philosophy historically and as distinct from other disciplines
At least from the time of Constantine to the Middle Ages, the Church was involved in the world – i.e., public affairs and endeavors such as philosophy. The Reformation was partly a reaction against this, refocusing the church on spiritual matters and leaving worldly matters to others, that is, to Christians outside the church’s official …
Mortimer J. Adler’s “Truth in Religion: The Plurality of Religions and the Unity of Truth” is very stimulating, though we would disagree on some points. One point that needs qualification is his unqualified endorsement of Augustine’s principle that religion must always accord with the science of the day. He doesn’t define science here perhaps because …
Robert Sokolowski wrote, “It is notoriously difficult for philosophers to explain, to people unfamiliar with their discipline, what it is that they do.” He goes on in his article entitle, “The Method of Philosophy: Making Distinctions” that the articulation of distinctions is what philosophy is about. (The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 51, No. 3, Mar., …
Philosophical realism basically means that the objects of ordinary perception exist independently of our minds. We apprehend objects independent of our understanding what happened or how they got here. This common-sense realism is assumed by most people but denied by most philosophers since Descartes. Observations of objects do not need interpretation for us to record that something is …
While the early scientists expected God’s creation to be orderly and show God’s lawfulness, that is certainly not the case with conventional science today. While we can say that’s because of the Enlightenment, there’s more to it than that. There’s something called the ontological inversion. Basically, at first science is very empirical: what is real …
