Humanitas articles from September 2002

Humanitas archives from September 2002

History, reason and hope: a comparative study of Kant, Hayek and Habermas: dialogue on personal and political ethics.
September 22, 2002... In the Critique of Practical Reason, Immanuel Kant expressed awe and admiration for "the starred heaven above me and the moral law within me". With reference to the heavens, Kant was struck by human insignificance in "the incalculable vastness...

Ethics and the common good: abstract vs. experiential.
September 22, 2002... In "History, Reason and Hope: A Comparative Study of Kant, Hayek and Habermas," (1) Professor Richard B. Day endorses the theory of communicative action put forth by Jurgen Habermas as further contributing to Immanuel Kant's ideal of an...

Knowing beyond science: what can we know and how can we know?
September 22, 2002... According to a perhaps naive, but still dominant positivistic view of science, scientific knowledge is the only reliable knowledge. It is reliable because it is objective. It derives its objectivity from the objectivity of observation made by a...

Reflections on piety: Euthyphro as modern man.
September 22, 2002... Modernism is an ancient phenomenon. If prostitution is the world's oldest profession, then modernism is the world's oldest heresy. Modernism's essential features were already understood long before the era of modernity. Plato reveals them in...

The River: a Vichian dialogue on humanistic education.
September 22, 2002... I went down yesterday to the River. I was walking along the park where today the barge will be landing after the ritual marriage of the King and Maid of Cotton. They had put on this festival for a hundred years at least, and indeed, the cotton...

Concerned with everything in the universe.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... In the history of writing history, there are a handful of volumes that become established as a model owing to tone, insightful content, and excellence of style. The most recent historical work by Jacques Barzun is such a volume. It is a...

Revelation over rationalism: the thought of Seyyed Hossein Nasr.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... Since the Library of Living Philosophers series was founded in 1938, only twenty-eight individuals, or fewer than one every two years, have been selected as subjects. The format of each volume calls for an intellectual autobiography or...

History, being, and absolutist temptations.(Book Review)
September 22, 2002... The two books under discussion here--one a translation by Nino Langiulli and Bruno Martini, with an accompanying commentary, of a late work by the Italian philosopher Nicola Abbagnano, and the other a study of the relation between philosophy...

Edward Rozek: a student's tribute.(Personal Reflections)
September 22, 2002... Time and again life has been trying to teach me a lesson, but I must admit that I have ben a rather slow learner. It is a lesson about the vanity of fame and fortune: what most of us, myself included, strive for day and night. In a dream...

The medieval mind: a meditation.
September 22, 2002... Entering into the mind of the medieval world is very difficult for moderns. There is a vast mental and psychological distance between the twenty-first century and the middle ages. The latter were drenched in mysticism, whereas the contemporary...