John Joseph Haldane

A philosophical inquiry into the nature of information and communication media raises conceptual and ontological questions. This analysis provides conceptual mappings and also raises the question of what is involved in the emergence of media out of some prior state from which they were absent, and again in subsequent phases of higher-level emergent phenomena. “Emergence” can be understood in a number of ways: epistemically, causally, or metaphysically, and there is a danger of equivocating between these different senses in general or in considering particular levels of media emergence alone, and drawing the wrong conclusions. In describing and attempting to understand recent developments in “emerging media” it may be useful to consider an analogy with developments in the visual arts involving the transition from figurative naturalism to abstractionism, then to minimalism, and from these to performance art and conceptualism.

Since the late 1960s there has been a significant and fast‐expanding interest in medieval philosophy, and though once largely confined to questions of logic and general ontology, the range of this interest has now extended to cover most aspects of normative enquiry such as ethics, politics and aesthetics (seeHaldane, 1991, 1992). The philosophy of the Renaissance is far less widely studied, though in recent times there have been signs of a developing interest and no doubt in the coming years there will be an expansion and intensification of this. One may doubt, however, whether the renaissance is as likely as the medieval period to catch and hold the interests of philosophers, as distinct from cultural historians, for while the renaissance produced striking innovations in the style of speculative writing and saw the emergence of secular humanism it had relatively little to add to the philosophical systems developed in the middle ages. These systems were themselves related to earlier ways of thinking, in particular to those of Plato and Aristotle, but the medievals added much to what antiquity had produced. Here I shall mention authors of the early middle ages through whose work the ideas of antiquity were communicated to later periods, and writers of the early modern period who paved the way for Descartes; but I will focus upon the major figures of the high middle ages.

So far as Anglophone academic study is concerned, interest in the idea of virtue as a central concept in ethical theory only dates from the late 1950s beginning with Elizabeth Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” but getting its first specific discussion in Georg Von Wright’s 1963 book The Varieties of Goodness in which he writes: “Virtue is a neglected topic in modern ethics”. As the present essay shows, these words became a common refrain through the 1970s, 80s and 90s. The rise to prominence of ideas of virtue in philosophy and then in educational theory and in psychology, as well as in schemes for establishing good practice in various fields of professional and public life raises questions about how a focus on virtue relates to other ways of evaluating agents and actions, and of how virtue itself may be identified and assessed.

In this awaited follow up to his book _Faithful Reason_, the well-known philosopher and Catholic thinker John Haldane brings his unrivalled insight to bear on questions of the existence of God and the nature and destiny of the human soul. His arguments weave elements drawn from philosophy of mind, epistemology and aesthetics, together with recurrent features of human experience to create a structure that simultaneously frames and supports ideas such as that the cosmos is a creation, human beings transcend their material composition, and that human fulfilment lies beyond death. As in many of his other writings this volume blends themes from Aquinas with insights drawn from analytical philosophy and further establishes John Haldane as the leading 'analytical thomist'