New Venture

For any followers unaware, I have started a new venture: personal philosophical consulting and education.  As the opportunities of the job market shrink during my search--not only the quantity of available jobs, but the strictures, and the worries about an unconventional candidate--it became increasingly clear that the traditional academic path was not one that I …

The Narrowness of Academic Journals

Today, I received a rejection notice from a journal to which I had recently submitted.  In itself, this does not bother me--frankly, after a few years on the job market, I am almost numb to rejection.  Unlike the job market, however, journals tend to give at least some justification, however slight, for rejecting a submission. …

Interpretation and Traditions: Some Audio

My colloquium given 27 April 2018 at the University of St. Thomas has been uploaded as an audio file in a variety of formats, available here. Or you can just listen to the soundcloud version:

Human Nature and Human Technology

We, in the present, are in some sense both our past and our future.  What we have done and what has been done to us contributes to who we are; and what we intend to do, what we are ordered towards doing, instantiates within us anticipatory relations and dispositions.  We resolve--without reducing--past and future into …

Interpretation & Traditions: A Sample

The below are introductory remarks to a presentation given on Friday, 27 April 2018, for Center for Thomistic Studies Colloquium at the University of St. Thomas, Houston TX.  An audio recording will be posted in the near future.  I also intend revisions, at some point, for publication. --- Preface [For those of you who don’t …

Being-in, In-Human

I wrote a piece on the phenomenology of place--colored by lenses of sin and redemption--and what it means to be in one.  The full thing is here, but first, a snippet: Who is not, from one hour to the next, one day to another, beset by worry about being in the right place at the …

What is Nominalism?

And why is it such a problem? One of the most serious and extensive controversies of the Latin Age of philosophy was that of universals.  The Greek philosophy of antiquity, and its transmission into the Latin Age by Boethius and through the Islamic tradition, had long discussed the question of whether the way in which …

In Protest of Scientism

Late last night, I saw this article on Quillette.com (a locus for generally "centrist" thought--which tends to mean "Enlightenment-thinking Liberal"--in the current rhetorical revolutionary war), "In Defence of Scientism".   My initial reaction--the article being one that is haughty in the extreme, and full of polysyllabic words used incorrectly in painfully contorted syntax--was one of …

The Effort of Effortless Knowledge

Frequently, to illustrate how human beings are or how they act, Thomas Aquinas juxtaposes the human with the angelic.  Specifically, when talking about why human knowledge is seemingly so complex, he makes this keen point: the more perfect a being is in its nature, the fewer actions it needs to achieve its final perfection; and …

Socialism and the Robots

The uncritical use of language frequently effects our thinking in unforeseen ways.  With little exception, our uncritical use stems from appropriating the environmentally-ordinary; in other words, we talk the way others do.  As a consequence, we tend to think the way others do, too.  Unfortunately, the uncritical use of language flows effortlessly, while stopping to …