In this broad overview of culture, ancient and modern, Patrick Madigan examines an historical series of philosophical failures, each more serious than the last: the incompleteness of Aristotelian analysis; the weakness of the Plotinian synthesis; the limited Cartesian response to the arch skeptic; the "distinction without a difference" in the Leibnizian/Kantian strategy; and the ensuing current romantic settlement as a victory which is indistinguishable from defeat since it leaves everything as it found it. All this leads to our (...) current insecurity and instability as focused on by Nietzsche. And so we come ultimately full swing to the origins of Christianity and Jesus' role as the experience of the "fidelity of God.". (shrink)

This book provides an excellent account of how Christianity acknowledged what was valid in the reigning Greek conception of divine perfection, diagnosed an essential and crippling consequence for the Greek project, and moved to meet this need. In an age torn by tensions between fundamentalist Christians and 'secular humanists, ' there is sorely needed an account of the interaction between Christianity and the pagan philosophy of its day. Contents: include: Aristotle and the Essential Failure; The Greek Convention of Perfection; Plotinus (...) and the Recognition of the Problem; The Rationalist Paradigm; and The Greek Convention of Divine Self-Love. (shrink)

I propose an ‘intellectual genealogy’ of the widespread contemporary lifestyle called ‘expressive individualism’, tracing it back first to the cult of the artist as genius, which flourished during the 19th century, but which has been democratized and universalized in our time. I then trace it back one step further, somewhat surprisingly, to the altered depiction of Lucifer John Milton gives in his poem Paradise Lost. Milton's Lucifer rejects not only Jesus as the highest creature, he rejects the Father as father; (...) he announces ‘I know none before me; I am self-begot.’ To the extent that we embrace the ethic of ‘expressive individualism’, therefore, we are implicitly committed to Milton's Lucifer as an archetype for human fulfilment, which I suggest, however, is a toxic model. (shrink)