“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris


Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Robert Pasnau on Medieval Metaphysics

HT Dirk Felleman for putting me on to this interview with him. Anyone who studies the rise and fall of metaphysics from Aquinas to the seventeenth century has my vote. We're stuck with the legacy of that era, the seventeenth century I mean. Anyone can see the chasm between Leibniz and Spinoza on one side of the chasm, and Kant and Hegel on the other side. From speculation to correlation. Something in the DNA of the default metaphysics, and something in the DNA of the early modern understanding of rhetoric and science, I reckon.

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