Author: Brian Kemple

Executive Director, Lyceum Institute (lyceum.institute) | Executive Editor of Reality (realityjournal.org)

[essay] The Constitution of Culture

The truth of the common good, as what we rightly ought to seek in our cultural realities and, therefore, as the final cause of any political constitution, does not alone suffice to cause that cultural reality’s alignment.  We must instead recognize a more complex causal constitution.  It is just this causality that was acknowledged—though not well-enough explained—by Jacques Maritain in his Integral Humanism, and it is just this causality which we will take up to explain in this essay.… Read More [essay] The Constitution of Culture

Brian Kemple

[review] Nihilism & Technology | Nihilism

Where, and how, do we bring meaning into the living of our lives? A movement from our assumed passive nihilism to a conscious active nihilism, Nolen Gertz argues. Despite this self-actualizing attempt at nihilism, it remains now as always a deleterious belief for any human being to adopt—the active no less, and perhaps quite a great deal more, than the passive.… Read More [review] Nihilism & Technology | Nihilism

Brian Kemple

[article] Signs and Reality

ABSTRACT: The world today has a “meaning” problem.  That is: while the attainment of “meaning” poses a perennial difficulty common to every human life in every human age, our lives in this age have a problem with attaining meaning—indeed, a twofold problem.  First, the problem being that we do not know, precisely, to what the term “meaning” refers; and second, the problem being that even if we recognize one aspect or more of the term’s referent, we do not understand how it can be resolved into a coherent whole, for we lack the requisite principles. Among the obstacles preventing both the attainment of the meaning of “meaning” and its coherent resolution are myriad misunderstandings of what it means to say that we “know reality”; misunderstandings which not only fall short but miss the mark entirely.    More must be done in order to explain both how realism is possible and just what falls into the reality which realism is said to make known. At the heart of the struggle for realism is the question of to what extent and in what regard the cognitive means of knowing are the same as the object known.  This question is especially central to the Thomistic tradition, for Thomas often refers to the species intelligibilis as a similitudo of the object known.  Various misinterpretations and muddy explanations of this reference have hindered an understanding of how the human intellect knows its object. To resolve this Thomistic problem and the problems of meaning, we propose a semiotic realism, a realism that structures its doctrines in accord with the nature of signs and that accordingly understands the species intelligibilis as fragmentary, incomplete, and in need of continual deliberate interpretational refinement in order that we attain a better grasp on the truth of the real.… Read More [article] Signs and Reality

Brian Kemple4 Comments

[review] What Love Is

“Romantic love”, Carrie Jenkins writes near the end of her book, “cannot continue to be something we just stumble into and accept.”  This is true and good advice, and Jenkins’ book—which spans a prologue, introduction, seven chapters, and a conclusion—successfully instigates a questioning after the truth of what romantic love is or ought to be.  The implication, however, that there might be other things—our politics, our careers, our religious beliefs—into which we, having stumbled into them, can or ought to accept unquestioningly, is itself highly questionable.  Indeed, I will argue that many of the presuppositions on which Jenkins builds the argument of What Love Is appear accepted without question.  As we intend to show here, these unexamined presuppositions, when exposed, result in Jenkins’ argument falling apart—or, perhaps to continue the metaphor, turn a stumble into a precipitous fall.… Read More [review] What Love Is

Brian Kemple

[article] Interpretation and Traditions

ABSTRACT: My topic today develops some themes found or at least suggested in both Ens Primum Cognitum and The Intersection of Semiotics and Phenomenology but focuses on one in particular: namely, why people are so quick to develop and obstinate in maintaining bad intellectual positions—not in terms of the historical causes which have contributed to the state of bad thinking prevalent today, but in terms of the cognitive capacities themselves; that is, what happens in the person as cognitive agent when falsehoods are adopted and subsequently protected.… Read More [article] Interpretation and Traditions

Brian Kemple1 Comment

[essay] Participation and the Divine

How does truth admit of more or less?  The same applies to nobility and being. One might also ask, just what does Thomas means by nobility?  How is it distinct from goodness?  How is the maximum in any genus supposed to cause everything else in that genus?  Is this formal or efficient causality?  Is this a Neo-Platonic argument from participation?  Is the argument undermined by the Angelic Doctor’s outdated and erroneous example of fire as cause of all heat?  Each issue is likely deserving of its own paper.  Yet behind all these questions (except, perhaps, the meaning of nobility), lies a more primary difficulty: the meanings of “more or less” and the “maximum” by which they are denominated. How we answer the above questions depends on our understanding of these two key features of the argument.… Read More [essay] Participation and the Divine

Brian Kemple1 Comment