Professor Catherine Brown Tkacz ABSTRACT: This article explores the concept of the imago Dei (image of God) as manifested uniquely in female human persons. The study begins with the Biblical affirmation in Genesis that both male and female are created in God’s image, emphasizing spiritual equality yet acknowledging the significance of sexual differences. This leads… Read More [article] The Incarnating and the Female Imago Dei
ABSTRACT: This essay offers an extended, reasoned walk-through Nathan Lyons’ path-breaking text, Signs in the Dust. Every so often, a book comes about that manages to show how a variety of philosophical paths, hitherto regarded as separate, are converging on a common terrain. The value of such texts is to name this common terrain, and to go beyond mere juxtaposition of different philosophical trajectories, actually to disclose the deeper affinity that makes them belong together in a coherent whole. This is what this book manages to accomplish: by showing the rich tapestry of inquiries converging around the nature/culture relationship, it successfully retrieves the medieval conversation on natural culture and cultural nature.… Read More [article] A Theory of Natural Culture and Cultural Nature
ABSTRACT: In this paper we will explore how the action of signs underlying all human experience precludes the possibility that we are being systematically deceived in our perception of reality. The simulation hypothesis, as well as similarly motivated skeptical scenarios, such as the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis and Descartes’ evil demon thought experiment, wrongly presuppose a modern, dualistic theory of knowledge, as well as a neuroreductionist model of sensation. However, we will see how the action of signs in human cognition presupposes the existence of a relational mode of being, namely, esse intentionale (“intentional being”), which is immaterial and incapable of subjection to technological manipulation… … Read More [article] A Thomistic Argument against the Simulation Hypothesis
ABSTRACT: This paper explores the perceptual implications of video games, and gamification in general, by drawing on a number of concepts from the media theory of Marshall McLuhan: primarily his discussion of games as anti-environments and of technologies as extensions of human senses and faculties. Understanding video games in terms of the cultural and psychological significance of play, I argue that video games as a product of the gamification of culture substantially alter the traditional function of play through their diminished capacity to serve as anti-environments. Finally, I offer a brief reflection on the opportunities for awareness and understanding in relation to contemporary gamification.… Read More [article] Life in the Anti-Environment
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
Alan FimisterSt. John Vianney Theological SeminaryDenver, CO In a recent review in this journal, the book Integralism: A Manual of Political Philosophy is criticised apparently on the assumption that it a) rejects democracy b) proposes no concrete steps by which the social and political order it describes might be attained. The first of these assumptions… Read More [essay] Make Disciples of All Nations
Catholic integralism, generally speaking, comprises a return to the past in order to move beyond the modern problem. In effect, its answer is to discard the political developments of modernity wholesale and return pick up where the Middle Ages left off. To many who do not hold this view, and who are not as familiar with the Integralist movement, such a suggestion appears strange to the point that this characterization may seem to be an uncharitable. To the contrary, however, it appears to us that the integralists themselves characterize the spirit of their philosophy in the same manner.… Read More [review] Integralism
From the Editorial Introduction: This first issue of Reality—The Philosophy of Realism—like most publications and especially those of a collaborative effort, signifies innumerable hours of effort. The goal of our journal is simple: to reinvigorate an intelligent discussion about realism as a philosophical approach. By a realist approach, we mean not simply as pertains to… Read More [Issue] The Philosophy of Realism
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
“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
REALITY 
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