Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Mysticism

  • No Total Clarity in Philosophy

    To demand total clarity in philosophy is like demanding that one's visual field be all focus and no fringe.  It is a demand  that cannot be satisfied.  But the situation in philosophy is worse than the metaphor suggests. The visual fringe can be brought into focus if one is willing to allow the focus to…

  • Why Did Thomas Aquinas Leave his Summa Theologiae Unfinished?

    Burnout or visio mystica?

  • Mysticism with Monica

    St. Monica's feast day is today; her son's is tomorrow. Of the various mystical vouchsafings, glimpses, and intimations recorded by St. Augustine in his Confessions, the vision at Ostia (Book 9, Chapter 10) is unique in that it is a sort of mystical duet. Mother and son achieve the vision together. Peter Kreeft does a good job of…

  • Synchronicity, Alain, Monasticism, Sense of Life, and the Unseen Order

    The other morning I recalled the passage in Alain where he recorded his boyhood visit to the abbey at La Trappe and his visceral revulsion at the life of the monks. So I pulled his On Happiness from the shelf and to my surprise opened right to the passage in question. Coincidence, or synchronicity? I'll…

  • Desert Light Draws Us into the Mystical

    Today, the feast of St. Augustine, is a clear and dry day in the Valley of the Sun. A meditation, then, on light and the ascent to the Light. Just as the eyes are the most spiritual of the bodily organs, light is the most spiritual of physical phenomena. And there is no light like…

  • Mysticism with Monica

    St. Monica's feast day is today; her son's is tomorrow. Of the various mystical vouchsafings, glimpses, and intimations recorded by St. Augustine in his Confessions, the vision at Ostia (Book 9, Chapter 10) is unique in that it is a sort of mystical duet. Mother and son achieve the vision together. Peter Kreeft does a…

  • Is God Beyond All Being?

    This is a redacted re-posting of an entry that first appeared in these pages on 8 May 2015. It answers a question Fr. Kimel poses in the comments to Divine Simplicity and Modal Collapse. ………………………………. Fr. Aidan Kimel writes, Reading through Vallicella’s article, I kept asking myself, Would Mascall agree with the proposition “existence exists”? I…

  • Grace

    Is it possible to take grace seriously these days? Well, I just arose from a good session on the black mat.  For a few moments I touched upon interior silence and experienced its bliss. This is nothing I conjured up from my own resources. But if I say I was granted this blissful silence by…

  • Philosophy, Religion, Mysticism

    Philosophers contradict one another, but that is not the worst of it. The grandest philosophical conclusion is and can only be a proposition about reality and not reality itself. But it is reality itself that we want. Can religion help? Its motor is belief. But belief is not knowledge, either propositional or direct. And if…

  • Intimations of Elsewhere Dismissed

    A colleague once reported an out-of-body experience.  He had been resting on his back on a couch when he came suddenly to view himself from the perspective of the ceiling.   He dismissed the experience. He had too much class to use the phrase 'brain fart,' but that is what I suspect he thought it was: a weird…

  • On the Expressibility of ‘Something Exists’

    I am trying to soften up the Opponent for the Inexpressible.  Here is another attempt. …………………….. Surely this is a valid and sound argument: 1. Stromboli exists.Ergo2. Something exists. Both sentences are true; both are meaningful; and the second follows from the first.  How do we translate the argument into the notation of standard first-order…

  • Is Everything an Object Among Objects?

    My opponent says Yes; I return a negative answer.  This entry continues the discussion in earlier theological posts, but leaves the simple God out of it, the better to dig down to the bare logical bones of the matter.  Theologians do not have proprietary rights in the Inexpressible and the Ineffable. Argument For The opponent…

  • Existence and Divine Simplicity: A Stroll Along the Via Negativa with Maimonides

    Here is an important passage from Moses Maimonides (1138-1204), The Guide to the Perplexed, Dover, p. 80: It is known that existence is an accident appertaining to all things, and therefore an element superadded to their essence. This must evidently be the case as regards everything the existence of which is due to some cause:…

  • The Discursive Framework, Logic, and Whether the Via Negativa is the Path to Nowhere

    The Historian of Logic comments: It seems to me that what you call the ‘Discursive Framework’ is what I and others call ‘logic’, and that it reflects a Kantian view of logic that prevailed before Russell and Frege, namely that logic reflects the ‘laws of thought’ only. Are you mooting the possibility of beings which…

  • Knowing God Through Experience

    A mercifully short (9:17) but very good YouTube video  featuring commentary by name figures in the philosophy of religion including  Marilyn Adams, William Alston, William Wainwright, and William Lane Craig.  Craig recounts the experience that made a theist of him.  (HT: Keith Burgess-Jackson) As Marilyn Adams correctly points out at the start of the presentation,…