From K. Vossler, Positivismus und Idealisms in der Sprachwissenschaft (1904). Quoted by Polanyi in Personal Knowledge (p. 102): The true artists of speech remain always conscious of the metaphorical character of language. They go on correcting and supplementing one metaphor by another, allowing their words to contradict each other and attending only to the unity… Read More »
Michael Polanyi’s 1958 book Personal Knowledge gets my vote for most important neglected philosophical masterpiece of the 20th century. It’s a wonderful book by a chemist- turned-philosopher of science that is in many ways far more profound than the much more influential work of Karl Popper. I first read Polanyi’s book about 10 years ago… Read More »
Here’s a nice debate between Daniel Dennett and Richard Swinburne entitled “How Should We Study Religion?” The subtitle implies that Swinburne is a theologian. That’s misleading. He’s a philosopher of religion and a philosopher of science. (HT: Victor Reppert)
As noted in my previous post, there was a lecture at UNLV tonight entitled “Intelligent Design: A Unique View of Globalization and Science” by Dr. Gunther Stent. Here are my reflections on the lecture. The lecture hall was packed–standing room only. Dr. Stent is a recognized expert in molecular genetics, having written an important textbook… Read More »
Tonight at UNLV there’s going to be lecture entitled “Intelligent Design: A Unique View of Globalization and Science” by Gunther Stent, emeritus professor of cell and molecular biology at UC Berkeley. From the abstract blurb that’s going around, I gather that he’s no friend of ID but is willing to concede that evolutionary orthodoxy is… Read More »
Open theism has been much-discussed in philosophy of religion and theology circles since the 1995 publication of Pinnock, et al.’s The Openness of God. But in many ways I find that the view is still poorly understood. Critics frequently fail to appreciate that there are several importantly different versions of open theism. First, we need… Read More »
I’ve been invited to become a contributor to the Prosblogion blog, a very fine place for discussions in the philosophy of religion. So from time-to-time I’ll be posting over there, in which cases I’ll either dual-post over here or provide a link for those who might be interested.
According to classical theism (as exemplified by Aquinas), God is “Pure Act”. What does that mean, you ask? Good question. The idea goes back to Aristotle, but we’ll pick it up with Aquinas. Very early on in the Summa Theologiae Aquinas says the following: For motion [motus, i.e., change] is nothing else than the reduction… Read More »
There’s an interesting discussion on the Christian doctrine of the Trinity going on at Prosblogion. I figure this is as good a time as any to dust off some speculations of my own on the subject. The doctrine of the Trinity, a cornerstone of Christian orthodoxy, may be summed up in the following two propositions:… Read More »
I just woke up from a dream in which I was being chased by a very persistent Thomist who wanted to sift my soul through some sort of metaphysical meat-grinder. Not wanting to find out what that would do to me, I escaped to Paradise, where I learned that Father Abraham now relaxes in a… Read More »