Basil Willey and the Terrible, Awful, No-Good Seventeenth Century
. . . the changes of this modern climate ever since the seventeenth century have become the subject of Basil Willey’s perceptive and extensive Background studies, beginning…
Toynbee’s History as a Search for Truth
History as a humane study is defined by Toynbee as a concern with the lives of civilizational societies in both their internal and external aspects: "The internal…
Explaining the Constancy of Species: Linneaus, Buffon, and Leibniz
The transition from the transcendent to the immanent view can be traced in each aspect of the life problem . . . . We now turn to…
Reaching for A Bridge Between Consciousness and Reality: The Languages of Eric Voegelin
1. I Have No Choice In a letter sent to Alfred Schütz on January 1, 1953, Eric Voegelin raised the following question regarding the parable of the…
What is a Liberal?
The task of sketching the history of liberalism, although modest, is for methodological reasons difficult.1 For we stand before the question of whether there is even such…
The Priority of Existence in Medieval Political Thought
The title of this article does not lend itself to an obvious meaning. It is not willfully obscure but the aptness of the title requires some explanation.…
Into the Ecclesiastical Abyss: The Catholic Church
I dealt with the Evangelical Church the previous time. Now we must concern ourselves with the Catholic Church. I put the Evangelical Church first, not only because…
Deformations of Faith
Mr. Chairman, thank you very much for your kind introduction. Ladies and gentlemen. The subject matter of these lectures is supposed to be "Deformations of Faith." The…
Montesquieu: The Elements of Political Liberty
The French revolt paralleling Hume's critique of reason came through Montesquieu (1689-1755). Again a new set of problems was opened that could not be covered by the…
“Cruciform Logic”: Mastering the Present in J. M. Coetzee’s Age of Iron
. . . even in an age of iron, pity is not silenced. —J. M. Coetzee Daniel answered in the presence of the king, and said,…
David Hume: Spokesman for the Comfortable Class
While the new order [the secular settlements following the religious upheavals of the 16th and 17th centuries] appeared roseate in the "Myth of Reason and Nature" to…
Gnosticism: A Brief Introduction
The fallacious character of an eidos of history [the belief that the whole course of history can be known–ed] has been shown on principle–but the analysis can…
The Legacy of Voegelin and Strauss
The Need for Political Philosophy A reflection on the legacy of Eric Voegelin and Leo Strauss must start from the following general questions: What is political philosophy?…
Jesus and the Unknown God
In the historical drama of revelation, the Unknown God ultimately becomes the God known through His presence in Christ. This drama, though it has been alive in…
Why Do We Need Philosophy?
God and man, world and society form a primordial community of being. The community with its quaternarian structure is, and is not, a datum of human experience.…