There has been a fine old ding-dong in the books pages of The Tablet, the Catholic weekly. Sir Michael Dummett, the retired Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, has accused Professor John Haldane of St Andrews of a style of thought that is “old-fashioned and cramped”.

In a review of Professor Haldane’s book Reasonable Faith (Routledge, £21.99) Sir Michael declares that “a man’s philosophy ought not to be controlled by his religious beliefs”. He then says: “If the results of someone’s philosophising appear to be coming into conflict with what he otherwise firmly believes, he ought to conclude that they cannot be correct, although he is unable at present to see where or how they have gone wrong.”

That sounds very like religious belief controlling a man’s philosophy….

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This is a column about two ways of thinking about your life. The first is what you might call the Well-Planned Life. It was nicely described by Clayton Christensen in the current issue of the Harvard Business Review, in an essay based on a recent commencement talk.

Christensen advised the students to invest a lot of time when they are young in finding a clear purpose for their lives. “When I was a Rhodes scholar,” he recalls, “I was in a very demanding academic program, trying to cram an extra year’s worth of work into my time at Oxford. I decided to spend an hour every night reading, thinking, and praying about why God put me on this earth.

“That was a very challenging commitment to keep, because every hour I spent doing that, I wasn’t studying applied econometrics. I was conflicted about whether I could really afford to take that time away from my studies, but I stuck with it ”” and ultimately figured out the purpose of my life.”

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I got the idea to start Amazon 16 years ago. I came across the fact that Web usage was growing at 2,300 percent per year. I’d never seen or heard of anything that grew that fast, and the idea of building an online bookstore with millions of titles — something that simply couldn’t exist in the physical world — was very exciting to me. I had just turned 30 years old, and I’d been married for a year. I told my wife MacKenzie that I wanted to quit my job and go do this crazy thing that probably wouldn’t work since most startups don’t, and I wasn’t sure what would happen after that. MacKenzie (also a Princeton grad and sitting here in the second row) told me I should go for it. As a young boy, I’d been a garage inventor. I’d invented an automatic gate closer out of cement-filled tires, a solar cooker that didn’t work very well out of an umbrella and tinfoil, baking-pan alarms to entrap my siblings. I’d always wanted to be an inventor, and she wanted me to follow my passion.

I was working at a financial firm in New York City with a bunch of very smart people, and I had a brilliant boss that I much admired. I went to my boss and told him I wanted to start a company selling books on the Internet. He took me on a long walk in Central Park, listened carefully to me, and finally said, “That sounds like a really good idea, but it would be an even better idea for someone who didn’t already have a good job.” That logic made some sense to me, and he convinced me to think about it for 48 hours before making a final decision. Seen in that light, it really was a difficult choice, but ultimately, I decided I had to give it a shot. I didn’t think I’d regret trying and failing. And I suspected I would always be haunted by a decision to not try at all. After much consideration, I took the less safe path to follow my passion, and I’m proud of that choice.

Tomorrow, in a very real sense, your life — the life you author from scratch on your own — begins….

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We Americans have never figured out whether we are children of the French or the British Enlightenment. Was our founding a radical departure or an act of preservation? This was a bone of contention between Jefferson and Hamilton, and it’s a bone of contention today, both between parties and within each one.

Today, if you look around American politics you see self-described conservative radicals who seek to sweep away 100 years of history and return government to its preindustrial role. You see self-confident Democratic technocrats who have tremendous faith in the power of government officials to use reason to control and reorganize complex systems. You see polemicists of the left and right practicing a highly abstract and ideological Jacobin style of politics.

The children of the British Enlightenment are in retreat. Yet there is the stubborn fact of human nature. The Scots were right, and the French were wrong. And out of that truth grows a style of change, a style that emphasizes modesty, gradualism and balance.

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When President O’Donnell asked me to give this address, I expressed one concern: “Will there be a protest? And will you prosecute the protestors? Or at least 88 of them?” He made no commitment. I accepted anyway.

So what can I tell you? This is a time of crises. The economy is a mess, the culture is a mess, the government is out of control. And, in the last three years, Notre Dame lost 21 football games. But this is a great time for us to be here, especially you graduates of this superbly Catholic college. This is so because the remedy for the general meltdown today is found only in Christ and in the teachings of the Catholic Church. Let’s talk bluntly about our situation and what you can do about it.

