Foundations of Liberty Or: The Intellectual Crisis of the Modern World A Lecture Series with Prof. Thomas Patrick Burke Preface These lectures are a sequel to my earlier series on the philosophy of liberty. That series took as its point of departure the interior freedom of the human will. Out of …(Read More)

Foundations of Liberty Or: The Intellectual Crisis of the Modern World A Lecture Series with Prof. Thomas Patrick Burke In the last lecture we saw, reading Plato’s dialogue Phaedo, how Socrates, in prison and awaiting execution,  developed the concept of teleological explanation, explaining by reference to purposes rather than by reference to …(Read More)

Foundations of Liberty Or: The Intellectual Crisis of the Modern World A Lecture Series with Prof. Thomas Patrick Burke The intellectual crisis of the modern world is the conflict between the physical sciences and the basic human values. Physics and chemistry, together with much of biology, have been immensely successful in …(Read More)

Foundations of Liberty Or: The Intellectual Crisis of the Modern World A Lecture Series with Prof. Thomas Patrick Burke In the last lecture we saw Aristotle’s twofold reaction to Socrates’s demand for universal teleological explanation, i.e. explanation in terms of purposes or what is for the best. He accepted and implemented …(Read More)

Foundations of Liberty Or: The Intellectual Crisis of the Modern World A Lecture Series with Prof. Thomas Patrick Burke In the last lecture we saw that the new science that began to emerge in 1600 abandoned the search for Socratean and Aristotelian teleological explanation,  not only for the inanimate world, but …(Read More)

Foundations of Liberty Or: The Intellectual Crisis of the Modern World A Lecture Series with Prof. Thomas Patrick Burke In recent lectures we have seen how the new science that emerged around 1600 is based on mechanicism, the theory that there is only one kind of causation in the world and …(Read More)

 Foundations of Liberty Or: The Intellectual Crisis of the Modern World A Lecture Series with Prof. Thomas Patrick Burke In the last lecture we looked at some of the many ways in which living beings differ from dead and inanimate ones. The chief difference, we saw, is that they operate with …(Read More)

 Foundations of Liberty Or: The Intellectual Crisis of the Modern World A Lecture Series with Prof. Thomas Patrick Burke In the last lecture we saw how Darwin, though he believed he explained the evolution of biological species solely in terms of mechanistic causation, i.e. chance and necessity, without any reference to …(Read More)

 Foundations of Liberty Or: The Intellectual Crisis of the Modern World A Lecture Series with Prof. Thomas Patrick Burke In the last lecture we suggested that modern genetics, though technically an immense advance on the biology of Darwin’s time, has repeated Darwin’s crucial philosophical error in regard to mechanistic and teleological causation. Darwin believed he …(Read More)

 Foundations of Liberty Or: The Intellectual Crisis of the Modern World A Lecture Series with Prof. Thomas Patrick Burke In the last lecture we examined a remarkable new development in biology, in the field of genetics, a field which occupies the center of the stage in the neo-Darwinian theory of how …(Read More)