released 4/26/2024
Philosopher Daniel Dennett died on April 19. He was best known for his claim that consciousness is an illusion. The nature of consciousness was a theme addressed thoroughly in David Bentley Hart’s 2013 book, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss. In a conversation about the book from Volume 122, Hart challenges the assumption that progress is made in our ability to account for reality if we assume the modern division between material and spiritual or physical and metaphysical. In this interview, Hart explains how pure naturalism leads to an un-doing of rationality as a result of its self-imposed limitations.
37 minutes
PREVIEW
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In this playful article from First Things, theologian David Bentley Hart muses on what is arguably America’s greatest contribution to civilization: baseball. Baseball, as Hart would have it, is the Platonic ideal of sports, “a game utterly saturated by infinity,” a game not contrived by our own artifice, but a discovery long kept secret in the dark mysteries of Reality. Contrary to what Hart disparagingly dubs “the oblong game” — the spatial and temporal confines of which are “pitilessly finite” — baseball in its shape and motion stretches towards endless vistas, unfolding organically according to its own narrative and inner logic while at the same time striving to complete the most perfect of shapes, the circle.
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