Read it all but please note: I would be grateful to readers if there could be no comments about the historical reference to Germany but instead to the larger argument–thank you; KSH.

…fidelity to Thomas also demands that a Catholic university teach theology as a divine science, and not religious studies, a human one dependent on rational inquiry alone. Even though the core beliefs of Christianity are revealed and held by faith, students have to be informed of what they are. Aquinas never suggests that explaining the content of the articles of faith will bring about a response of faith, but he does think that we need to be told them. Theology courses at a Catholic university propose sacra doctrina. They set out what Christ taught in the Gospels, since he “is the first and chief teacher of spiritual doctrine and faith”. Consequently, a Catholic university should be a place in where special attention is given to ensuring that students learn from theologians who propose the teaching of Christ as historical and authoritative.

Authentic Christian faith does not fear reason “but seeks it out and has trust in it”. Faith presupposes reason and perfects it. Nor does human reason lose anything by opening itself to the content of faith. When reason is illumined by faith, it “is set free from the fragility and limitations deriving from the disobedience of sin and finds the strength required to rise to the knowledge of the Triune God”. The Holy Father observes that St Thomas thinks that human reason, as it were, “breathes” by moving within a vast horizon open to transcendence. If, instead, “a person reduces himself to thinking only of material objects or those that can be proven, he closes himself to the great questions about life, himself and God and is impoverished”. Such a person has far too summarily divorced reason from faith, rendering asunder the very dynamic of the intellect.

What does this mean for Catholic universities today? Pope Benedict answers in this way: “The Catholic university is [therefore] a vast laboratory where, in accordance with the different disciplines, ever new areas of research are developed in a stimulating confrontation between faith and reason that aims to recover the harmonious synthesis achieved by Thomas Aquinas and other great Christian thinkers”. When firmly grounded in St Thomas’ understanding of faith and reason, Catholic institutions of higher learning can confidently face every new challenge on the horizon, since the truths discovered by any genuine science can never contradict the one Truth, who is God himself.

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Contemporary Christians may hesitate to assign a direct connection between particular natural disasters and sins. Yet many still believe that the reason for the existence of natural disasters in general is punitive and a direct consequence of early human disobedience in the Garden.

As harsh as that may sound to some, the alternative seems bleaker from a religious perspective. If natural disasters are not anyone’s fault, human or divine, wouldn’t that mean these catastrophes are also without purpose, just another tragic event reflecting the fragility of our lives? If God isn’t using natural disasters to punish disobedient creatures, why does He allow them at all?

One historically significant answer finds divine purpose in natural horrors””without those horrors signifying punishment. This year marks the 300th anniversary of Gottfried Leibniz’s “Theodicy,” which remains one of the grandest attempts to prove the goodness and justice of a God who created an evil-soaked cosmos like ours. Most affecting was his claim that our world is, in fact, the best world that God could have made (so don’t complain!), which sounds either crudely optimistic or despairingly pessimistic.

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Where do we go from here? Nearly everyone agrees that we are standing at the end of an age, perhaps at a new axial period. We have left modernity behind almost as surely as we have left antiquity behind. We are “postmodern”. But we do not yet know what that means.

From our unique experiment in living without a set of objective values, only two roads lie open: return or destruction. Once the sled is on the slippery slope leading to the abyss, we either brake or break; and no amount of rhetoric about “progress” can alter that fact. Crying “progress” as we die will not raise us from death.

–Peter Kreeft

It is hard to overestimate the hostility that the philosophical community has shown toward evolutionary psychology. With very few exceptions — although I am skeptical about much I am prepared to take it seriously — it is hated and despised, often, it seems to me, on less than convincing grounds. (Misreading statistics and so forth.) But even if the objections are well taken, this does not explain the visceral hostility. My strong suspicion is that the philosophers are using their clever critiques to mask the same fear as that of Bishop Wilberforce. The nonbelievers stand side by side with the believers in wanting humans on a unique, higher-than-anyone-else pinnacle.

The fact is, however, that we are animals and we were produced by natural selection, so even if you reject evolutionary psychology you had better get over your worries and start looking for a convincing and profitable approach. A number of people have been trying to do this, showing how culture is connected to our biology and how this connection has been shaped by selection. Leaders in this direction are Californian researchers Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd. In their Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution, they argue that culture is influenced and spread because humans have certain biases or tendencies — biases or tendencies rooted in selection — that direct the success of some ideas or practices over others….

