Philosophy
HEGE Series
Why is Everything Broken? — Edward Curten
Such an approach [logical analyses in the classical style], while possessed of a certain elegance and balance, has serious limitations since it suggests the world follows a neat Aristotelian logic and that there is a method to the world’s madness that is easy to capture in logical argumentation. Romanticism and existentialism, to name two reactions to such thinking, arose in opposition. Each offered a needed corrective to the reductive, materialist nature of a scientific method that became deified while dismissing God, freedom, and the spiritual as leftover superstitions from olden times....
Why I Am Not Orthodox
— rejection of Orthodox Chrisitianity by placing philosophy above revelation of God in Christ
Great Philosophers
Introduction to Western Philosophy | Hillsdale College
The Role of Philosophy and Literature in building up the National Identity of the early 19th century United States | Two Philosophies - Keijo Virtane
— “Tocqueville wrote in the 1830s that he did not know any people who were so uninterested in philosophy than the Americans. Even though he exaggarated, it was easy see that the Germans, English and French avoided the practical aspects of philosophy compared to American thinkers who looked for useful solutions and mixed political and theological ingredients with their philosophy.
The so called Scottish approach became the quasi-official philosophy of nineteenth-century America....”
The Transcendentalists and Their World
From Puritan to Yankee: Character and the Social Order in Connecticut, 1690-1765 - Richard Bushman | Kevin C. Murphy reflections
The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities - Richard Bushman | Kevin C. Murphy reflections
The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History
The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation
Searching for Utopia: The History of an Idea
Introduction to Western Philosophy | Hillsdale College
The Philosophy of Man: A New Introduction to Some Perennial Issues
How to Think About the Great Ideas: From the Great Books of Western Civilization
The Consequences of Ideas: Understanding the Concepts that Shaped Our World — R. C. Sproul
intellectual history discipline | Britannica.com
— “intellectual history, branch of history that deals with the historical propagation and dissemination of ideas. Intellectual history is closely related to the history of ideas, a branch of history that treats ideas as objects of formal analysis. Like the history of ideas, intellectual history considers the formally articulated ideas of scholarly and literary figures, but it also encompasses the sentiments of ordinary people—even popular delusions come within the ambit of intellectual history. In this respect intellectual history intersects with psychohistory (the study of history using psychological or psychoanalytic methods) and the cultural history of mentalités, or popular attitudes and unconscious preconceptions.
“All history,” as the English philosopher R.G. Collingwood (1889–1943) said, “is the history of thought.” One traditional view of history, now discarded, is that it is virtually synonymous with the history of ideas—history is composed of human actions; human actions have to be explained by intentions; and intentions cannot be formed without ideas. On a grander scale, the doctrines of Christianity were the core of providential universal histories in the West (histories that conceived the broad course of human events as determined by divine will), which persisted until the 18th century, since the acceptance—or rejection—of Christian ideas was considered Western history’s master plot. When the providential argument in its simpler medieval form lost credibility, it was reformulated by the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), with his conception of the tropes appropriate to the different ages of humanity, and by the German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel (1770–1831), whose “objective” idealism identified the development of Spirit, or the Idea, as the motor of history. In the techniques of historical investigation too, the history of ideas was the source for the hermeneutical skills required for reading complex texts. The interpretation of ancient laws and religious doctrines was the workshop in which were forged the tools that were subsequently used in all historical work....
Confusion can arise because history of ideas and intellectual history are sometimes treated as synonyms. As noted above, the former is properly the name of a field of study in which ideas themselves are the central subject. The most sophisticated approach to the history of ideas was formulated by the American philosopher Arthur Lovejoy (1873–1962), who focused on what he called “unit ideas,” such as the notion of a Great Chain of Being extending from God through the angels to humans down to the least-complicated life-forms. Lovejoy traced this idea from its classical roots through the 19th century in both philosophical and literary elaborations. Philosophical or theological doctrines (e.g., Plato’s theory of Forms, or Manichaeism, a dualist religious movement founded in Persia) lend themselves best to the unit-idea mode of study. One difficulty with the history of unit ideas, however, is that it is often difficult to establish the identity of an idea through time. The term natural law, for example, meant quite different things to Stoic philosophers, to the English philosophers Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and John Locke (1632–1704), and to the prosecutors of Nazi war criminals at the Nürnberg trials (1945–46); the meaning of the same words can change radically. This drives the historian to the Oxford English Dictionary or its equivalents for other languages to get a first take on the history of meaning changes. This step, however, must be supplemented by extensive reading in the contemporary literature, not only to see what semiotic load the words bear but also to see what controversies or contrary positions might have been in the mind of the writer.”
