Browse

Believing in Order to See: On the Rationality of Revelation and the Irrationality of Some Believers

Jean-Luc Marion

This is a collection of articles written over the space of twenty years on various subjects connected to the rationality of faith and its presentation in the contemporary world. Marion discusses the ... More

This is a collection of articles written over the space of twenty years on various subjects connected to the rationality of faith and its presentation in the contemporary world. Marion discusses the role of the intellectual in the church, the rationality of faith, the infinite worth and incomprehensibility of the human, the phenomenality of the sacraments, and the phenomenological nature of miracles and of revelation more broadly. Throughout he stresses that faith has its own rationality, which is one of love, gift, and givenness, which can be outlined phenomenologically and hence expressed with philosophical rigor. He also criticizes various movements within Catholicism to intellectualize the role of the laity and instead argues for the simple responsibility of the baptized as church of Christ in need of the sacraments and unfolding their particular rigor and “logic.” Marion outlines the gift-character of faith and sacraments and their essential phenomenality of giveness, which calls forth a response of love and devotion in the sense of kenotic abandon. He ends with an analysis of sanctity.Less

Couch City: Socrates against Simonides

Harry Berger

Ward Risvold and J. Benjamin Fuqua (eds)

In addition to providing a thorough philological review, this book revises the way scholars have tended to read the Simonides episode from Plato’s Protagoras. Couch City ties this review with a ... More

In addition to providing a thorough philological review, this book revises the way scholars have tended to read the Simonides episode from Plato’s Protagoras. Couch City ties this review with a literary interpretation of the poem’s involvement in the dialogue, how the dialogue itself may be read literarily, and, most importantly, how these readings work together rather than as discrete, incidental literary interventions in Socrates studies. It uses concepts like the performatives of speech-act theory to demonstrate how the structure of the dialogue sanctions the poem’s transgressive playfulness as much as how Socrates’s performance of the poem informs that structure as well as its execution. As much as Couch City examines classical rhetoric and philosophy, it reverberates just as much into contemporary literary studies. The book marries careful structural reading of the poem and dialogue with broader conceptual investigation that may be applied to or re-read in the poem or its reading, producing an argument that rejects the notion that Socrates fails Plato’s philosophical project, but rather complicates it in literary fashion by performing sophistry in order to defeat sophistry.Less

Ens rationis from Suárez to Caramuel: A Study in Scholasticism of the Baroque Era

Daniel D. Novotny

The influence of the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) on 17th-century philosophy, theology, and law can hardly be underestimated. This book explores one of the most controversial topics of ... More

The influence of the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) on 17th-century philosophy, theology, and law can hardly be underestimated. This book explores one of the most controversial topics of Suárez’s philosophy: beings of reason. Beings of reason are impossible intentional objects, such as blindness and square-circle. The first part of the book is structured around a close reading of Suárez’s main text on the subject, namely Disputation 54. The chapters are devoted to the questions of the nature, causes, and the division of beings of reason. The second part centers on texts by other outstanding philosophers of the time, such as the Spanish Jesuit Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza (1578-1641), the Italian Franciscan Bartolomeo Mastri (1602-73), and the Spanish-Bohemian-Luxembourgian polymath Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz (1606-82). Two theses are defended: First, that Suárez’s theory of beings of reason is incoherent and, second, that he stands at the beginning of a series of first-rate scholastic philosophers of the Baroque era who addressed this topic. These theses are supported by showing that the scholastic philosophers who followed Suárez attempted to improve upon the standard Suarezian account of beings of reason either by (a) modifying it, working out further details, and resolving the objections against it, or (b) coming up with altogether different theories. The book also contains a chapter which aims at making the scholastic preoccupations with beings of reason intelligible to contemporary analytical metaphysicians and a chapter discussing the need to pay greater historiographical attention to the study of scholasticism of the Baroque era.Less

Mental Language: From Plato to William of Ockham

Claude Panaccio

The notion that human thought is structured like a language, with a precise syntax and semantics, has been pivotal in recent philosophy of mind. Yet it is not a new idea: it was systematically ... More

The notion that human thought is structured like a language, with a precise syntax and semantics, has been pivotal in recent philosophy of mind. Yet it is not a new idea: it was systematically explored in the fourteenth century by William of Ockham and became central in late medieval philosophy. This book examines the background of Ockham's innovation by tracing the history of the mental language theme in ancient and medieval thought. It shows the various contexts in which the idea was developed, the different uses it was put to, and the networks through which it was transmitted. Two ancient traditions are identified as relevant: one philosophical, stemming from Plato and Aristotle, which led to the emergence of a technical notion of ‘internal discourse’ in later Greek philosophy; and the other theological, rooted in the Fathers of the Christian Church and reaching its apogee in Augustine in the fifth century A.D. The study then focuses on the merging of the two traditions in the Middle Ages, as they gave rise to detailed discussions over the structure of human thought and its relations with signs and language. And it finally stresses the originality and significance of Ockham's doctrine of the 'oratio mentalis' (mental discourse) and the strong impression it made upon his immediate successors.Less

Ordinary Oblivion and the Self Unmoored: Reading Plato's Phaedrus and Writing the Soul

Jennifer R. Rapp

Rapp begins with a question posed by poet Theodore Roethke: “should we say that the self, once perceived, becomes a soul?” Through her examination of Plato's Phaedrus and her insights about the place ... More

Rapp begins with a question posed by poet Theodore Roethke: “should we say that the self, once perceived, becomes a soul?” Through her examination of Plato's Phaedrus and her insights about the place of forgetting in a life, Rapp answers Roethke's query with a resounding “yes.” In so doing, Rapp offers a re-imagined view onto the Phaedrus, a recast interpretation of Plato's relevance to contemporary life, and an innovative account of forgetting as a fertile fragility constitutive of humanity. The crux of Rapp's account of forgetting and her re-reading of Plato is the idea that ordinary forms of oblivion in a life are essential for change, knowledge, and truer seeing beyond the self. Ordinary moments of oblivion both saturate and fissure a life, as well as make possible the decomposing and generative processes of reading required--and risked--by Plato's texts. It is through these processes that the soul becomes forged, such that, argues Rapp, the religious dimension of Plato's philosophy rests not in metaphysics but arises from the texts themselves. Building upon Socrates’ suggested method of “forming an image of the soul through words” Rapp documents the vibrant, boundary-blurring images of the soul in the Phaedrus to illustrate how Plato's conception of the soul is not narrowly dualistic, but pliantly construed in a way befitting our porous nature. Her attention to the Phaedrus and her meditative apprehension of the permeable character of human life leave our understanding of both Plato and forgetting inescapably altered, if not resolved.Less