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There are some genuine conspiracies afoot in the world. These tend to be restricted in their ambit; all too often they cock up spectacularly. But with the large-scale events where the credulous see conspiracy, cock-up is invariably the correct explanation. Princess Di’s death? A drunken cock-up. The British invasion of Iraq? An arrogant cock-up by those swinging dicks Blair, Campbell et al. Global warming? A cock-up by most of humanity. So on it goes: cock-up, cock-up, cock-up. Contrary to what Marxists and conspiracy theorists alike believe, human history doesn’t advance by any discernible dialectic, but revolves in a cycle of cock-ups. Presumably, this will continue until the gyre widens out into the big cock-up that does for us all entirely.

It’s easy to understand why conspiracy theories should have such a grip on the collective imagination. It’s tough living in a chaotic universe ruled only by contingency and cock-up, and without the reassuring belief that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds. Besides, the conspiracy-believer is flattered by his own credulousness, which he mistakes for enhanced insight. He – unlike you – is in on something, privy to the gossip of the celestial spheres, logged on to the cosmic Twitter.

So, take my advice: don’t attempt for a second to argue with these deluded folk. Simply smite them on the head with a copy of Hume’s Enquiry – or, better still, his much heftier Treatise of Human Nature. Hardback, naturally.

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…her radicalism went further, rejecting the age-old ethic of altruism and self-sacrifice. While she was hardly the first philosopher to advocate a morality of individualism and rational self-interest, she formulated it in a uniquely accessible way and a uniquely passionate one, not as a dry economic construct but as a bold vision of struggle, creative achievement and romanticism.

All this accounts for much of Ayn Rand’s appeal. But that appeal is severely limited by the flaws of her worldview.

One of those flaws is her unwillingness to consider the possibility that the values of the free market can coexist with other, non-individualistic and non-market-based virtues ”“ those of family and community, for example. Instead, Ms. Rand frames even human relations in terms of trade (our concern for loved ones is based on the positive things they bring to our lives) and offered at best lukewarm support for charitable aid. When charity is mentioned in her fiction, it is nearly always in a negative context. In Atlas Shrugged, a club providing shelter to needy young women is ridiculed for offering help to alcoholics, drug users and unwed mothers-to-be.

Family fares even worse in Ms. Rand’s universe. In her 1964 Playboy interview, she flatly declared that it was “immoral” to place family ties and friendship above productive work; in her fiction, family life is depicted as a stifling swamp.

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“How can I help you this morning?”

“I’m not satisfied with the way I presented my case, so I thought I’d go straight to the horse’s mouth. That’s you.”

I considered neighing, but thought better of it.

“Could I just lay out my argument step by step?” she asked. “As soon as you spot a problem, you can say ‘Stop’ and I’ll stop.”

I smiled. “Just what I was about to suggest.”

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Whether or not there is a God, human beings did not create themselves ”” perhaps an obvious but nevertheless salutary truth. We are the products of an amazing (perhaps even ultimately mysterious) array of causes that operated long before we came on the scene and will continue to operate long after we are gone.

That alone is enough to produce a sense of vertigo, of amazement, as we contemplate our own fragility and seeming insignificance against the infinite backdrop of time and space ”” the “eternal silence of those infinite spaces” that terrified Pascal. Yet so far from accepting, as the 20th-century existentialists did, that our lives are absurd, or that we are free to invent any values we chose, many, perhaps most, are drawn in an opposite direction.

As we struggle through life, we seem compelled to acknowledge, sooner or later, that our human good, our flourishing and fulfilment, depends on orienting ourselves towards values that we did not create. Love, compassion, mercy, truth, justice, courage, endurance, fidelity ”” all belong to a core of key virtues that all the world’s great religions (and the secular cultures that have emerged from them) recognise, and which command our allegiance whether we like it or not.

We may try to go against them, to live our lives without reference to them, but such attempts are always, in the end, self-defeating and productive of misery and frustration rather than human flourishing.

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…there is a kind of relentless spirit of androgyny pushed in our intellectual culture, where manliness is actively discouraged and disparaged and womanliness is taken to be a kind of servitude from which women must be delivered. The goal seems to be to make men more like women and women more like men, so that, by their eventual blending together, they become indistinguishable. The result, of course, is that male and female become morally insignificant distinctions in our minds.

