Quid est veritas? Veritas veritas est?

Is Truth True?
Elliot Bougis
When I proposed (in appallingly feeble Latin) a motto, which was revised by my Latinate superiors thus: Potest veritas se defendere (Truth can defend itself), someone brought up Pilate’s question to Christ, “Quid est veritas? What is truth?” and asked me for some help in responding to arguments against truth in favor [...]

Is freedom the capacity to choose rightly?

Freedom as distinct from rationality

Michael Liccione has recently proposed identifying freedom as the capacity to choose rightly – see his post on Philosophia Perennis of September 9, 2008.  (It is fair to add that he makes this identification with an important qualification, to which I will turn later.)
It seems to me that to identify freedom, [...]

MacIntyre on Anscombe

Alasdair MacIntyre has written a review of a recent collection of papers by G. E. M. Anscombe for the Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. The collection is G.E.M. Anscombe, Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays on Religion, Philosophy and Ethics, Imprint Academic, 2008, 273pp., $34.90 (pbk), ISBN 9781845401214. I mention this not only to draw your [...]

The will to believe and the believing will…

Étienne Gilson says on page 83 of his Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages that “faith is not a principle of philosophical knowledge, but it is a safe guide to rational truth and an infallible warning against philosophical error.” The point being that, while faith cannot provide rationally deductive demonstrations of this or that [...]

Bush is… Obama is not…?

While I have been a distant observer of all things Bush for the last five years, having lived in Taiwan during that time, I have noticed one theme in particular. Bush is criticized by his many critics (fittingly) for being a talking suit of his party, an elite son of big money. He is also [...]

Bring Out Yer Dead!

An article in The Economist describes the worries of bioethicists about what we might call the problem of deadly demarcation: the fact that vicissitudes in medical definitions of death appear to be subject to the growing trend of organ harvesting. In 1968 a committee at the Harvard Medical School recommended extinction of brain activity as [...]

The Metaphysics of Naturalism

[This is a guest article posted for purposes of constructive discussion between a "naturalist" philosopher and Catholic philosophers. For myself, there isn't much in its content that I can object to, even as an opponent of metaphysical naturalism. Perhaps that means I've misunderstood David. If so, that question would be a good way to start [...]