In this episode, I provide some thoughts from Kant’s logic about the nature of philosophy. Philosophy is not sophism, which merely seeks to appear clever and win debates. Philosophy is not the picture-thinking we encounter in the mytho-poetic ancient cultures. Philosophy integrates all the other sciences in a purposeful unity.

In this episode, I give a brief rundown of the surrealist movement in the art and literature. The surreal is a merger of dream and reality, such that dreams can provide a source of truth and there is no longer a distinction between dreams and reality. The surrealists used Freud to justify their exploration of the unconscious and they challenged the facile order of the conscious mind characteristic of Enlightenment Reason. Automatic writing let ideas flow with moral or aesthetic concern.

Kant tried to balance the strict lawfulness of nature with an absolute idea of human freedom. To accomplish this, Kant established the natural world as ideal, i.e. based on mental mediation in part. In ourselves, independent of any mental mediation, we can exercise an absolute freedom. But a will that is distinct from any causal structure seems free to invent itself without any constraint by the natural law. A will that is independent of any causal structure can make itself good without the grace of God. The independence of the Kantian agent seems to be the basis of the rebellion against nature characteristic of the New World Order.

In this episode, I discuss the philosophical roots of the cultural battle, after the recent repeal of Roe v. Wade. There are three key issues that have profound implications for how we view the controversial social issues of our time, which include, but are surely not limited to, abortion. These issues involve belief in God, our definition of truth, and our notion of liberty. Please check out this article by Pedro Trevijano to read up on the issue! https://www.religionenlibertad.com/opinion/484706846/batalla-cultural.html

In this episode, I discuss an article by the Spanish writer Pedro Trevijano in which he distinguishes between two extreme attitudes in one’s moral philosophy. One is pharisiacal and rigid, judging others and claiming possession of absolute truth. The other has no sense of absolute truth and puts everything up for debate. I think this provides a helpful framework for considering ethical issues. https://www.religionenlibertad.com/opinion/574738836/relativismo-moral-catolico-extremismos.html?eti=5293##STAT_CONTROL_CODE_3_574738836##

In this episode I go over an argument for the immortality of the soul from St. Thomas Aquinas. The idea is that the soul can grasp unchanging principles, while the senses are rooted in a specific time and place. I tie this idea into Plato’s Theory of the Forms, which holds that there are supra-sensible ideas that are abstract patterns for all concrete realities. The mind’s ability to grasp the general formulations of mathematics makes a compelling case for its distinctness from the body.

In this episode, I discuss two conceptions of liberty. One is the ability to do what one desires. The other is the a self-mastery in which true autonomy is the following of the moral law. Kant gave us an idea of freedom that is libertarian. We are truly free when we are able to think in universal terms, and not just yield to private self-interest. I consider these ideas in light of a line from an epistle of St. Peter in which he warns us of using liberty as a cloak for malice.

In this episode, I discuss an episode in the Gospel of Matthew in which the people of Nazareth dismiss Christ for his wisdom and miracles. I was wondering how people could be so foolish and perverse? They have a “crabs in the bucket” mentality. I turn to Aquinas to illuminate how we do not directly choose evil, but instead mistakenly choose a certain pleasure that comes with an evil. We do not have a “diabolical will”—one of Kant’s ideas-because we don’t seek to rebel against the law for its own sake. We have mistaken priorities in which we value a small pleasure over the real goodness of God.

In this episode, I discuss a recent interview with Remi Brague, a prominent European thinker. He documents the phenomenon of “cancel culture.” It is common to hear about this, but we must not take it lightly. We need to recognize that political correctness protects certain dogmas from any criticism. Feminism, radical ecologism, and gender ideology, among others, do not permit dissent. These ideas are meant to drive a wedge between ourselves and the past, and we are in danger of losing touch with our moral compass.

In this episode, I discuss a fascinating and vigorous philosophical treatise by a great American, Benjamin Franklin. It is called “A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain.” Franklin denies human free will. How can we choose something to which the omnipotent God does not consent? Franklin claims that there is no evil, because pain is necessary for the existence of pleasure. There is no need for an afterlife to realize justice, because pleasure always arises in exact proportion to pain.

In this episode, I discuss how Adorno views the Enlightenment as sliding inevitably towards totalitarianism. The Enlightenment seeks to reduce reality to numerical rationality. It suffers no exemption to this reductive trend. Eventually it emerges in a totalitarian political system that brings every aspect of human life under its control.

Aporia is a state of speechlessness in which we are unable to articulate a mysterious phenomenon. In this podcast, I explore the precarious existence of time, and how it is an aporia insofar as it is defined by being and non-being. Death is also an aporia, because it is an experience no one can assume for us, but we talk as if it were an impersonal experience that always happens to other people.

In this episode, I illuminate the modern notion of identity politics through a description of Hegel’s parable of the master and the slave. This parable is about how consciousness views itself as a transparent measure of all things, only to be relativized in the encounter with the “other,” that is, another consciousness. I tie in this encounter with the other with identity politics, which is perpetually seeking outliers to the dominant cultural narrative.

In this episode, I discuss again the death of God theology. I root this movement in the rational religion of Kant, which sought to remove the doctrines of historical religions and make them subordinate to an ahistorical and universal moral law. I then describe Nietzsche’s character, Zarathustra, and how he sees the “meaning of the earth” in the transcendence of the human in the Ubermensch. I finally discuss Heidegger’s notion of anxiety and how it reveals the contingency of all meaning and the inner emptiness of the world.

In this podcast, I discuss how postmodernism represents a radicalization of the Enlightenment. Not only is faith abandoned, but human reason’s ability to develop objective knowledge is challenged. Postmodernism entered theology in the death of God theology. This theology seeks to rethink the idea of God to conform to a more secular and worldly culture. Check out the 1966 Time magazine article, “Is God Dead?”, at Time-Is-God-dead.pdf(valleybeitmidrash.org).

In this podcast, I go over Kant’s great work, The Critique of the Power of Judgment. I discuss the difference between the beautiful and the sublime. I discuss what Kant means by free play, in the interaction between the imagination and the understanding. I also discuss how reflecting judgement attempts to find a universal in what is particular.

In this episode, I discuss how Hume deals with the problem of subjectivism in artistic appreciation. If beauty is just a feeling, and not a property of objects, how can anyone be wrong about their judgment of art? Hume provides five characteristics of the true judge of art: delicacy, practice, comparison, freedom from prejudice, and good sense.

In this episode, I discuss how the theory of beauty, or aesthetics, developed during the Enlightenment. Aesthetic judgement has to do with how we react to works of art and beauty in nature. I discuss how aesthetics in the Enlightenment tied aesthetic judgement to the rational structure in things. What is beautiful in art is what captures the unity in multiplicity, i.e. the universal rational structure that connects things that appear on the surface to be diverse.

In this episode, I discuss the attitude of Enlightenment thinkers towards religion. I discuss how they sought to purge religion of any unreasonable elements involving miracles and supernaturalism. They wanted a religion based solely on the moral law. I mention deism, which presents God as a Supreme Architect who never intervened in the world, which proceeds like clockwork. I also mention how liberty of conscience was radicalized in the Enlightenment, such that it was divorced from Revelation.

In this episode, I discuss how ethics changed in the Enlightenment. The classical basis in ethics, in the Platonic intelligible domain, and the Aristotelian teleology, was lost in the secular naturalism of the Enlightenment. So too was the faith-based focus on the afterlife. I discuss the threat of subjectivism in ethics, in which it is based on individual desires without any objective standard! Check out the entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the Enlightenment online!