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27A review article on Leszek Kołakowski’s, ‘Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing?’ centering on Leibniz’s famous Question.
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82What is the good/ good of the form of the good?Sophia 48 (4): 413-417. 2009.‘Good’ is nothing specific but is transcendentally or generally applied over specific, and specified, ‘categories’. These ‘categories’ may be seen—at least for the purposes of this note—as under Platonic Forms. The rule that instances under a category or form need a Form to be under is valid. It may be tautological: but this is OK for rules. Not being specific, however, ‘good’ neither needs nor can have a specifying Form. So, on these grounds, the Form of the Good is otious. Any rule of the kind…Read more
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36The shield of pallas: The virtual contemplation of the human soul: The aesthetic of fr. Arthur little S.j. (1887–1949)Sophia 44 (1): 105-124. 2005.This paper explores the extreme but well-argued-for thesis that the indirect object of an aesthetic experience of serious art is the human soul of the person having the experience. The author of the thesis was Fr. Arthur Little S.J. a mid twentieth-century Irishman, professional philosopher and philosophical popularizer. The paper treats Little’s thesis seriously: comparisons are drawn with Kant, which may be of interest even to those hostile to Little’s central assertion. Little makes a brillia…Read more
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25A 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.
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96A review article on Leszek Kołakowski’s, ‘ Why is There Something Rather Than Nothing ?’ centering on Leibniz’s famous Question.
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49‘The Origin of the Work of Art’: HeideggerSophia 51 (4): 465-478. 2012.Professor Max Charlesworth and I worked, at Deakin University, on a course, 'Understanding Art'. Max was interested in the Social History of Art and in art as: 'giving form to mere matter'. Here 'form' might be read as 'lucid', 'exemplary', 'beautiful' etcetera. I am an Aristotle Poetics 4 man '… imitating something with the utmost veracity in a picture', and an Aristotle and John Cage man: 'Art is the imitation of nature in the manner of operation. Or a net'. (Cage) (See Aristotle Meteorologica…Read more
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14The 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
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The Readymades of Marcel Duchamp: Cut Flowers or les fleurs du mal?Literature & Aesthetics 10 31-50. 2000.
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33Sophie's world: a Novel about the history of philosophySophia 34 (2): 120-121. 1995.Phoenix House, London, 1995.
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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.
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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
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25Keywords Voltaire - Jesuit - Religious poems.
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14Listening 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
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4Christ’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