I’m getting a lot out of these thoughtful pieces on why Catholic Scots should take an interest in philosophy. By encouraging ordinary Catholics to make truths taken on authority their own, and by considering the place of philosophy in personal quest and transformation of the self, you are doing serious intellectual spadework, whilst inviting readers to do some for themselves. It was pleasing and interesting to read about how you arrived at an encounter with Kierkegaard having touched on this matter with me on Twitter in the past. I cheekily suggested that it was better to arrive at Kierkegaard later rather than not read him at all.
I fancied I had arrived at him at just the right time when I was an undergraduate philosophy student, volunteering at a suicide crisis line and struggling with some of very conscious forms of despair described by Kierkegaard in The Sickness Unto Death. Early at university I took a course on Existentialism, which focused on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Where I am today, almost twenty years later, and having read some works of K and N since then, is in agreement with you on ‘less need of Kierkegaard and more need of Aristotle, perhaps’, but I still wonder whether we might require something of both.
I’m looking forward to reading upcoming reflections on Catholic Social Teaching (and hopefully something on Foucault soon!). There’s a distinctly late Foucault flavour to some of this, if you don’t mind me saying. Of course, there is a glaring incongruity in the work of Foucault when he moves from a focus on regimes of truth, the disciplinary society and all-pervasive capillary power to talking about the possibilities of radical self-invention later on. But perhaps this might have something to do with ‘the problem of how to live authentically’ within institutions that are not always great, leaving aside questions about the extent to which Foucault was led astray in his own life by a Nietzschean quest beyond good and evil.
I’m getting a lot out of these thoughtful pieces on why Catholic Scots should take an interest in philosophy. By encouraging ordinary Catholics to make truths taken on authority their own, and by considering the place of philosophy in personal quest and transformation of the self, you are doing serious intellectual spadework, whilst inviting readers to do some for themselves. It was pleasing and interesting to read about how you arrived at an encounter with Kierkegaard having touched on this matter with me on Twitter in the past. I cheekily suggested that it was better to arrive at Kierkegaard later rather than not read him at all.
I fancied I had arrived at him at just the right time when I was an undergraduate philosophy student, volunteering at a suicide crisis line and struggling with some of very conscious forms of despair described by Kierkegaard in The Sickness Unto Death. Early at university I took a course on Existentialism, which focused on Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Where I am today, almost twenty years later, and having read some works of K and N since then, is in agreement with you on ‘less need of Kierkegaard and more need of Aristotle, perhaps’, but I still wonder whether we might require something of both.
I’m looking forward to reading upcoming reflections on Catholic Social Teaching (and hopefully something on Foucault soon!). There’s a distinctly late Foucault flavour to some of this, if you don’t mind me saying. Of course, there is a glaring incongruity in the work of Foucault when he moves from a focus on regimes of truth, the disciplinary society and all-pervasive capillary power to talking about the possibilities of radical self-invention later on. But perhaps this might have something to do with ‘the problem of how to live authentically’ within institutions that are not always great, leaving aside questions about the extent to which Foucault was led astray in his own life by a Nietzschean quest beyond good and evil.