The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea Arthur O. Lovejoy
Adventures of Ideas Alfred North Whitehead
History of Ideas — Karlstad University, Brandeis University, University of VA, University of Chicago Press, Science Direct, Journal of the History of Ideas
Visions of Politics | Cambridge Core
— Chapter 4 - Meaning and understanding in the history of ideas
A History of Ideas: The most intriguing, relevant and helpful concepts from the story of humanity
Waking Life | Wikipedia
— “...a 2001 American animated film written and directed by Richard Linklater. The film explores a wide range of philosophical issues, including the nature of reality, dreams and lucid dreams, consciousness, the meaning of life, free will, and existentialism.”
Logic
Rhetoric
Rhetoric | Wikipedia
Philosophy of Progress
Progress | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
— “Philosophical proponents of progress assert that the human condition has improved over the course of history and will continue to improve. Doctrines of progress first appeared in 18th-century Europe and epitomize the optimism of that time and place. Belief in progress flourished in the 19th century. While skeptics of progress did exist alongside its supporters from the beginning, it was not until the 20th century that theorists backed away en masse from the notion. Many 20th-century thinkers rejected the notion of progress after horrendous events such as the two World Wars, the Holocaust, and the use of nuclear weaponry.”
The Roots of Progress
What is a “philosophy of progress?”
Why do we need a NEW philosophy of progress?
We need a new philosophy of progress
— “We live in an age that has lost its optimism. Polls show that people think the world is getting worse, not better. Children fear dying from environmental catastrophe before they reach old age. Technologists are as likely to be told that they are ruining society as that they are bettering it.
But it was not always so. Just a few centuries ago, Western thinkers were caught up in a wave of optimism for technology, humanity and the future, based on the new philosophy of the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment was many things, but in large part, it was a philosophy of progress.”
The Philosophy of Progress — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Christian Philosophy
Reason and the Christian Religion: Essays in Honour of Richard Swinburne
From Plato to Christ: How Platonic Thought Shaped the Christian Faith
A reminder that stoicism can be divine
Biblical Philosophy: Is There Such a Thing?
Philosophy and History of Christian Thought | YouTube Playlist - Bruce Gore
Christian philosophy | Wikipedia
Christian Platonism and Christian Neoplatonism: Christian Platonists and Platonizing Christians in History
The Philosophia perennis of Hellenistic Christianity
A Critical Assessment of Georges Florovsky’s Notion of Christian Hellenism as philosophia perennis
Georges Florovsky and the Russian Religious Renaissance
Faith and Knowledge in the Thought of Georges Florovsky
Georges Vasilievich Florovsky: Philosopher of the Orthodox World — John Chamberlain
—Part 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Celsus | Wikipedia
— “a 2nd-century Greek philosopher and opponent of early Christianity.”
The True Word | Wikipedia
— “a lost treatise in which the ancient Greek philosopher Celsus addressed many principal points of early Christianity and refuted or argued against their validity.”
Origen | Wikipedia
Contra Celsum | Wikipedia
— “a major apologetics work by the Church Father Origen of Alexandria, written in around 248 AD, countering the writings of Celsus”
Modalism | Wikipedia
— condemned as Heresy; the belief (similar to Eastern Monism) that Father, Son and Holy Spirit are 3 different modes of God, as opposed to a Trinitarian view of 3 distinct persons within the Godhead.
See — Western Esotericism
Sabellianism | Wikipedia
Patripassianism | Wikipedia
Nominalism
Nominalism | Wikipedia
Nominalism Series
The Abstraction of God and the Culture Wars (Nominalism 7)
English Moral Philosophy
Traditional Christian (Orthodox) understanding of human nature, pleasure and pain as expounded by St. Maximus the Confessor was stood on its head by English moral philosophy (English moral philosophical tradition), specifically Utilitarianism. Ironically, Utilitarian happiness is rooted in English moral philosophical belief in a Radically Benevolent God, but the essence of English moral philosophy (philosophical tradition) as expressed in Utilitarianism is political and economic (not social), which hasn't turned out to be very benevolent at all for most people or the world, but more along the malevolent dog eat dog lines of the fallen world of Social Darwinism.
The Utiltiarian standard of morality based on pleasure has had far reaching negative, painful, unhappy repercussions on the Created order (Cosmos) by way of the modern pollitical and economic system rooted in applied scientific technology, progress, urban-industrialism, consumer capitalism, and usury. The works of Charles Dickens are in direct response to Utilitarian "Poor Law Bastilles" resulting from the New Poor Law of 1834.
