The Disinterested Spectator

N.W. Flitcraft Agere sequitur esse. This venerable scholastic dictum — i.e., “action follows upon being” — encapsulates the point at issue in Summa Theologiae  I, Q. 4–6. What a thing does is a ‘second act’ which follows upon what a thing is, its ‘first act’. Since God is ipsum esse, existence itself, everything He …

The article reproduced here was first published as “The Distinction and the Priority of Philosophy” by the Philos-Sophia Initiative. John Trevor Berger, Contributing Editor A key element of Wolfgang Smith’s thought is his ontological distinction between the physical  and the corporeal  domains. This distinction proceeds from the observation that there …

N. W. Flitcraft Anyone who has read C. S. Lewis’ The Four Loves  is aware that there are four terms in ancient Greek corresponding to four related but different meanings of the English word ‘love’: storge, philia, eros, and agape: Affection, Friendship, Eros, and Charity, respectively. Lewis does not provide an English …

N.W. Flitcraft I have always found Aristotle’s description of metaphysics as an ‘architectonic science’ right on the mark.¹ I certainly think of philosophy architectonically, as opposed to ‘dialectically’. Actually, I fancy this may account for my own fascination with classical architecture; both philosophy and architecture are manifolds of the peculiar …

Jacob Klein (1899–1978)* The quaternity of the original liberal arts — Arithmetic, Geometry, Music, Astronomy [the Quadrivium] — is characterized by the immensely fascinating fact that their content can be understood and therefore learned and therefore known. The Greek word that embodies these three meanings is mathēma, the learnable. Thus the traditional liberal arts are originally …