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Commentary
- Bruce on Ode to a Cat
- Aslandad on “The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
- Rotating Pilgrim on “The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
- Rotating Pilgrim on “The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
- Rotating Pilgrim on “The overwhelming feeling I have about life is poignancy. A happy sadness.”
Tag Archives: Philosophy
Terry Eagleton on Cultural Theory
“Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on. It is also, as we have suggested before, rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions.” After Theory by Terry Eagleton, 2003.
Chesterton and a philosophy of common sense
In describing Thomism as a philosophy of common sense, G.K. Chesterton wrote:
“Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody’s system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody’s sense of reality; to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense. Each started with a paradox; a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they would call a sane point of view. That is the one thing common to Hobbes and Hegel, to Kant and Bergson, to Berkeley and William James. A man had to believe something that no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity; as that law is about right, or right is outside reason, or things are only as we think them, or everything is relative to a reality that is not there. The modern philosopher claims, like a sort of confident man, that if we will grant him this, the rest will be easy; he will straighten out the world, if he is allowed to give this one twist to the mind…
Against all this the philosophy of St. Thomas stands founded on the universal common conviction that eggs are eggs. The Hegelian may say that an egg is really a hen, because it is a part of an endless process of Becoming; the Berkelian
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