Sunday, December 21, 2008

Yet Another Blog Update

My last post effectively wraps up the posts that I am able to draw from notes taken during my reading of the last two years (and if you think that means that my notes were pretty paltry, I'm not going to argue with you).

Unfortunately this may mean that my posting is going to be a bit sparse for a while. I draw inspiration for many of my posts from stuff I'm reading, but at present I'm in the thick of fixing some deficits in my history education. At least seven (depending on how you want to count them) of the next ten books in my reading list are primarily history, and for the most part history does not really inspire me with fodder for blog posts.

This doesn't mean that I won't be posting at all, but unless something otherwise provokes me, I don't really have anything to fall back on for subject matter. I apologize to my few regular readers for this. Unfortunately this is a consequence of not being an actual academic: I have to do this stuff in my free time, and there just isn't enough of it to offer me opportunity for doing all the reading and writing that I'd like.

But to give maybe a glimmer of hope, here are a few things I'm tossing around for the hopefully-not-too-distant future that will hopefully prove interesting.
  • Working through the Church Fathers
  • Working through the Summa Contra Gentiles more thoroughly
  • Working through the Summa Theologica more thoroughly, with an assist from Farrell's Companion
  • Working through Maritain's Degrees of Knowledge
  • Working through McInerny's Praeambula Fidei
  • Working through some of Anselm
Anyway, I hope you'll stay tuned.

As an aside, and apropos my previous post, I spent some time this evening reading over at the Crimson Catholic (and if you want really serious Catholic philosophical discussion, you can hardly do better than what Jonathan Prejean has done there). He had an extended discussion relating to Nestorianism a couple years ago, and it's fascinating. You can find links to the various posts here; scroll down maybe halfway to the section headed "Eric Svendsen" for the series. There is some excellent material here. One thing that came to mind while reading was a result of the Protestant in question insisting that human nature included being a person (while Prejean argued, of course, that a "person" is that which instantiates a rational nature). The implicit - or maybe explicit - denial by his adversary of human nature existing in any sense apart from a human person reeks of nominalism to me. Once again, although this man seemed to have been oblivious to it, we can see that one's philosophic outlook can't really be divorced from how he thinks about theology.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey, don't be a stranger. even rebutting "The Mindless One" is better than nothing. I'm too stupid to write my one blog and need the stimulation from others.

I'l check your CC link. I hadn't seen anything new but was encouraged to see him back at it at JAO and DA's blog.

Merry Christmas

Martin

Fred Noltie said...

Hello Martin,

Thanks for your kind words. BTW the Crimson Catholic stuff I linked is a few years old; it's not new (which is very unfortunate in my book).

Doing some apologetic-ish stuff is something that I've considered during this upcoming dry spell. We'll see. I'm not real inclined to take up a discussion with TF, since he seems to have problems treating Catholics with respect - at least in my experience (heh - maybe he just has problems treating me with respect, in which case I shouldn't put a stumbling block in front of him!)

I have no plans to disappear for the next few months, but posting might be a bit lighter than average.

Peace,

RdP