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 …

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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 & 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 …

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 …

Causality: a Rough Draft

In an extended (and sometimes heated) discussion with colleagues at the Center for the Study of Digital Life, it was determined that one of the key things needed to advance in our work is a clear understanding of causality.  I have, consequently, been at work in attempting to provide a stripped-down, simplified explanation of what …

The Allure and the Danger of Interdisciplinary Study

A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again. -Alexander Pope A word that has been thrown about in academia for as long as I've been involved is "interdisciplinary".  On the Thomist side of my experience, the …

Together but Disunited: On Intellectual Culture

Over at Quillette.com yesterday, the site's founder and editor-in-chief, Claire Lehmann, posted an article asking readers to "help build a third culture"--that is, a culture which does not hold humanities and science education in opposition, but which bridges the gap between the two, or somehow otherwise allows them to coexist in harmony.  Her inspiration was …

Education in the Digital Age

Education, we continually hear, is in a crisis.  Not only is this cry overwrought, it is false: the word crisis comes from the Greek (krisis), where it was a medical term meaning the point in an illness where the patient will either recover or become irrevocably worse and inevitably die. Education--by which I mean specifically …

The Value of a Library

After about sixteen months, abandoned in boxes in a storage facility in Houston, most of my belongings were recently retrieved--the majority of which are books.  I had paired down my possessions to a minimum a few years ago, having moved into a furnished house, so I had virtually nothing in the way of furniture--the life …