no way equal to that. But I do long to understand your truth in some way, your truth which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand in order to believe; I believe in order to understand. For I also believe that "Unless I believe, I shall not understand.”

- St. Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianpolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1995).

On Hegel's Geist Contra Kant's Transcendental Ego

However, the transition from Kant's talk of "consciousness in general" and "synthetic unity of consciousness" to Hegel's conception of a literally general consciousness has been understandably challenged as one of the most confused and notoriously invalid moves in the history of philosophy.

- Robert C. Solomon, “Hegel’s Concept of Geist,” in The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 23, no. 4 (1970).

On Media As Epistemology

‎"We have reached, I believe, a critical mass in that electronic media have decisively and irreversibly changed the character of our symbolic environment. We are now a culture whose information, ideas and epistemology are given form by television, not by the printed word. Just because TV and print coexist, doesn’t mean there is parity — print is now merely a residual epistemology."

- Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in An Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 2005)

On Christus Salvator

quid est veritas?

- Iohnnaes 18:28a

On Truth, Beauty, And Death

I died for beauty but was scarce
Adjusted in the tomb,
When one who died for truth was lain
In an adjoining room.

He questioned softly why I failed?
"For beauty," I replied.
"And I for truth, the two are one;
We brethren are," he said.

And so, as kinsmen met a night,
We talked between the rooms,
Until the moss had reached our lips,
And covered up our names.

-Emily Dickinson, "I Died For Beauty -but was scarce," in , The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Bianchi and Hampson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1937), 161.

On Husserl, Phenomenology, Descartes, And Augustine

When discussing Descartes and Phenomenology in his Cartesian Meditations Husserl quotes St. Augustine stating:

"Noli foras ire, in te redi in interiore homine habitat veritas."

(Do not wish to go out; go back into yourself. Truth dwells in the inner man)

- St. Augustine, De Vera Religione, 39 n. 72.

On Epistemology and Virtue Ethics

"It is my assertion that the problems in contemporary ethics are essentially the same as those in contemporary epistemology. If Plantinga's approach to epistemology [proper functional epistemology] provides a solution to the theory of knowledge, then proper function should also provide a solution tot he problems in ethics. Proper function should help determine which ethical theory is the right one [namely, Augustinian and Thomistic Virtue Ethics]."

- Craig V. Mitchell, Alvin Plantinga's Proper Functionalism As A Model For Christian Ethics. Ph.D. dissertation, Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2005.

On Dawkins and Non Sequiturs

If one is looking for a case study in non sequiturs just check out Dawkins' text The God Delusion. He gives a summary of his argument in chapter four of his book in the section "An Interlude At Cambridge". In his words, the argument of the book falls or stands on his presentation. Unfortunately, even by conventional rules of logic, his argument doesn't stand at all.

Namely, even if all six points of his argument were true, then it still wouldn't follow that "the God hypothesis is untenable." It should be noted that where he does think Christians are in error, they are still sincere -just in error (pg. 154). So we should do same should we not? Yes. Anyways, when reading at what point do his points, by the laws of logic, dissuade the hypothesis of God's existence?

"This Chapter has contained the central argument of my book, and so, at the risk of sounding repetitive, I shall summarize it as a series of six numbered points.

1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.

2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made (sic) artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or wing, a spider or a person.

3. The temptation is a false one because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a 'crane', not a 'skyhook', for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.

4. The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, has evolved by slow, graduate degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that -an illusion.

5. We don't have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. This kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with.

6. We should not give up the hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.

If the argument of this chapter is accepted, the factual premise of religion -the God hypothesis -is untenable. God almost certainly does not exist."

- Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Hougton Mifflin, 2006), 157-158.

On Truth, Dogma, And Women

In the Preface it is written:

"Supposing that Truth is a woman -what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as the have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women -that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman? Certainly she has never allowed herself to be won; and at present every kind of dogma stands with sad and discourages mien -if, indeed, it stands at all! For there are scoffers who maintain that it has fallen, that all dogma lies on the ground -nay more, that it is at its last gasp. But to speak seriously, there are good grounds for hoping that all dogmatising in philosophy, whatever solemn, whatever conclusive and decided airs it has assumed, may have been only a noble puerilism and tyronism; and probably the time is at hand when it be once understood what has actually sufficed for the basic of such imposing about absolute philosophical edifices as the dogmatists have hitherto reared: perhaps some popular superstition of immemorial time (such as the soul-superstition, which, in the form of subject -and ego-superstition, has not yet ceased doing mischief); perhaps some play upon words, a deception on the part of grammar, or an audacious (sic) generalisation of very restricted, very personal, very human -all -too-human facts."

Of course, I couldn't disagree more.

- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1907), 4f.