Knowledge

Poet and Eastern Orthodox believer Scott Cairns explains how a good poem functions like an icon: it assists the process of our becoming aware of what is real, and it is generative in the ways it keeps opening up new understandings. (56 minutes)

Mark Mitchell on Michael Polanyi’s recognition of the dangerous dead-end of materialistic reductionism

Mark Mitchell connects key aspects of Michael Polanyi’s conception of knowledge with Matthew Crawford’s insistence that real knowing involves more than technique. (34 minutes)

FROM VOL. 139 Esther Lightcap Meek discusses the realism of philosopher and chemist Michael Polanyi. (23 minutes)

FROM VOL. 76 Professor Martin X. Moleski explains why Michael Polanyi (1891-1976) left his career in science to become a philosopher. (16 minutes)

FROM VOL. 66 Esther Lightcap Meek challenges the modernist view of knowledge, which prefers the figure of the autonomous knower to the figure of a steward of knowledge acquired in part from others. (15 minutes)

F. C. Copleston on Aquinas’s confidence in the embodied nature of knowledge

FROM VOL. 135 Matthew Levering talks about the long and rich tradition of reasoning about God. (23 minutes)

In this 2016 lecture, John F. Crosby explores key personalist insights found in the thinking of John Henry Newman and Romano Guardini. (60 minutes)

In this lecture, Daniel Gibbons compares and contrasts understandings of sacramental poetics proposed by Augustine, Aquinas, and Sydney. (36 minutes)

In this lecture, Christopher Blum argues that scientists need to regain a full appreciation of nature’s intelligibility, as they are apt to lose sight of reality due to the reductionism produced by their theories. (31 minutes)

In this lecture, Carlo Lancellotti argues that integration of the moral, cognitive, and aesthetic aspects of mathematics is needed in a robust liberal arts mathematics curriculum. (25 minutes)

FROM VOL. 121 James K. A. Smith advocates for a return to some pre-modern conceptualizations of the human body. (18 minutes)

Daniel Ritchie finds in the poetry of William Cowper (1731–1800) an anticipation of Michael Polanyi’s epistemology

Daniel Ritchie argues that poet and hymnodist William Cowper was ahead of his time in critiquing the Enlightenment's reductionist view of knowledge. (16 minutes)

Daniel E. Ritchie discusses the life and work of poet William Cowper (1731–1800), comparing his commitment to understanding reality through personal knowledge, intuition, and rigorous contemplation with the thought of Michael Polanyi. (43 minutes)

FROM VOL. 104 Daniel Ritchie describes how many of the figures he studies in his new book emphasize the significance of human experience, enculturation, and contingency to human knowledge. (21 minutes)

FROM VOL. 156 William C. Hackett discusses the relationships between philosophy and theology, and of both to the meaning embedded in myth. (29 minutes)

Robert Jenson on how the Christian understanding of Truth in a personal Word shaped the Western university

Theologian Paul Griffiths situates our creaturely knowing within the framework of the relation between God and Creation