Aeschylus and Aristophanes, Plato and Aristotle, Xenophon and Thucydides: it is one thing to know their texts. It is another to read them in the language their authors used. The roots of Western culture sprung up in Ancient Greece. If we are to be successful cultivators of future growth ourselves, we ought to attend to […]

Our Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor, Director of Catholic Studies, and Chair of Philosophy as Aquinas College in Grand Rapids, MI, was on the Acton Line podcast of the Acton Institute last year (but just let us know recently!). Give a listen here: Reason, nature, and the human good – YouTube

“…it is strange if it is a shameful thing not to be able to come to one’s own aid with one’s body but not a shameful thing to do so by means of argument, which is to a greater degree a human being’s own than is the use of the body.” Aristotle, Art of Rhetoric, […]

“I know.” “I don’t know.” We say these two sentences all the time. But do we know what they mean? Do we know what it means, “to know”? For many persons, content as they are not to ask meaningful questions, there seems no need of an answer. But for anyone who wishes to have confidence […]

“What’s wrong with the world?”  Countless thinkers have asked this question, especially over the past century-plus, and they have asked it over and over again; to the point that few in recent years seem to ask it any longer, even for the purpose of adopting the thinnest veneer of rhetorical posturing.  No. Today, almost everyone […]

All of us, it seems, today bear a heavy burden of being. Increasingly, we may find it difficult to rise from our beds and confront the day: indeed, even for those who persevere, it is a perseverance, it is a confrontation. The world challenges our fortitude. But why? We might assign, and justly, many different […]

What does it mean to be good as a human being? Modernity, all too often, has treated this as a problem to be solved. That is, we tend to view moral failings as simply in need of the right solution, the right education, the right program. Morality, however, is something that belongs to the individual. […]

…the history of the trivium is largely a history of the rivalry among them for ascendancy.  Ancient grammar was at odds with the dialectics of Plato and, especially, of Aristotle, as the art of interpreting phenomena.  As the method of patristic theology, grammar enjoyed uninterrupted ascendancy until the revival of dialectics by Gerbert, Roscellinus, and […]

This is not quite how I envisioned this first blog post turning out… Originally, I had considered writing something on the issue of the political common good, focusing on the plurality of common goods in relation to the political exercise of social justice in its original and true sense (namely, the right ordering of various […]

METAPHYSICS: THE DEPTHS OF ACT & POTENCY “In long Indian file, as when herons take wing, the white birds were now all flying towards Ahab’s boat; and when within a few yards began fluttering over the water there, wheeling round and round, with joyous, expectant cries.  Their vision was keener than man’s; Ahab could perceive […]