To fix politics, care more about other things. […] It should be said that people on the left and on the right who try to use politics to find their moral meaning are turning politics into an idol. Idolatry is what happens when people give ultimate allegiance to something that should be serving only an […]
Raimond Gaita on Some Varieties of Courage [Walter] Bonatti [a mountaineer] says … that he curses the need to prove himself, wishing he were free of it as most people are. For him, the need was not to prove himself to others, but to prove to himself that he possessed certain virtues even in the […]
On directions in which to extend one’s critical vocabulary 1. Raimond Gaita There is a permanent tension between academic practice and the example of Socrates, which is why philosophers cannot simply appeal to their authority as people who have mastered a subject to justify their entry into a discussion that requires some depth and wisdom. If they […]
Fergus Kerr on Cornelius Ernst and Herbert McCabe as readers of Wittgenstein How, as theologians, did Cornelius Ernst and Herbert McCabe read Wittgenstein’s Investigations? Neither held the standard view that the Investigations is intended as a contribution to something called “philosophy of language.” That (Ernst would have thought) is [a] kind of “trivialization” of Wittgenstein … . […]
Raimond Gaita on philosophical points of departure I wish to offer a starting-point for reflection — philosophical reflection — on absolute value; not the starting point, not even a starting-point unproblematically within the subject, but a starting-point partly from outside the subject. I do not wish to prejudge the relation between reflection within the subject and reflection […]
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