The Future of Innocence, Beauty, and Dissent
At the core of the cycle of life, corruption of innocence and beauty followed by the necessary corrective that makes life whole again, we encounter the self,…
The Problem of Meaning in Human Agency or Art
Does art mean anything? Let us be precise from the outset about terms. Art stands traditionally as a counterpart of nature.[1] When Shakespeare has Hamlet spell out…
Beyond the Scientific Revolution: Ian McGilchrist’s “The Matter With Things”
While the scientific revolution produced many benefits, the scientific perspective omits purpose and value, without which life is meaningless. With The Matter With Things, Iain McGilchrist makes…
The Life and Thought of Alasdair MacIntyre
“[S]tories and theses about rule-following and rule-breaking, about achieving and failing to achieve goods, have to be understood together or not at all.” If Alasdair MacIntyre is…
Beyond John Locke: Reality and Experience
John Locke argued that there is a difference between how the world is and how we perceive it to be. This idea has come to dominate Western…
Man, God, and Machine
“Logic is to be conceived […] as the realm [Reich] of pure thought. This realm is truth as it is without veil and absolutely. It can therefore…
Why Read Plato, Nietzsche, and Strauss?
Plato, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Leo Strauss need no introduction to students of philosophy, especially students of political philosophy. Although these three figures are well-known and well-read, have…
Machiavelli’s Rome and Sparta
In the dedicatory letter to his Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli reveals his intended audience, “I have chosen not those who are princes, but those who for their…
The Time We Have: Life and Ideas
Close observers of contemporary postmodern philosophy will notice that postmodern philosophy is commensurate with pack animals, for both operate on a deterministic model. How so? Consider that…
Movie Art and the Nature of Story
Almost anyone who has taught film studies has drawn on one of the numerous editions of the superb textbook by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson Film Art.…
Plato: The Poet-Philosopher
Today, “more scholars argue…that Plato’s philosophy is interwoven with myth.” Even though popular misperception casts Plato as an enemy of the poets, the reason for Plato’s criticism…
Liberalism and Its Discontents: Waller R. Newell’s Tyranny and Revolution: Rousseau to Heidegger
Today’s political discourse is rife with the prognosis that liberalism is in trouble, evidenced by the rise of anti-liberal and post-liberal thought, each of which maintains that…
Satan Out of the Box: The Meaning of Labor, Today
“As long as you abide within my discourse, you are my students; and you will know the truth, and the truth shall set you free” —John 8.32…
Social Psychologists’ Attack on Intuition and Expertise
Iain McGilchrist comments in The Matter With Things that our moral intuitions often cannot survive extremely fanciful hypothetical situations nor imagining counterfactual imputations of omniscience. Our intuitions…
Inspiration and Tragedy in Jena
On the eve of the “end of history,” Napoleon and his Grande Armée rolled into the small but rowdy university town of Jena. A professor of philosophy,…