Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn’s Ars Vitae is just the kind of reasonable, non-polemical book that our society needs today. Equally adept at diagnosing the problem and offering cogent solutions, Lasch-Quinn balances well the theoretical and the practical, the external and the internal, the philosophical and the theological, the pagan and the Christian, the academic and the popular,…

A Review of James K. A. Smith, The Nicene Option James K. A. Smith has been in the business of “translation” for many years. He translated Jean-Luc Marion’s important book The Crossing of the Visible from the French (1991), helping English readers gain access to Marion’s profound phenomenology as he applied it to painting, icons, and…

A Review of Louis Markos, From Plato to Christ Recent years have seen a resurgence of Christian interest in classical Greek philosophy. While the nineteenth-century distrust of Hellenization led to a dismissal of essentialist philosophical categories as useful for theology, recent authors have recognized the damaging toll of such a denial of metaphysics for theological…

“Then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.” Almost hidden within the Genesis creation account stands this singular sentence about God’s creation of humankind. Revealed is God’s creative act; implied is the dual nature of…

A Review of Joshua Cockayne, Contemporary with Christ: Kierkegaard and Second-Personal Spirituality I was in a Master of Arts program in analytic philosophy of religion when I first discovered Kierkegaard, and it was Kierkegaard who led me “on principle” away from analytic philosophy. Though I have made my home mostly in the continental tradition, I…

There are two kinds of facts: normative and non-normative. Facts about how things should be, what is or is not properly functioning, what is right or wrong, what is healthy or not, and what is good or bad are normative. Facts about how things are or how they could be or statistically tend to be…

Neo-Aristotelianism is indeed resurgent in contemporary philosophy. The renaissance has been underway for at least fifty years, beginning with a new focus on classical metaphysical themes by Roderick Chisholm, David M. Armstrong, Alvin Plantinga, and Robert M. Adams. In the 1960’s and 70’s, these anglophone philosophers began digging themselves out of the rubble of logical…

My overall aim in this brief response to Paul Gould’s lead essay is to draw the reader’s attention to an area of contemporary moral philosophy—Neo-Aristotelian metaethics—that is ripe for rediscovery in the wake of the ongoing resurgence of Neo-Aristotelianism in metaphysics and philosophy of science. Sketching A Metaphysical Picture Let me begin with a thumbnail…

I am grateful to Professor Gould for his invitation to respond to his introductory remarks for this symposium. Professor Gould is especially interested in a framework for philosophical thought and a particular comprehension of nature, that, as he says, held sway for millenia. He refers to this as the “Neo-Aristotelian picture,” according to which “the…

Our conception of nature and the natural shapes our way of perceiving, thinking, and living. Let me explain. On the dominant way of conceiving the world and our place in it today, gifted to us by the Enlightenment thinker David Hume among others, the universe is like a clock—a mechanism—and is wholly composed of bits…

I am sure I am not the only professional philosopher who, from an early age, decided to stay firmly away from the free-will problem. It has always struck me as being like one of those rather cruel animal traps, where the happy little rodent, perhaps attracted by some yummy smell, steps on the platform which…

“God saw that it was good.” As reported by Saint Augustine, the Manichees latched onto the peculiarity of this refrain in the opening chapter of Genesis to criticize the received Christian doctrine of creation. Read in a certain light, it seems to suggest that either God didn’t know what he was going to make before…