To shun wickedness, to care for our souls, and to love one another without looking for rewards, if followed by all, would turn injustice, now a constant companion of human life, into a stranger. In his 2005 masterpiece, Match Point, Woody Allen explores moral failing in a universe governed by chance, or what the protagonist [...]
We want to give our students a classroom in which inciting books are talked about not as mere literature nor as historical documents, but boldly as they meant themselves to be taken: as the Word of God, or the insight of the intellect, or the wisdom of the world. And yet we want these same [...]
When the ancient philosophers speak of the philosophical life, one thing is immediately clear: It is a life and not a profession of which they are speaking. For the life of philosophy seems to have one reason for being—the search for truth. By “the permanent part” of the College in the title of my address, [...]
Our tradition may be in dire need of resuscitation and recollection, and it seems quite possible that the Chinese may help us in our necessity. Sour Sweet by Timothy Mo (288 pages, Sphere Books, 1982; Aventura Paperback, 1985) Shenfan William Hinton (785 pages, Random House, 1983; Vintage Paperback, 1984) The two books lumped together here have nothing in [...]
Phantasia is the realm of the imagination, the realm into which nothingness first erupts, and the beginning of philosophy. I The Unending Story by Michael Ende is both literally and in several other ways the most wonderful book I’ve read in ages. I think it will be easily received into the canon—hitherto almost exclusively English—of great [...]
If we can begin to understand the sense of federalism as an idea rather than a fixed set of immutable relations, and moreover as an idea that is designed to balance and reconcile the competing claims of competing goods, then our debates over the promise of federalism may take on a new vitality and plausibility… Today’s offering in [...]
Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde should prompt us to search for an antidote to the lovers’ death wish—to pursue a love that preserves rather than destroys, celebrates rather than abolishes individuality, and seeks life rather than death. “They who were two and divided now became one and united.” —Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan and Isolde I come [...]
There is nothing in the natural world, or in the inner and outer life of man, that does not find its counterpart in the all-embracing realm of tones. Music as symbol is the whole of all things. “They who were two and divided now became one and united.” —Gottfried von Strassburg, Tristan and Isolde I [...]
Alexis de Tocqueville, while traveling through the dense woods in Michigan, in 1831, came across a pioneer and his family, making the “first step toward civilization in the wilds.”[1] He noted in his travel diary that “from time to time along the road one comes to new clearings. As all these settlements are exactly like [...]
The Copernican Revolution elevated the scientist above the stars, planets, and Earth to a position of the highest being in the cosmos. The Myth Like most, if not all religions, science has a creation myth that proclaims a new cosmic situation. The Copernican myth tells how science began and, like all myths, is recited again [...]
Here’s a cause close to my heart: public and semi-public speech. I mean occasions when we are addressed by our political leaders on grand occasions of concern to the whole republic, and times, like the present, when we choose to come together to hear what someone invited to do so says about a matter of [...]
To understand the concept of God in Modernity, I first turned to the high point of Christianity in both the East and West. According to patristic tradition, God can be known in two ways. Cataphatic, or rational, knowledge defines God by positive statements; apophatic knowledge is direct experience of God, although such knowledge cannot be [...]
The ancient rhetoricians, who knew their business, taught that the way to begin a speech, the more so a breakfast talk, was with what they called a captatio benevolentiae, a “capturing of goodwill.” I’ll try that on you—I’ll try to snaffle your benevolence by claiming that we are likely to have this in common: a [...]
For the first time in nearly a decade I again have the great pleasure of teaching a freshman language tutorial. I am myself a believer in the "spirit" of a tutorial, because I am convinced that what happens in class for well or ill is nothing beyond the accumulated effect of the goodness or deficiency [...]