Eventually, such naval gazing of Western philosophy (as is English moral philosophical tradition), unmoored from Divine Wisdom in Traditional Christianity (Orthodoxy) would start dissecting how such a good God could allow suffering. Some, who would have nothing to do with Christianity disputed such arguments in order to rationalize that there is no god.
This was the environment in which Charles Darwin lived, who when his eldest and most beloved child died, became an atheist. Apparently, he could abide death and decay from a godless evolutionary viewpoint as he witnessed via microorganisms and insects, but could not reconcile such with the existence of God when it came to suffering and death of his loved one. He simply failed to understand the difference between Creation (nature) before and after the Fall of Humanity from comm-union with God.
Annie's Box: Charles Darwin, His Daughter And Human Evolution 2001
Creation (2009 film) | Wikipedia — Trailer
Pity that Darwin, and especially none of the other English intellectuals involved in British philosophy of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries ever thought to search out Traditional Christianity and its lights such as St. Maximus of the 7th century.
The rest is western history.
What such history illustrates is the insanity of mere reason apart from comm-union with God which transfigures human reason with Divine Wisdom. Reason alone is nothing but mad ravings of intellect, mere information or knowledge, that is not just useless but dangerous and destructive without spiritual connection to its Creator. Though such reason may dress itself up in human respectability (high-falutin education, upper class standing, expensive fine clothing, 3-piece suits, luxury housing and transportation, expansive vocabulary, well spokeness, and sophisticated social graces), nevertheless, without God human reason alone is nothing.
Homology (biology) | Wikipedia
There Were Giants In The Earth The Light Age is the Dark Age, part one | The Abbey of Misrule - Paul Kingsnorth [Western] Medieval Christianity placed a high value on the intellect, but it was an intellect that was to operate within certain bounds. There could be said to be two types of knowledge: that known by the ratio and that known by the nous. The ratio is the deductive, logical, reasoning mind. The nous is what Orthodox Christianity still refers to as the ‘heart-mind’: it is a deeper level of thinking than mere reason, and it looks to attain wisdom: knowledge of the deeper truth of reality. The medieval mind saw the ratio as a servant of the nous... Utilitarianism as Part of the English Moral Philosophical Tradition [I]t was John Locke who provided the starting place for the utilitarian branch of ethical thought. Locke's singular contribution was his exclusion of innate ideas from the human conscience — with them went innate moral ideas as well. Locke could find only the desire for happiness and the aversion of pain in the human mind — a sort of proto-utilitarianism. His embargo on innate ideas laid down challenge to subsequent English moralists: Could the moral feeling — which gives us approbation for the honorable act and hostility toward evil — be accounted for without recourse to innate ideas? In a broad sense the conflict here is between Locke's unwavering empiricism and the legacy of a Protestant commitment to direct communication between man and God [without Roman Catholic ”sacred” intermediaries (heirarchy, clergy, monastics) from which laity had been excluded. See — Modernity]. Locke would win. Utilitarianism's point of departure from this [English moral philosophical] tradition turned on the question of innate moral ideas. Utilitarianism (1) ...attempted to reduce decision-making about human actions to a "felicific calculus" by weighing the profit, convenience, advantage, benefit, emolument, and happiness that would ensue from the action against the mischief, disadvantage, inconvenience, loss, and unhappiness that it would also entail.... Combined with the [unregulated, “free” market] laissez-faire approach to business...and Malthusian ideas on the increase of population, it...was responsible for a number of democratic reforms in the first few decades of the nineteenth century. It was not until the New Poor Law of 1834...that the formulaic heartlessness of this philosophy became obvious, as parish relief for the poor (a system that had indeed broken down as the result of the shift of population following the industrial revolution) was replaced by workhouses, which quickly became known as "Poor Law Bastilles." Throughout the century, a wide range of thinkers and political groups opposed utilitarian thought and the associated classical [liberal] economics. [Yet it was not until the FDR administration that any significant opposition was made to such economics of classic liberalism, which resulted in a spurt of exapansion of the middle class following World War II. However, that would be short lived, and the reinstatement of classic liberalism (neo-liberalism) by the Republican party beginning with Reaganomics would undo those advances and return the American economy to even beyond the level of depravity and income inequality of the Gilded Age of the late 19th century.] Utilitarianism (2) Mill defines "happiness" to be both intellectual and sensual pleasure. The Victorian Web: Philosophy — Political and Economic Philosophies (more info) The Warfare of Conscience with Theology God and the English Utilitarians — I Introduction II Common Ground: Commitment to a Radically Benevolent God III Origins of Utilitarianism's Radically Benevolent God IV Utilitarianism as Part of the English Moral Philosophical Tradition V What Divided Secular and Theological Utilitarians? Conclusion Evolution as a Guide to Conduct The evolutionists of the Victorian period similarly [to Plato and Aristotle] believed that the good must be derived from the facts of human existence. They differed only in that they believed that these facts were to be derived not by intuition or reflection or divine guidance, but by the application of the scientific method. For a number of writers in this period, the vision conjured up was intoxicating, perhaps in proportion to the anxiety they felt in propagating an idea which they knew to be considered as corrosive for the traditional foundations of society.