The insignificance feeds the notion that there is really nothing wrong with endless technical manipulating of our sexuality and reproduction.

But there is another related sense of obsolescence because the spirit of androgyny takes flesh in the actual culture and through real social and educational institutions and policies. If the distinct aims of manhood and womanhood, fatherhood and motherhood are removed as the proper and good goal of boys and girls, then what, precisely, do boys and girls aim at? They are each taught to aim at the exact same target: becoming self-supporting, individual moneymakers.

The guiding assumption that a boy becomes a man precisely in becoming a husband and provider for his family has been replaced by an entirely indistinct, androgynous image of a large boy making money by himself, for himself, and for the satisfaction of his own pleasures. The guiding assumption that a girl becomes a woman by becoming a wife and mother has been replaced by the same indistinct, androgynous image of individual moneymaker working by herself, for herself, and for the satisfaction of her own pleasures.

Little wonder, given this image, that when men and women do decide to become a couple, the marriage would have as little moral meaning to them as divorce.

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“Man can will nothing unless he has first understood that he must count no one but himself; that he is alone, abandoned on earth in the midst of his infinite responsibilities, without help, with no other aim than the one he sets himself, with no other destiny than the one he forges for himself on this earth.”

–Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness

“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem,” Albert Camus wrote, “and that is suicide.” How to explain why, among the only species capable of pondering its own demise, whose desperate attempts to forestall mortality have spawned both armies and branches of medicine in a perpetual search for the Fountain of Youth, there are those who, by their own hand, would choose death over life? Our contradictory reactions to the act speak to the conflicted hold it has on our imaginations: revulsion mixed with fascination, scorn leavened with pity. It is a cardinal sin ”” but change the packaging a little, and suicide assumes the guise of heroism or high passion, the stuff of literature and art.

Beyond the philosophical paradox are the bewilderingly complex dynamics of the act itself. While a universal phenomenon, the incidence of suicide varies so immensely across different population groups ”” among nations and cultures, ages and gender, race and religion ”” that any overarching theory about its root cause is rendered useless. Even identifying those subgroups that are particularly suicide-prone is of very limited help in addressing the issue. In the United States, for example, both elderly men living in Western states and white male adolescents from divorced families are at elevated risk, but since the overwhelming majority in both these groups never attempt suicide, how can we identify the truly at risk among them?

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One can see… [Sartre’s] point. At times life does seem uncompromisingly bleak. Terrorism, starvation, war, disease, climate change and the ticking nuclear clock threaten humanity on the global front. Broken relationships, street violence, drug abuse, alcoholism, sexual crime and depression lurk demonically on the domestic horizon. Even the religious dimension is bedevilled by fanaticism, intolerance, infighting and bigotry.
So is that it? Is life a nihilistic endurance test, a tortured journey through a cosmic desolation? If so, we might as well jump off the nearest cliff.

There is an exit strategy from the mire. It springs from a realisation that the future is always pregnant with unformulated possibilities and hope, and that an unrelieved pessimism for what lies ahead might prove unfounded.

At its most fundamental level this implies that life forges ahead inexorably with a kind of Hegelian dialectic. The cosmic wheel of fortune throws up a grim actuality such as terminal illness or a bereavement. Our gut response is one of despair or even rage. But as time passes events slowly meld themselves into a synthesis, a compromise with the stark hand of fate, or maybe God.

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Richard Rorty, the American philosopher and social critic who died on Friday aged 75, was a highly influential figure in what came to be known as “postmodernism”.

To his admirers and disciples Rorty was “the most interesting philosopher in the world today” and “one of the most provocative and influential thinkers of our time”.

But his views did not want for opposition. Rorty himself wrote, for his own entry in the Penguin Reference Dictionary of Philosophy: “Although frequently accused of raving irrationalism and unconscionable frivolity by the political Right, and of insufficient radicalism, as well as premature anti-Communism, by the political Left, I think of myself as sharing John Dewey’s political attitudes and hopes, as well as his pragmatism.”

He was certainly unusual among philosophers in being widely read outside his own discipline. In part this may have been because he advised students that they need not bother reading Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel or, indeed, much of the rest of 3,000 years’ worth of accumulated philosophical wisdom. Instead Rorty argued for a moderated form of pragmatism derived from the ideas of Nietzsche, William James and, above all, Dewey.

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