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Articles
Remembering Nicholas Rescher, a Gentle Giant
Nicholas Rescher, who died on January 5 at age ninety-five, was the most extensively published philosopher of the last century, with a hundred books and four hundred articles to...
The Queen in Scotland
The death of Queen Elizabeth II was in no sense tragic, particularly as it occurred in her beloved Balmoral home amid the Cairngorm moors and mountains. Nor was it...
The Power of Reality
In Goethe’s poetic play Faust, the titular erudite scholar debates with his young assistant Wagner. While Wagner is an enthusiast for enlightenment and progress, urging the transformative power of...
The Cure for Ignorance
Every age has its moral problems and perplexities, but we seem to live in especially troubled times. Sketching a graph with the temporal axis running from 1950 to the...
When Campion Met Miss Anscombe
Edmund Campion (1540–81) and Elizabeth Anscombe (1919–2001) were among the most brilliant of their generations of Oxford students: he at St. John’s College, she at St. Hugh’s. Later, each...
Roger Scruton: Burkean and Bohemian
The death of Sir Roger Scruton has deprived academic aesthetics of one of its most creative, insightful, and wide-ranging practitioners. Roger was one of a kind: poetic, courageous, and...
MacIntyre Against Morality
Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity: An Essay on Desire, Practical Reasoning, and Narrativeby alasdair macintyrecambridge, 332 pages, $49.99 I The dialogues of Plato provide the first sustained demonstration...
A Tale of Two Cities—And of Two Churches
You will recall the lapidary opening of Dickens’s famous novel of London and Paris in the period of the French Revolution. Headed ‘Book I—Recalled to Life: Chapter I: The...
Why Scotland and Ireland Went Different Ways
I In St. Andrews on Thursday, September 18, I voted in the Scottish referendum and the following morning flew to Ireland to give a lecture in the International Centre...
Scotland on the Eve of the Referendum
The Road to the Present In 1707, the Scottish Parliament ‘adjourned’ sine die, having voted to enter into union with England thereby creating the United Kingdom. That multi-nation state,...
A New Pope for a New Chapter in an Old Story
The general expectation when the cardinals filed into the Sistine Chapel on Tuesday afternoon was that it was likely to be a long conclave. The assumption was that it...
The Conclave and Cardinal Ravasi
It is hard to know when a new pope will be elected. Prior to entering into the formal conclave this afternoon the cardinals have already had several days of...
For Cardinal O’Brien, A Sad End
“If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well, it were done quickly.” So speaks Macbeth of the murder of the king, but the words might well be...
Goodbye to Cardinal O’Brien
The resignation of Cardinal O’Brien as Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, within a month of the date on which his formal resignation would normally have taken effect, is...
A Tale of Two Thomases
Consider this description of one of “America’s Byways”: “Traversing the lush hills and farmlands of southern Indiana, and paralleling the mighty Ohio River, this route marks a timeworn and...
