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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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 …

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 …

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 …

Natural Personhood

What makes a person, a person?  Of late, as it was in its inception, the term's legal significance has been brought into question.  As it stands in U.S. law, all reality is classified into either that of a person or that of a thing; the former cannot be stripped of its rights' protections without due …

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 …

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" …

Languages, Translation, and Philosophy

Oftentimes, I go on book-purchasing sprees.  Sometimes this is due to visiting used bookstores in great academic cities.  Others, its due to an influx of cash and dropped prices from my extensive book wishlist on Amazon.  But this week, I spent a painful amount of money (for a po' un[der]employed academic like myself, at least) …

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 …