The Christian Vanguard

No. The quotation some people have in mind when they think that he did is the following.  But in Europe, in the nineteenth century, the two models were joined by a third, socialism, which quickly split into two different branches, one totalitarian and the other democratic. Democratic socialism managed to fit within the two existing models as a welcome counterweight to the radical liberal positions, which it developed and corrected. It also managed to appeal to various denominations. In England it became the political party of the Catholics, who had never felt at home among either the Protestant conservatives or the liberals. In Wilhelmine Germany, too, Catholic groups felt closer to democratic socialism than to the rigidly Prussian and Protestant conservative forces. In many respects, democratic socialism was and is close to Catholic social doctrine and has in any case made a remarkable contribution to the formation of a social consciousness. The quotation from B16 is take...

The following is an essay I wrote for my British Empiricism class.  In order to understand Berkeley’s argument that sensible objects cannot exist unperceived, we first need to understand his ontology and how he understands “existence”. The objects of our knowledge, begins Berkeley, are either impressed upon the senses, or by perception of the passions or mind, or by memory and imagination. All these objects, no matter which mode they come by, will only be known to us by some kind of property, such as it is red, soft, and heavy. That is all that is known to us, and what is not known to us is the thing in themselves. When I describe my heavy red blanket, all I am really describing are my bundled perceptions of the thing, but there is a gap between my perceptions of the thing and the thing itself. So all I really have access to are perceptions. However, if there are no perceptions of a thing, then it cannot be said to exist. For Berkeley, to speak of something unperceived as exis...

The following is an essay I turned in for my Aristotle class.  Teleology for Aristotle is an all permeating cause of prior causes. It is an end, termination, or consummation of previous acts. It is “that for the sake of which” a thing is done (194b30). So, suppose I want to be healthy, I will perform certain acts for the purpose of achieving health. I wake up early so that I may exercise so that I may be healthy. I put on my socks, so I can put on my shoes, so I can go on my run, so that I can be healthy. In this series of actions, the end goal of health sustains and motivates these actions, and these actions are complete and done well when health is achieved.  Teleology being an end should not be confused with the temporally last thing in a series, however. Even though my running causes my health may be the last in a series in a temporal sense, that’s only an accidental feature of the example. More fundamentally, Aristotle means that which is best for it (195a20). Fo...

The following is an essay I had to write for my Aristotle class. Aristotle’s discussion about the distinction between energeia and kinesis is an organic development of his previous discussion about the distinction between potencies (1048a25). He thinks that clearing up distinctions about actualility will also help us understand in a clearer way what we mean by our distinctions within potencies (1048a25). If there is a distinction like natural potencies and rational potencies (1047b-1047b30), then it stands to reason that there will be a correlating distinction within actualities. Aristotle also claims that actuality, or energeia, is an extension of the same movement, or kinesis (1047a30), which could be problematic since if they are essentially identical, then it shouldn’t be possible to have those correlating distinctions, as there can be no distinctions among identical things. So, energeia and kinesis would have to be distinct. This is what is motivating Aristotle. So what i...