A peculiar self-congratulatory narrative runs throughout contemporary accounts of the history of Western philosophy. According to this narrative, philosophy is, by its very nature, co-extensive with a process of demytholigization. Whereas Greek poets attempted to explain the world mythologically by invoking the unseen operations of gods and spiritual forces, Greek philosophy, on this account, was …
As I have argued in a previous essay,1 Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man seeks to establish the necessity of beauty for human life by offering two kinds of argument. The first argument turns on the salutary political effects of beauty, and the second on the concept of beauty itself, arguing that it …
The Timaeus is one of Plato’s most historically influential dialogues, because it, unlike the others, was translated into Latin1 and preserved in the medieval world. Yet it is also one of the hardest to understand. The bulk of this “dialogue” consists of a monologue by Timaeus, a Pythagorean philosopher from Locri, who tells an imaginative …
1. Deconstruction in the Evangelical Church The term “deconstruction” has taken on a life of its own in Evangelical Christian circles. I can remember being both surprised and annoyed when sitting in these churches and hearing pastors rail against postmodern philosophers as if they were prophets of the antichrist. Their animosity surprised me, because I …
The distinction between the conscious and the unconscious has become a cultural commonplace. We recognize when our co-workers, friends, and family act unconsciously, repeatedly manifesting meaningful patterns of action they claim to be purely accidental. Wider society also capitalizes on the unconscious by designing its propaganda (marketing) to appeal to our deep longings that rarely …