Speaking the Language of Your Age

The [dogmatic] declarations [of the early Church] were uttered in the language of Greek philosophy because the false statements were uttered in that language. [The Power and the Wisdom, John L. McKenzie, S.J., The Bruce Publishing Company, 1965, page 129] The opponents of the Church, both the ones with good intentions and the hateful ones, … [Read more…]

Engaging the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI: There Are Various Charisms in the Body of Christ

I’m being somewhat unfair in titling this series of blog posts as if Pope Benedict were responsible for the lack of response by Christian thinkers to the opportunities and problems presented by modern empirical knowledge. It’s creative thinkers who’ve failed over the past five centuries or so, perhaps because of the general cultural decay narrated … [Read more…]

Shaping Our Minds to Reality

The wavefunction is the vehicle of our understanding of the quantum world. Judged by the robust standards of classical physics it may seem a rather wraith-like entity. But it is certainly the object of quantum mechanical discourse and, for all the peculiarity of its collapse, its subtle essence may be the form that reality has … [Read more…]

What is Mind?: Creating Meanings

[How Brains Make Up Their Minds, Walter J. Freeman, Columbia University Press, 2000] Intentionality in the doctrine of Aquinas does not require consciousness, but it does require acting to create meaning instead of just thinking. This view is shared by the philosophers Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, J.J. Gibson, and the pragmatists. We sniff, move our … [Read more…]

A Note on the Debate Between G.E.M. Anscombe and C.S. Lewis

I discovered an interesting article on the Internet, Praxeology, War, Democracy, and the State by Roderick T. Long of Auburn University. See Roderick T. Long’s Home Page or Wikipedia article on praxeology for a definition of ‘praxeology’. If you can’t read a DOC formatted file, do a google search and you’ll be offered an html … [Read more…]

Adaptive Minds: A Review of “Adaptive Thinking”, Part IV

[Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World, Gerd Gigerenzer, Oxford University Press, 2000] In the introduction to Part IV, Professor Gigerenzer tells us: The “discovery” of cognitive illusions was not the first assault on human rationality. Sigmund Freud’s attack is probably the best known: According to him, the unconscious wishes and desires of the human … [Read more…]

Adaptive Minds: A Review of Adaptive Thinking, Part IV

[Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World, Gerd Gigerenzer, Oxford University Press, 2000] Professor Gigerenzer starts off the introduction to Part IV with a strong claim: The study of human thinking is deeply suspicious of introducing anything genuinely social into the world of “pure” rationality. As in much of cognitive science, most researchers have fallen … [Read more…]

Adaptive Minds: A Review of “Adaptive Thinking”, Part III

[“Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World”, Gerd Gigerenzer, Oxford University Press, 2000] In part III (chapters 7-8), Professor Gigerenzer tells us: “To understand the power of human intelligence, one needs to analyze the match between cognitive strategies and the structure of environments. Together they are like a pair of scissors, each blade of little … [Read more…]

Adaptive Minds: A Review of “Adaptive Thinking”, Part II

[“Adaptive Thinking: Rationality in the Real World”, Gerd Gigerenzer, Oxford University Press, 2000] In Part II, chapters 4-6, Professor Girgenzer provides a few arguments towards a view of what he labels ‘ecological rationality’ which he defines as follows: Ecological rationality refers to the study of how cognitive strategies exploit the representation and structure of information … [Read more…]