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:

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 …

Advertisement

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 …

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 …

Perceptual Interpretation

Some rambling thoughts, prompted by this passage: In short, sensations differ from perceptions in that sensations are co-determined by the subjectivity of environmental source of stimulation together with the subjectivity of animal body stimulated, while perceptions by contrast are actively interpretative rather than passively revelatory of the surroundings; rather than co-determined as sensations are, perceptions …

Semiotics and Phenomenology: Preface

Below is the (current draft) preface I wrote for my soon-to-be (please, I hope) accepted Intersection of Semiotics and Phenomenology: Peirce and Heidegger in Dialogue (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter). --- This book presents a complex argument.  It will likely not convince all who read it.  It probably will not even convince many who read it.  But it …

Signs and Culture

Bear with me, audience... I'm working out some ideas. --- Humanity, among all animal species, possesses unique social relations.  That is, while seemingly all highly-developed animals interact socially, only humans interact socio-culturally.  What exactly does this mean, though?  We are all familiar, on some level or another, with the idea of culture, and even with many …

Evolved Inanity

Ronnie de Sousa, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Toronto, penned quite a piece of sophistry for Aeon Magazine.  The title: "Natural-born existentialists"; the by-line, "Ethics cannot be based on human nature because, as evolutionary biology tells us, there is no such thing."  It's unfortunate that de Sousa is a professor, and from …

A Short: What is Philosophy?

In yesterday morning's reads, I came across this piece by Charlie Huenemann, "Why philosophers should hang out at the humanists' parties" at Aeon Magazine, but delayed it until today.  It is quite bad, altogether misconstrues the nature of philosophical reasoning, and demonstrates that having a PhD in philosophy does not mean you know what "philosophy" …

On the Art of Annotation, etc.

I often wonder, when reading, how much work the author put into writing the work.  I know that, in my own book-and-article-writing endeavors, what ends up on the page amounts to less than 1/10th of what I do elsewhere in the process (including all of the editing and revising, which is never less than 2/3rds …