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Tag Archives: aristotle
Thinking Critically about Critical Theory
First thought. The broad takeaway insight of postmodernism is the following: there is always more in a text than the author knows or intends. This goes rather nicely with Nietzsche’s claim that “there are no facts, only interpretations.” But before … Continue reading
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Tagged aristotle, critical theory, critical thinking, derrida, Marxism, postmodernism, romanticism
5 Comments
Does Critical Theory Kill Aristotle or Does Aristotle Kill Critical Theory?
Within the humanities, contemporary critical theorizing typically entails left leaning political commitments accompanied by some line of attack or qualification on Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle—his idea that every communicative act necessarily requires three things: an author or speaker (Greek: ethos), a … Continue reading
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Tagged aristotle, authors, critical theory, literary theory, pragmatism, reading, writers
1 Comment
The God of the Philosophers vs. The God of Revelation
. This past week, I read Peter Vardy and Julie Arliss’s The Thinker’s Guide to God (O Books 2003). The authors are Catholics, and it’s a really great read. Here, for example, is a wonderful distinction that they make with regard … Continue reading
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Tagged agnosticism, apologetics, aquinas, aristotle, atheism, atheist, Catholicism, God, Jesus, philosophy, unmoved mover
2 Comments
Why Atheism is Not Just Disbelief in the Existence of Gods
Atheists typically assert that atheism is just disbelief in the existence of gods, and when they say this it is usually to insist that little, or even nothing, follows from this definition (or has ever followed from it). On this line … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, aristotle, atheism, atheist, definition, george santayana, Jesus, michael burleigh, philosophy, Richard Dawkins
5 Comments
Critical Thinking Tip #7: Try Using Aristotle’s Method of Definition to Get a Handle on What You’re Pondering
Critical thinking gets turbo-charged wherever terms are clearly defined. And it was Aristotle who first noticed that, if a definition is to be any good, it should say something general and something specific. Aristotle designated these two components the genus and diaphora … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, aristotle, atheism, critical thinking, genus, logic, philosophy, reason, species, specimen
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What is a Human, Really? Thinking about Definition via Aristotle
If your definition of a word is to be any good, Aristotle was the first to notice that it should say something general and something specific. Aristotle designated these two components the genus and species of a definition. Thus you might … Continue reading
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Tagged apologetics, aristotle, atheism, Ayn Rand, critical thinking, definition, gods, logic, philosophy, precision, reason
32 Comments
The Thorny Problem of Defining What a Book Is (It’s Not as Easy as You Might Think)
I like this definition of a book (which I found in a Times Literary Supplement essay): I. A. Richards called the book “a machine to think with” . . . Notice that the definition has the two elements that Aristotle … Continue reading
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Tagged aristotle, biology, books, civilization, definition, entropy, information, life, literature, the book, words
5 Comments
Does Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Total Library” Spell the Death of God?
Of the notion of “the Total Library” (a library containing all possible combinations of letters, punctuation, and spacing), Jorge Luis Borges (in the first paragraph of his 1939 essay “The Total Library”) writes the following: It’s a wonder how long … Continue reading
Aristotle on (what ought to be) a source of social shame
A great Aristotle quote: It is absurd to hold that a man ought to be ashamed of being unable to defend himself with his limbs but not of being unable to defend himself with speech and reason, when the use … Continue reading
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Tagged aristotle, college, critical thinking, doubt, faith, fitness, intellect, life, muscles, reason, skepticism
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Prometheus Unbound 