essay
Many of the elements of the conventional language (the third stage) can be traced back to that poetical or creative moment when the nexus between the sign and the thing is still necessary. Finally, we must emphasize here that in his attempt to discover through language the documents of primordial human history, Vico’s conception of…
This is serious, by the way: Apparently sh*t happens due to something like the darwinian “Origin of Feces“? Every now and then, science puts forth a theory that — at least on a bitterly cold December day, with a flu infection stirring fatigue in a certain science journalist — resonates with grand poetic truth. The…
Yesterday, Judith Warner posted an op-ed at the NYT, “Holier Than They,” that has drawn so far 108 comments. Upon reading the piece and the comments, I came away with conflicting thoughts: I agree completely, and this is all wrong. In essence, Warner is challenging Christians–specifically “conservative” Christians–to reexamine the tenets of their faith to…
Metanexus Institute fosters an intellectual and spiritual movement of more than 11,000 scientists, theologians, philosophers, and other deeply concerned persons trying to offer an alternative to narrow ideologies and the fragmentation that comes from compartmentalizing our lives. We are working to transform education and research in order to better address our common human questions and…
Accentuating the positive: Allan V. Horwitz and Jerome C. Wakefield continue the fight against the over-diagnosis of depression-as-disease in their Op-Ed, “Sadness is not a disorder.” They contend: What’s wrong is this: Depressive disorder and normal sadness are different conditions with different prognoses and implications. In responding to intense sadness, psychiatry does a disservice by…
You see a friend lost in the details of what looks to you like a fundamentally bad plan. You want to help your friend. You ask a leading question or two: “Do you sometimes wonder if your plan makes sense?” or “How do you feel it’s going lately, I mean overall?” Your friend generally welcomes…
In imagining the 2007 AAR session on Radical Orthodoxy and Process Theology in advance, I have to admit that an exchange of gifts was not the first thing that came to mind! (Perhaps I should call it “Reciprocating Misgivings.”) For as Radical Orthodoxy puts it quite rightly, no gift can be given without active receptivity,…
Sometimes at Metanexus we say that we’re after “the whole story of the whole cosmos for the whole person.” We say we’re after it because we do not possess anything like the whole story. We say it, though, because the whole story is more like our motivating hope, our “regulative idea,” so to speak, that…
Science Fact or Science Fiction A great crooner, if not exactly a great scholar, named Frank Sinatra once sang that he had the whole world upon a string. And as we all know song lyrics can sometimes paint a rather accurate picture of real life, while at other times they venture into altogether imaginative and…
The study of language is the starting point of Vico’s historicism. For Vico, language is humanity’s primordial historicization. In fact, Vico’s professed academic discipline was neither history nor philosophy but rhetoric, i.e., the study of language in its creative aspects and as a literary phenomenon. We have already discussed that the reason Vico rejects the…