Hello everyone.

I am a professional philosopher and an Orthodox Christian.  My journey to classic liturgical theism is in many ways parallel to Professer Feser's -- I passed from Nietzsche's utter destruction of my very faint early (nearly contentless) Prostentism to Heidegger and thence to Plato and finally forward to Christianity, as the genuine culmination of Greek philosophy.  My path led me through Plato to Byzantium rather than through Aristotle to Rome, but I would never diminish Aristotle (whom I consider to be a modified Platonist in all essential respects).  Paradoxically, Catholicism is a like a sweet lure to a philospher like me, but this makes me distrust it.  I tend to regard Latin Christianity as over-emphasizing the power of discursive rationality (logos in the lesser sense, or better, dianoia) and under-emphasizing mystical noētic experience, which in my view sets the stage for the denial of noēsis -- which I take to be equivalent to nominalism, or the denial of real natures or essences, and thus to entail William of Ockham's assertion of the primacy of will and freedom in God over intellect and reason, which was in turn to become (I believe) THE chief mark of modernity: the (step by step) subordination of everything, including the beautiful, the good, and the true (in that order) to the total autonomy of will, first the divine will in theology, and then the human will in philosophical anthropology.  To my mind, the core belief or inner spirit of modernity is this faith in the total autonomy of the will and the perception of anything that hinders or restricts this spontaneous movement of the will as bad, and something to be liberated from.  To thus be absolute sponaneity, this will must itself be contentless except as its own pure movement, a kind of nothingness, or nothing in itself: Nietzsche and Sartre are right to say that modernity is essentially nihilism, a faith not in nothing but in the Nothing.   Nihilism is absolutely incompatible with classical theism, which says both that GOD IS (or rather God says to us I AM), and which regards humanity not as sovereign and godlike, but as fundamentally CREATED and FALLEN beings, dependent beings, and thus possessing neither the right to nor the actual power for such autonomy; true freedom is to be delivered from evil and to find the one who alone is Good, not to pass beyond good and evil, in the wake of the death of God, in a titanic effort of the Will to Power.   

I read profitably the writings of people like Edward Feser, David Oderburg, Peter Kreeft, Pope John-Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI, Fr. Seraphin Rose, Fr. Fagothy, Fr. Robert Sokolowski, John Haldane, David Roochnik, Stanley Rosen, C.S. Lewis, G. K. Chesterton, Fr. Joseph Owens, Bishop Kallistos Ware, Vladimir Lossky, Alvin Plantinga, and David Bentley Hart, in addition to the traditional canon of the Great Books of philosophy, and to a lesser extent, theology.  

Basically, I am looking for a place where I can talk seriously to intelligent, thoughtful people about serious philosophical and theological issues.   Since I mostly teach Introductory classes, I spent pretty much every day at "square one," making the case against subjectivism, relativism, gods of the gaps, scientism, correcting the most primitive ideas of history ... and frankly, discussion on most Comboxes, even ones for wonderful things (such as Father Robert Barron's YouTube commenaries, or of course Professor Feser's blog) don't get much past square one -- maybe to square two on a good day or three on a rare thread.  

I hope to have a chance to really talk and think a lot of things through here.  Socrates would say that "thinking through" and "talking through" are the same thing or dianoia = dialegesthai.  

I am looking forward to discussing interesting things, and meeting interesting interloctors.  

_Jason Grey 

Christos Anesti
 

Last edited by Jason Grey (7/16/2015 11:28 pm)