Faith and Philosophy: The Historical Impact

This title was first published in 2003. This work examines how Christian faith has historically impacted the notion of Nous or divine mind in Western thought up to and including the present. Christian faith is seen to have inaugurated an essential transformation over time of the ancient notion of divine mind and of thought in general. Beginning with an examination of Aristotle’s notion of essence, Plato’s creation myth in the Timaeus , and Plotinus’ One , it is shown how faith in the hands of Augustine and Aquinas fundamentally reshaped Western thought and made possible in the modern period the radical subjectivity of Descartes brought to perfection by Kant and Hegel. The strenuous counter-thinking of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Levinas is closely compared to its disarming alternative, the thinking of Jefferson, Emerson and C.S. Peirce the father of American pragmatism.