Quotes from Arthur Herman

For Aristotle, nature is no insubstantial mystery, just as no system is entirely static. Like the puppy and like us, systems naturally incorporate change. Aristotle's term for nature's built-in bias toward change and motion is energeia; he also uses the word dynamis, which translates as "power." Aristotle's worldview is dynamic.

Second, Aristotle restores the reality, even the dignity, of the individual. Aristotle's forms, unlike Plato's Forms, do not exist separately from individuals. They appear only through the individual. We would know nothing about dogs without individual dogs in the world to observe and study; we would know nothing about justice without individual examples to examine and analyze.

Aquinas was unconvinced. The message of revealed religion contained in the Bible and church doctrine was meant for everyone, not just the rednecks among us. Likewise, every human being deserved to know the whole truth, not just a chosen elite. To fall for the notion of a "double truth" and argue there was one set of truths for reason and another for faith and never the two shall meet made nonsense of the idea of truth itself.

Aristotle's version of Plato's God is pure nous, or pure thought. The human soul is not; it includes other faculties or powers, like the senses and the passions. But there is still enough nous left to figure out what is going on.

The problem was, Albert never made that lack of conflict explicit. For all his staggering erudition, he was never tempted to join up the two great existing systems of wisdom in the Western world: the school of Aristotle and Greek science and that of Plato and his Christian disciples, including Saint Augustine. That was the task Aquinas decided to undertake once he received his license to teach at the University of Paris in 1256.

Hoot, Johnie Rousseau mon, what for hae ye sae mony figmangairies? You're a bonny man indeed to mauk siccan a wark; set ye up. Canna ye just live like ither fowk?

The work Aquinas did in the next sixteen years changed the face of Western Christianity and philosophy.

Adam Smith would compose the founding text of modern economics— Inquiry Concerning the Wealth of Nations—in a language that was, it is all too easy to forget, a foreign tongue to him.

the Summa Contra Gentiles and Summa Theologica. These last two alone total a stupefying two million words. They are a monumental fusion of learning and faith, and a reconciliation of ancient philosophy and Christian theology, without parallel even in the works of Saint Augustine. In fact, together they make Aquinas the one Christian thinker whose system can stand beside those of Aristotle and Plato—in part because it is a brilliant synthesis of the best of both thinkers.

In page after page of the Summa, Aquinas will calmly and tentatively assert a position. Then he looks around at all the counterpositions and objections. He examines whether they hold up under scrutiny; if not, he quietly refutes them and moves on to the next question. At one stroke, a Christian dialectic was born, more sophisticated than Abelard's and more all-embracing than Anselm's, because it stands on a reading of Aristotle's entire corpus.

saw logic as the buttress of theology and his faith, not a substitute for them. If this earns him impatience from later skeptics and freethinkers, it does fit him into his own time and place. Peter Abelard's Aristotle points down the road to Thomas Aquinas, not the Enlightenment.

The overriding issue for Aquinas is, "Is it true?" His Averroist colleague Siger of Brabant had asserted that if it was in Aristotle, then it must be true. Not necessarily, Aquinas says. He cites the Philosopher (as he calls Aristotle in both Summas) more often than any other non-Christian thinker. But he also finds powerful insights in Plato, in Saint Augustine, and in Dionysius the Areopagite.? Citations from the Bible always clinch the argument.

The nineteenth century faced an ambiguous legacy. On one side was civil society theory, teaching that human society makes men better. On the other stood Rousseau, proclaiming that it makes them worse.

In fact, Toynbee went so far as to suggest privately that surrender to Hitler might be preferable to more hatred and violence. "It would be possible to argue," he told friends, "that the world is in such desperate need of political unification … that it is worth paying the price of falling under the worst tyranny.

White envy of the black penis appears in various symbolic forms: the penchant for gun ownership, nuclear missiles, cigarettes (especially among white women feminists who smoke as a sign of liberation), and the Washington Monument. Even the chessboard becomes a symbolic racial battleground, with the black player allowed to move first on alternating black and white squares but the white player, naturally, always guaranteed to win.84

All the same, Abelard opened the mind of the Middle Ages in new and startling ways. He gave the name of Aristotle and Aristotle's logic an edgy glamour it never entirely lost. Aristotle had said: All men desire to know. Abelard now added: All men need to question and doubt in order to know. These were important signposts for the future. For now, medieval civilization was about to swing down another path, one emblazoned by the Neoplatonist imagination.

For every quality in life—goodness, justice, courage, beauty, loyalty—there has to exist a single standard, a model of perfection of which, Socrates says, "all equal objects of sense Ã¢â'¬Â¦ are only imperfect copies.

And as his research continued in Syracuse, Archimedes made sure word of what he was doing got back to friends in Alexandria. Among his correspondents was a former Croton pupil named Dositheusa to whom Archimedes would send one major treatise after another that would revolutionize mathematics. There was Quadrature of the Parabola, then two books on Sphere and Cylinder, one on Spiral Lines, and finally a treatise on Conoids and Spheroids.27

God's supreme reason dictates the structure of both the supernatural and the natural order, since both reflect His eternal purpose. Truths about the first are revealed to us in the form of divine law, which means Scripture. Truths about the second are revealed to us through our senses, by means of the laws of nature.

Taken together, they laid the future cornerstone of what comes to be called calculus, or the mathematics of infinity (Archimedes was the first mathematician to use the concept of infinity in his work). Without it, modern math and science as we know it would not exist.

a single ideal of perfection, which is impossible to know through our senses, but is knowable through the soul of reason. If we can concentrate our minds instead on that higher standard, or what Socrates calls the Idea or Form of that virtue, defined as Courage or Beauty or Justice in Itself—or even Goodness, which is the highest Form of all, setting the standard of perfection for all the rest—then true wisdom will be ours.

Gridlock at the public level guarantees liberty at the private level: this was the dirty little secret Madison dared to unveil in the Federalist Papers.

Dialectic teaches us that contradiction is the essence of the false, just as consistency with first principles is the essence of the true.

Resignation, "passive self-perfecting," and "etherealization": these were the components for the new Western self-image. At the same time that modern liberals embraced the goals and assumptions of welfare state New Liberalism, they gave up their self-confident, competitive edge. Toynbee's father-in-law, Gilbert Murray, coined a term for this: "failure of nerve.