Newman’s classic An Essay In Aid Of A Grammar Of Assent is unlikely to have been read by mainstream epistemologists — much to their shame. GoA is freely available on Project Gutenberg as is his philosophical novel Loss and Gain: The Sory of a Convert. EmpiricismEpistemologyepistemology of religious beliefgrammar of assentJohn Henry Newmanloss and gainphilosophical literatureReligion
This in The Atlantic (H/T to Shannon Selin) If you’ve got only 10 minutes, read his essay “A Much Repeated Repetition.” (“Of a mechanical thing we have a full knowledge. Of a living thing we have a divine ignorance.”) Why should it want to make him a saint? Why Chesterton and not—if you’re talking about…
A travel article (who in N.O. talks of “the Big Easy”?) . . . and realized, once again, that there’s no better place to find Walker Percy than inside the pages of his many dazzling novels, which I’d fallen in love with years ago. a confederacy of duncesJohn Kennedy TooleLiteratureLouisiananew orleansphilosophical literatureTennessee Williamsthe moviegoerTruman CapoteWalker Percywilliam…
But it was worse than this in his case. It was more than being a Southerner. For some years he had had a nervous condition and as a consequence he did not know how to live his life. As a child he had had “spells,” occurrences which were nameless and not to be thought of,…
As for the present young man, the last of the line, he did not know what to think. So he became a watcher and a listener and a wanderer. He could not get enough of watching. Once when he was a boy, a man next door had gone crazy and had sat out in his…
Being of both a scientific and a superstitious turn of mind and therefore always on the lookout for chance happenings which lead to great discoveries, he had to have a last look—much as a man will open a telephone book and read the name at his thumbnail. ~~~~~~~~~ It did not take him long to…
Another nice piece by Toole biographer Cory MacLauchlin. a confederacy of duncesButterfly in the TypewriterCory MacLauchlinJohn Kennedy Toolenew orleansphilosophical literatureWalker Percy
I shrug. There is only one thing I can do: listen to people, see how they stick themselves into the world, hand them along a ways in their dark journey and be handed along, and for good and selfish reasons. It only remains to decide whether this vocation is best pursued in a service station…
“One last question to satisfy my idle curiosity. What has been going on in your mind during all the years when we listened to music together, read the Crito, and spoke together—or was it only I who spoke—good Lord, I can’t remember—of goodness and truth and beauty and nobility?” Another cry and the ramoneur is…
Christians talk about the horror of sin, but they have overlooked something. They keep talking as if everyone were a great sinner, when the truth is that nowadays one is hardly up to it. There is very little sin in the depths of the malaise. The highest moment of a malaisian’s life can be that…
manwithoutqualities 