My third book of poetry, published last year: https://t.co/bzlX3mU3Im

While a certain sort of taste is obviously an insufficient guide in making moral judgements, I think people underestimate how far it can take you.

Again, I *highly* recommend David Bentley Hart's new essay. It's an installment in his ongoing series of articles, but also a broad and decisive statement on the politics (or anti-politics) of "apocalyptic uprooting." ~~ Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, which

Florensky's willingness to grant a surprising degree of agency to certain "fictional" characters, like Faust ("they can almost be regarded as autonomous entities") is very reminiscent of Tomberg.

“In creating a body for some spiritual principle, an artist or poet no longer has the power to interrupt the flow of energy streaming from a new centre. This new center forms persons created in its image and drawn into its sphere of influence.”—Florensky, The Meaning of Idealism

Increasingly, I think the notion of evil as privation, needs to be augmented with the notion of evil as strict justice. If one accepts the former then the latter amounts to benefiting the stronger at the expense of the weaker. It is structurally self-interested and divisive.

the inanimate realm, generic universal/particular relation is primary. In the organic realm, this is no longer true. Thus, rather than an opposition, one can read the differing emphases as pertaining to the science of the inanimate and the organic respectively.

this, one could develop a promising account of the tension, in Aristotle's thought, between his prioritisation, in different places, of particular entities and species. The former makes sense in a context where philosophy has only relatively recently emerged from myth. In the...

The concept of a bare entity is, I think, indistinguishable from that one an inanimate object. A logic which takes beings in this sense to be basic, is essentially only applicable to the inanimate world. I still haven't worked this out, but it seems to me that, starting from...

of its sensible manifestations will give you only an abstraction, much closer to a sort of empiricist faded impression.

that a "genetic method" which presents a concrete universal by "collecting and integrating the moments of its appearance" (which is, incidentally, a very Goethe formulation) is the proper way to grasp the genuine idea. Attempting to get to the idea, while bypassing the series...

I'm reading Florensky's The Meaning of Idealism, and it is, unsurprisingly, brilliant. I'm particularly struck by how well he expresses two crucial points: 1) that the sensible and the intelligible are not distinct realities, but different modes of seeing the same reality; 2)...

It does seem to me that if one conceives of the intelligible in such a way that one completely excludes the qualitative, then one introduces a gap similar to that faced by materialists with regard to qualia.

"Intellect, that is, mind, when it fell was made soul, and soul in its turn provided with virtues will become intellect." [Νοῦς, id est mens, corruens facta est anima, et rursum anima instructa uirtutibus mens fet] - Origen of Alexandria, attributed by Jerome, Ep. 124.6.5–6, ed.

https://t.co/KnK3w6wE7R

Aristotle is saying something quite different: one cannot be human, in the full sense, at all, except by participating (to the point of a certain identity) in Divine Noesis. Going beyond the merely human is constitutive of being human.

What I object to here, specifically, is the suggestion that, for Aristotle, reaching the truth requires us to "renounce being human". This seems tendentious. It seems to assume that one can define the human in abstraction from their relation to the divine. But, to my mind...

with respect to its divine foundation, as Plato, Aristotle and the Neo-Platonists did. In order to reach the fullness of truth, the human being had to renounce being human, as the path from Aristotelian nous to Plotinian mysticism illustrates.”

of the world but in denying the relational dimension of the first principle. This left science itself suspended in the void, a path taken by the Sophists and the Skeptics, or introduced a separation between divine and human thought, which ended up making the human equivocal...

I don't find this very persuasive, at least with regard to Aristotle & nous): "In fact, the fundamental aporia of the Greek world consisted in affirming the relationality of the epistêmê, which is the authentic path to truth insofar as it sought the metaphysical foundation of...

those of Sextus Empiricus...". Does anyone have any thoughts on what he might mean by "relativism" here?