Utilitarianism: What It Is, Founders, and Main Principles
See — Michael J. Sandel
Rationalism
The Enlightenment
Bacon
Descartes
Hobbes
Locke
Kant
Hume
Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza’s Scientific Pantheism
Philosophy and Resurrection: The Gospel according to Spinoza
Romanticism
The Forgotten History of Walden Pond
Realism
Idealism
Naturalism
Liberalism
Thomas Jefferson’s Cancellation Portends End of Classical Liberalism
Individualism
The Cult of Individualism: A History of an Enduring American Myth
The Myth of American Individualism
Hermann Kutter | Wikipedia
John Ruskin | Wikipedia
William Morris | Wikipedia
Rosa Luxemburg | Wikipedia
Nihilism
Existentialism
Atheism
Capitalism
Socialism
Christian Socialism? What it is and What the Gospel Says About it — Bruderhof | YouTube
Is Christianity Socialism? — Bruderhof | YouTube
Christian Socialism: Impossible Ideal or Practical Reality? — Bruderhof | YouTube
Marxism
Marxism: What It Is and Comparison to Communism, Socialism, and Capitalism | Investopedia
— Marxism is a social, political, and economic philosophy named after the 19th-century German philosopher and economist Karl Marx.
Karl Marx | Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Marxism | Dictionary.com
Marxists Internet Archive
Communism
Isaiah Berlin
The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas
Against the Current: Essays in the History of Ideas
The Sense of Reality: Studies in Ideas and Their History
The Power of Ideas: Second Edition
The Roots of Romanticism: Second Edition
Political Ideas in the Romantic Age: Their Rise and Influence on Modern Thought
Isaiah Berlin's Counter-Enlightenment
Three Critics of the Enlightenment: Vico, Hamann, Herder
Michael J. Sandel
Michael Sandel: 'The populist backlash has been a revolt against the tyranny of merit' The philosopher believes the liberal left’s pursuit of meritocracy has betrayed the working classes. His new book [The Tyranny of Merit] argues for a politics centred on dignity
Rich students get better SAT scores—here’s why
Justice with Michael Sandel — on utilitarianism and libertarianism
Harvard University
YouTube
Michael Sandel | Wikipedia
Michael J. Sandel Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government
Michael J. Sandel Harvard University Affiliated Professor
Amazon Author's Page
Michael Sandel, Political philosopher | TED.com
Michael Sandel | Kevin C. Murphy reflections
Michael Sandel | PBS
The Public Philosopher | BBC
What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets | Google Books
What Money Can't Buy by Michael Sandel – review
Labour conference 2012: a cerebral address on moral limits of markets
Patrick J. Dennan
See — Patrick J. Dennan
Mark Albion
Businessman and the Fisherman
The Story of a Fisherman: a short story that highlights the importance of knowing your life goals
The Good Life — Tony Bennett | YouTube (Lyrics)
The Good Life — More Than Money | YouTube
More Than Money by Mark Albion (BK Life Book) | YouTube
— “We won't remember you for the size of your wallet as much as the size of your heart.”
More Than Money — Excerpt
More Than Money: Questions Every Mba Needs to Answer | Google Books
Mark Albion | Sounds True
Mark Vernon
Mark Vernon.com
Mark Vernon | The Guardian
Matthew Rose
Matthew Rose
A World after Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right
After Liberalism… the Deluge
Politics, Religion and Inviting Disaster
John Cuddeback
LifeCraft (Bacon from Acorns)
LifeCraft Blog
Mini-Series from the LifeCraft Blog
The Leisure Question: A Series
The Difference between Leisure and Amusement
Professors on Break: Dr. John Cuddeback | Christendom College
LifeCraftVideos | YouTube
Welcome to LifeCraft - Start Crafting A Vibrant Life
LifeCraft: Good Work
What is Leisure?
What Leisure Has to Do with the Meaning of Life