Make Philosophy Fun Again! Read my new essay at "European Conservative"
About Me
A short primer: Though I have a family, a 9 to 5 job, and a large garden, I also have a passion for studying and sharing the great traditions of our civilisation: Sacred Scripture & Sacred History, Greece & Rome, the Fathers of the Church, the Gothic-Frankish-Celtic-Norman continuity, and finally the Era of Christendom. I hope you will enjoy this celebration of our civilization. I'll update it as often as possible but be sure to follow me on Twitter to access my latest musings.
A shorter bio: I am a Country Mouse who went to the City to learn philosophy and history. In addition to a varied business career, I have been writing for 20 years. I don't like talking about myself, so I guess I'll close with some advice (not that you asked): shop local, volunteer in your community, and don't stay home playing video games.
Thomism: where the great traditions meet.
"Saint Thomas Aquinas: was his the most integrated, rational mind of all time? He wrote seven centuries ago, yet his works are far more lucid and readable than studies written today."
--Fr. Matthias Lu
Liberal-Conservatism?!
I call myself a liberal-conservative to thwart ideological classification, but also to indicate that I will support a good idea regardless of its origin. Party affiliation is meaningless . The best ideas are already united in The Gospels, and manifested in the great cultural synthesis of the so-called Middle Ages. It remains for us to apply them to our era.
Jacques Maritain
"...according to St. Thomas Aquinas the individuality of inanimate and animate things is rooted in matter so far as matter has uniquely distinct determinations with respect to location in space. The word matter designates here...materia prima, pure potentiality, able neither to be nor to be thought by itself, and from which all corporeal beings are made. Prime matter or 'matter absolute' is a kind of non-being , a simple power of receptivity and of substantial mutability, an avidity for being. And of every being made of matter, this avidity bears the imprint of a metaphysical energy--'form' or 'soul'--which constitutes with matter a substantial unity...
"Now personality is an even deeper mystery, whose profound significance it is still more difficult to discover. In order to embark on the philosophical discovery of personality, the best way is to consider the relation between personality and love...
"In order to be able to give oneself, one must first exist, and not only as the sound which passes in the air, or this idea which crosses my mind, but as a thing which subsists and which by itself exercises existence. And one must not only exist as other things, one must exist in an eminent way, by possessing oneself, by holding oneself in hand and by dispossessing of oneself; that is,
one must exist through a spiritual existence, capable of enveloping itself by intelligence and freedom, and of super-existing in knowledge and free love. That is why the Western metaphysical tradition defines the person by independence: the person is a reality, which, subsisting spiritually, constitutes a universe by itself and an independent whole (relatively independent), in the great whole of the universe and facing the transcendent Whole, which is God. And this is why this philosophical tradition sees in God the sovereign personality, since God's existence consists itself in a pure and absolute super-existence of intellection and love."