Philosophy

Nikolai Berdyaev God is mystery, beyond all truth, beauty, and goodness that we can comprehend.  God eternally chose/chooses to be a person, to relate with other persons.  Personality is a mystery, too.  Year after year, we go through changes, and yet we are the same person.  No matter how well you …

Continue Reading about Philosophy, mystery, and personality

One of the persisting problems of philosophy is how to bring together the idea of universal truth with the idea of personal truth.  At their extremes, each idea tries to eliminate any room for the other. At one extreme, the idea of universal truth excludes those who do not accept a particular …

Continue Reading about Concepts and struggle

Notre Dame, Paris In commercial and political messages, when we see any reasoning at all, most of it is one-sided.  The conclusion may be true, but there is no attempt to be fair to other points of view.  By contrast, an editorial I once read distinguished itself: at the beginning, the writer …

Continue Reading about Thomas Aquinas and reasoning

A point raised in Dr. McCoy’s comment on the previous post, “Descartes and intuition,” deserves a fresh post in reply. There is no silver bullet when it comes to knowledge, wisdom, and insight.  We have to work at it.  We gain the truths of science by experiment, the truths of philosophy by …

Continue Reading about Intuition and mistakes