On Linguistic Puzzles

"I have a telephone conversation with New York. My friend tells me that his young trees have buds of such and such a kind. I am now convinced that his tree is... Am I also convinced that the earth exists?" 

- Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty

On Freud's Methodology

"However, psychoanalysis is not just a school that flourished and faded. It is widely regarded as the paradigm of bad science, a theory so obviously false that it's proponents must be deluded or devious or both." 

- Patricia Kitcher, Freud's Dream: A Complete Interdisciplinary Science of Mind

On The Baconian Method

On Bacon's Project:

"... after the brilliant, often witty, and always challenging Bk I, Bk II proves to be a rather pretentious, even half-baked collection of veiled theories, Hermetic innuendos, Scholastic distinctions, and labels. Had only Bk II survived, more than one Ph.D dissertation would have been needed to est precisely what the Baconian method was."

 - Daniel Robinson, An Intellectual History of Psychology

On Being And God

"At issue here is not the possibility if God's attaining Being, but, quite the opposite, the possibility of Being's attaining to God." 

- Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte

On Faith, Proof, And The Sovereignty Of God

Faith is different from proof. One is human and the other a gift of God. 'The just shall live by faith' (Rom. 1:17). This is faith that God himself puts into our hearts, often using proof as the instrument. 'Faith comes by hearing' (Rom. 10:17). But this faith is in our hearts, and makes us say not, 'I know' but 'I believe'.

- Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Great Britain: Penguin Group, 1966), #7

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 Christology, Union With Christ And Glorification

‎So I hold out my arms to my Redeemer, who, having been foretold for four thousand years, has come to suffer and to die for me on earth, at the time and under all the circumstances foretold. By His grace, I await death in peace, in the hope of being eternally united to Him. Yet I live with joy, whether in the prosperity which it pleases Him to bestow upon me, or in the adversity which He sends for my good, and which He has taught me to bear by His example.

- Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Great Britain: Penguin Group, 1966), #737.

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 Existentialism And Modern Skepticism

An escalator ride is a good time to reconsider, to reconsider everything: where are you from? Where are you going? Who are you? What is your real name? What are you after?

- Oskar Matzerath in Guntar Grass, The Tin Drum, (1964)

On Hegel, Marx And Materialism

There is, however, as much materialism in Hegel as in Marx. Since matter is for [Hegel] certainly a stage in the begriff. (Just as there is also a strong strain of teleological idealism in the supposedly scientific materialism of Marx.)

- J.N. Findlay, Hegel: A Re-Examination (New York: Macmillan, 1958).

On Society, Virtue And Trash

‎A style of this sort will seem to modern readers marred by classical stiffness- "truth," "Knowers," the Good," "Man" -but we can by no mean deny that behind our objection to such language is a guilty consciousness of the flimsiness, and not infrequently the trashiness, of our modern talk about "values."

- Saul Bellow in Allan Bloom, Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987)

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 Faith And Reason

Theology is structured as an understanding of faith in the light of a twofold methodological principle: the auditus fidei and the intellectus fidei. With the first, theology makes its own the content of Revelation as this has been gradually expounded in Sacred Tradition, Sacred Scripture and the Church's living Magisterium. With the second, theology seeks to respond through speculative enquiry to the specific demands of disciplined thought.

Philosophy contributes specifically to theology in preparing for a correct auditus fidei with its study of the structure of knowledge and personal communication, especially the various forms and functions of language. No less important is philosophy's contribution to a more coherent understanding of Church Tradition, the pronouncements of the Magisterium and the teaching of the great masters of theology, who often adopt concepts and thought-forms drawn from a particular philosophical tradition. In this case, the theologian is summoned not only to explain the concepts and terms used by the Church in her thinking and the development of her teaching, but also to know in depth the philosophical systems which may have influenced those concepts and terms, in order to formulate correct and consistent interpretations of them.

With regard to the intellectus fidei, a prime consideration must be that divine Truth "proposed to us in the Sacred Scriptures and rightly interpreted by the Church's teaching"89 enjoys an innate intelligibility, so logically consistent that it stands as an authentic body of knowledge. The intellectus fidei expounds this truth, not only in grasping the logical and conceptual structure of the propositions in which the Church's teaching is framed, but also, indeed primarily, in bringing to light the salvific meaning of these propositions for the individual and for humanity. From the sum of these propositions, the believer comes to know the history of salvation, which culminates in the person of Jesus Christ and in his Paschal Mystery. Believers then share in this mystery by their assent of faith.

For its part, dogmatic theology must be able to articulate the universal meaning of the mystery of the One and Triune God and of the economy of salvation, both as a narrative and, above all, in the form of argument. It must do so, in other words, through concepts formulated in a critical and universally communicable way. Without philosophy's contribution, it would in fact be impossible to discuss theological issues such as, for example, the use of language to speak about God, the personal relations within the Trinity, God's creative activity in the world, the relationship between God and man, or Christ's identity as true God and true man.

- Pope John Paul II in Fides et Ratio §§ 65f.

On The World Of Man, The Kingdom Of God And Value Theory

“For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?

- Matthew 16:26

On The Necessity Of Metaphysics

In other words, it is quite possible that actual existence may be an active force and an efficient cause of observable effects in those things of which we say that they are. If such were the case, all philosophies based upon an existenceless notion of being would be courting disaster, and eventually meet it. It would not take more than two or three disastrous experiments of that kind to convince philosophers that it does not pay to posit being as the first principle of metaphysical knowledge. Hence their repeated attempts to replace it by any one of its many possible surrogates, at the risk of multiplying philosophical failures, so to speak, ad infinitum.

- Étienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers. 2nd Ed. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1952.

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 The Chief End Of Man

All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend tot his end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this object. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.

- Blaise Pascal, Pascal's Pensées, trans. W.F. Trotter (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1958), 113, thought #425.

On The Logician, Myopic Intellectual Pride And Poetry

The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.

- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1936).