To save democracy from subjectivism, truth must become a democratic project. The greatest of crimes can be enacted in the name of sincerity, authenticity, and “being at peace with oneself.” Each of these criteria looks to one’s own estimate of oneself… During the Presidential Campaign of 1996, in California, President Bill Clinton said that democracy [...]
In the modern world, C.S. Lewis argues in "The Abolition of Man," we have trained the head and encouraged the heart, while neglecting the soul, the most important part of the person. As Lewis so scathingly puts it, we are producing men without chests. No one could rightly accuse C.S. Lewis, who was raised as [...]
Edmund Burke understood that the individual’s own natural reasoning would never be as deep or profound as the wisdom of our ancestors, bequeathed to us through tradition and custom. He believed that looking inwards, as Jean-Jacques Rousseau advocated, would precipitate our demise. On our college campuses, the clashes between liberals and conservatives have grown hostile. [...]
Over the course of several hundred years, Americans, as well as Europeans, freed themselves from the past, transformed nature into a commodity, centralized political power, and instituted bureaucracies, all with the aim of making themselves happy in this world. Unlike Eve eating fruit from the forbidden tree, the beginning of the Second Fall can be [...]
A living system getting too close to the edge of chaos risks incoherence, but moving too far away risks rigidity, either case leading to extinction. Complex systems flourish at the edge of chaos. For the imaginative conservative, real thought, reflection, and learning often take place at the edge of chaos… Studying history teaches us not [...]
John of Salisbury exemplifies a practice that we must champion to change our learning systems—to address the failings directly and to see that one educator can transform the world in which he teaches… John of Salisbury not only depicts the thorough and balanced measure of the education of the ideal scholar, but he also points [...]
It is difficult to see ourselves as we are, even if this inner “seeing” is one of the most important things we must do for ourselves… In today’s world, when the topic of the defects of university teaching and curricula comes up, the most well-known alternative put forward is the “great books programs.” I take it [...]
The completion of Plato lies in the resurrection, in the reality that sees not just the immortality of the soul but the acting person as the source of all reason. Is there any way to bring political philosophy and revelation, Athens and Jerusalem, into a coherent, non-contradictory relation to each other without undermining the integrity [...]
In Modernity, the capacity for effortless knowing is denied, ignored, or misunderstood. As a result, the origin of all knowledge is taken as unaided human effort and activity. The Two Modes of the Mind If we lack a word for an experience, we obviously cannot talk to others about it, and the experience, no matter [...]
Our final cause is not tied to this world we live in. Though we inhabit the world for a rather temporary span of time, we do have enough time, no matter what polity or era we live in, to decide for ourselves whether or not we will accept the purpose for which we are created. [...]
If we could dialogue with our friends and enemies in a spirit of charity we would all be much happier and, more to the point, we would all be much closer to the truth of things… I am glad to think that through all those years we never stopped arguing; and we never once quarreled [...]
John Paul II’s “Fides et Ratio” is an act of daring: not only an exhortation to professional philosophers to return to foundational rationality, but an invitation to all and sundry to realize their natural philosophical capability. I find this call absolutely remarkable, not only as a Magisterial pronouncement for the faithful, but especially as an [...]
The world lost one of its keenest philosophical minds when John Deely passed away on January 7, 2017. As a philosopher, John developed his insights by working within the fertile soil of the Catholic intellectual tradition. The influence of the great French Thomist Jacques Maritain was immense, not only in John’s professional life, but also [...]
The Relative Absoluteness of Truth The first false dichotomy I would like to expose is the one between relativism and absolutism. From this viewpoint, truth is either “absolutely absolute” or “absolutely relative,” with no tertium quid. However, truth is neither of these. If we understand truth as a relationship between what are relative, human beings [...]