For the past six months this site has been devoted to podcasts, first a long series on Pope St John Paul the Great’s Theology of the Body and then a shorter course on John Paul II’s important encyclical Veritatis Splendor. Now I propose to change my format. For the foreseeable future—at least a year—this Substack will feature not audio podcasts but written essays that you will have to read. The theme of these essays is to be “The Catholic Philosopher”.
For more than thirty-five years, I have been a degreed philosopher, having earned my Dr. Phil. from the Internationale Akademie für Philosophie im Fürstentum Liechtenstein in 1989. This has qualified me to teach philosophy to undergraduates and even occasionally to post-graduates. It also entitles me to represent myself as a genuine philosopher. Whether Socrates might agree that I am a true philosopher may be open to debate, but I do have the certificate. For a much longer time, I have been a Catholic, baptized as such on July 1, 1945. This was no achievement of my own. I must thank my parents for this. That I belong to Christ cannot be denied, even if I should—God forbid!—deny Him or follow some other god. The point of this bit of autobiographical information is that I am both a Catholic and a philosopher, and my Catholicism has profoundly affected my philosophy. Let me explain.
In my undergraduate years I studied mathematics, which is a wonderful field. Beautiful as it is, math has little to do with religion, Christian or otherwise. Philosophy, on the other hand, is inextricably bound to religion. Socrates knew this—read his Apology—and so did Aristotle. The reason for this is simple. Mathematics is about abstractions from the visible world. The objects of mathematics, such as numbers, lines, parabolas, and even imaginary numbers, are drawn from idealized entities in the visible, physical world, whereas philosophy deals in reality—all reality. Since God is real and the human soul is immortal, philosophy must address religion in some way.
Philosophy is the science of the most general features of being. Whatever there is is a being. Metaphysics is that branch of philosophy that addresses being qua being. Your nose, the Great Nebula in Andromeda (M31), Socrates, brontosauruses, and Harry Potter’s broom are all beings—as is the state of democracy in Latin America. These are all beings, but not all in the same way. During a cold or flu, one’s nose is an insistent, annoying reality. Diplomats and activists worry and take significant actions concerning democracy. Young readers are captivated by Harry Potter and his skill on the flying broom. All these are beings, but we do not say that all are real. What is real? or better, what is the touchstone of reality? These are philosophical questions. And if God is indeed real, then the questions of his being and his nature must surely be of utmost importance. If he is the Supreme Being, then we must take him into account as we try to grasp the rest of reality.
Besides being, philosophers concern themselves with the good and the true. Right now, we are said to live in an era of “post truth”. Indeed, the question how one can know truth is a difficult and troubling one. We need only consider the COVID phenomenon, concerning which we know now that many facts about the virus and its management were hidden from the public, that well-qualified experts on virology and epidemiology were silenced or censored. Such an apparently simple question as the number of sexes of human beings there are is seriously controverted, as public figures and medical professionals deny the long recognized distinction between male and female. What is truth, and how do we know it? Similar issues arise concerning the good. Arguably, these are the most important issues. Is there any definitive ultimate good? It is widely accepted that there is no such good, that any judgment of the good must ultimately be grounded in subjectivity. Hence in political thought, there is no common good, because such a concept entails that there is some good that is good for every person whatever, whether he recognizes it or not. We cannot agree about the good, but if we reflect even briefly but carefully, we come to realize that it is an especially vital concept. How can you or I or we do anything at all if we cannot recognize what is genuinely good?
So, if one is a Catholic philosopher, the qualification as Catholic is not an idle biographical detail. Rather, it is fundamental to his philosophical reasoning. In the Substack essays that follow, I will offer philosophical reflections on important themes—that is, on themes that I regard as important. We will think about human freedom (about which there is much philosophical incoherence), about a million monkeys at a million typewriters and the truly silly proposition that the world is a mere product of chance, about goodness and the common good, and about what it means that one of us who was born of a Virgin in Bethlehem 2,000 years ago at executed thirty years later, only to rise from death three days later, was is God himself. If philosophy is about the reality knowable to human reason, then it should be able to say something intelligent about this man, too. I do not, however, intend to address “trolley problems”, except perhaps to say that they have nothing to do with ethics.
I invite you to follow along as I discuss issues that I think important.