Tag: society

[article] Life in the Anti-Environment

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

Editorial Team1 Comment

[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] Integralism

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

Francisco Eduardo Plaza1 Comment

[article] Was Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange a Personalist?

A Rapprochement Between the Individual-Person Distinction and the Primacy of the Common Good Contra Maritain’s Personalism[1] Taylor Patrick O’NeillAssistant Professor of TheologyMount Mercy UniversityCedar Rapids, IA ABSTRACT: This paper uses Garrigou-Lagrange in order to explore the wider question of a Thomistic response to personalism and the thought of Jacques Maritain. How ought Thomistic thinkers to… Read More [article] Was Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange a Personalist?

Editorial Team1 Comment

[Issue] The Philosophy of Realism

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

Editorial Team3 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