-
27A review article on Leszek Kołakowski’s, ‘Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?’ centering on Leibniz’s famous Question.
-
25Speaking to picturesSophia 46 (1): 79-89. 2007.A review of Peter Steele’s Plenty, a book in which each poem is faced by a colour plate of the painting or object which sparked it off. Hollander’s ecphrasis and Krieger’s ekphrasis are held in – possibly unresolvable – dialectic by Steele’s poems. The only resolution which one can find is one of wit rather than of philosophy.
-
23The Theological Consequence is of a more scandalous nature for Catholic ‘insiders’—the literate laity etc.etc.—than is the ‘mere’ ‘Humanist’ one. The pair together can to ‘Evangalisation’ no good at all.The Eminence, who on the BBC programme looks slightly comic. is, when one reflects a very disquieting figure indeed. So: A squib is comic: a serious one is, serious.Note the ‘BBC Panorama’ presentations have been seen in Australia, and so, possibly, in other countries in which this Journal is rea…Read more
-
22Considering Religions, Rights and Bioethics: For Max Charlesworth (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2019.This volume engages in conversation with the thinking and work of Max Charlesworth as well as the many questions, tasks and challenges in academic and public life that he posed. It addresses philosophical, religious and cultural issues, ranging from bioethics to Australian Songlines, and from consultation in a liberal society to intentionality. The volume honours Max Charlesworth, a renowned and celebrated Australian public intellectual, who founded the journal Sophia, and trained a number of th…Read more
-
22
-
22A review of Peter Steele’s Plenty, a book in which each poem is faced by a colour plate of the painting or object which sparked it off. Hollander’s ecphrasis and Krieger’s ekphrasis are held in – possibly unresolvable – dialectic by Steele’s poems. The only resolution which one can find is one of wit rather than of philosophy.
-
15Christ’s name is often taken in vain, but not in this book title. It is at once a prayer and a cry of anguish. Robinson was deputed to deal with the whole abuse problem in the Archdiocese of Sydney and knows horrid things at first hand: abuse and clerical cover-ups, both.Bishop Robinson’s book is practical—if perhaps at the time of publication unduly sanguine. He calls, in chapter 13 for ‘A New Council for a New Church’ to enable to get the problem of sexual abuse fixed and for the Church to get…Read more
-
14
-
13Listening to Pictures: A Review of Peter Steele’s The Whispering Gallery: Art into Poetry; Melbourne, Macmillan, 2006, 128 pp., ISBN: 1876832851, hb (review)Sophia 46 (2): 193-198. 2007.A review of Peter Steele’s: The Whispering Gallery: Art into Poetry, in which Steele writes poems on and to paintings and the sculpture Black Sun (By Inge King) in the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. Each work on which there is a poem is reproduced. In this book Steele writes more to the ‘contour’ of the topic-work than he did in Plenty. His poems – as ever sidenoted – are tensed between the topicality of the work of art in question, and Kant’s aesthetic which involves ‘the f…Read more
-
13Booknote on Johann August Eberhard and Immanuel Kant, Preparation for Natural Theology: with Kant’s notes and the Danzig Rational Theology Transcript, Ed. & Trans. Courtney D. Fugate & John Hymers: London & New York: Bloomsbury, 2016, ISBN: 978-1474213837, hb, 328 pp (review)Sophia 56 (3): 537-538. 2017.
-
13The old and the new sublimes: Do they signify? God?Sophia 34 (1): 49-64. 1995.It is not the case that God is interestingly like the unavailable transcendental signified in being unavailable. God always was absconded. The signified may not even really have gone away at all. And if it has, it is not God; it is only like Him in having gone away. And it has gone away, if it has, in a different mode of ‘going away’.To use a Turneresque metaphor: God is and will always be another, far, range behind the misty-but-glittering and absconded signifieds, which leave only the trace wh…Read more
-
12The Tyranny of Taxonomy Sexuality and AnomalySophia 57 (3): 521-532. 2018.Human sexuality is not binary: this, although counter-intuitive initially, is a medical fact. Homo-sexuality was an anomaly under a M/F taxonomy, and so ‘unnatural’ and ‘an abomination’. It is a mere statistical anomaly: it is a fact of Nature, nevertheless. Doctrines of Natural Law must recognize that even if Nature is stable, the notion/word ‘Nature’ is a shifter. As medical and other sciences amend our understanding of Nature, the idea of ‘Nature’ shifts. Natural Law theory is – and must cont…Read more
-
10In Memoriam: Maxwell John CharlesworthSophia 53 (4): 425-426. 2014.Maxwell John Charlesworth, cofounder with Graeme E. de Graaff, of Sophia , died suddenly and peacefully at home on the second of June 2014. Born on the thirtieth of December 1925 in Numurkah, Victoria, Max took his MA in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne in 1948. At that time, the Melbourne Department of Philosophy was the preeminent school in Australasia. He married Stephanie Armstrong in 1950. Between 1950 and 1952, he was hospitalized for TB. On his recovery, he studied—1953–1955—at t…Read more