Professor of Philosophy and Religion @CIIS_SF • Currently working on Contemplation and the Book of Nature • I mostly post what I’m reading
Sebastopol, CA
Joined June 2013
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Philosophy, the study of wisdom, is not one thing & religion another... What is the exercise of philosophy but the exposition of the rules of true religion by which the supreme & principal cause of all things, God, is worshipped with humility & rationally searched for?
— Eriugena
Tasked my agents with praying the rosary for me every morning. Five decades, no shortcuts.
Spiritual growth and formation, SOLVED.
The future is wild, y’all.
Jacob Sherman retweeted
Reality is a poem. The Fall was the occlusion of that reality. The Incarnation restores reality as a poem. When we let ourselves be written into this poem we are redeemed. (That is the essence of Augustine’s theology in one tweet.)
It belongs to the wisdom that is an intellectual virtue to pronounce right judgement about divine things after reason has made its inquiry, but it belongs to wisdom as a gift of the Holy Spirit to judge aright about them by connaturality with them.
– Aquinas, ST II-II q45 a2
Jacob Sherman retweeted
Anyway, until we can meaningfully return to the teacher/scholar model and get serious about liberal gen ed reform, I think we will continue to crash out.
’It is necessary’, says Pascal, ‘to keep a thought in the back of one’s mind, and to judge everything by it; but meanwhile to speak like the people.’
There is harmony, geometry, metaphysics, and, so to speak, morality everywhere [on peut dire qu’il y a de l’harmonie, de la géometrie, de la métaphysique, et pour parler ainsi, de la morale partout].
– G W Leibniz in a letter to Bossuet
Went to You Can See Everything Monday evening.
Genuinely riveting for three hours.
If you think it’s a film about Elizabeth Holmes, then you’re the mark. She’s just the occasion for a film about media, truth, and what the documentary genre is or isn’t.
Exquisite, brilliant.
The sage, in choosing the good, chooses it infallibly, but at the same time with the freest will. This is perhaps because the good…is in reality nothing other than love, which is the will in all its purity, and because wanting what is truly good is to will oneself.
– F Ravaisson
Jacob Sherman retweeted
remains one of the best tweets of the year
AI ppl loooove to pretend they hold tons secret knowledge. Everyone has Seen Things, and have been trusted with the Esoteric Knowledge. It's also cringe if you don't partake because it implies you're not in the Inner Circle. In reality most people are kinda confused, working it all out ad hoc, relying on the same rumours, and so on - but the status games are hard to resist!
They convince the soul of its powerlessness, and it is this that is most apt to bring about its downfall.
— Félix Ravaisson,‘Contemporary Philosophy’ (SE 60)
Jacob Sherman retweeted
Intelligence must draw on memory. The mind must not simply compile data — as an algorithm now does more quickly than we can — but recall lived experiences, which contain depths of meaning that only the human soul can recognize, and connect more deeply with the goodness of these experiences. Everything that is good begins “with the Spirit” and thus possesses a breath, a dynamism and a sense of communion that, once experienced, are engraved upon the heart. vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/e…
Ethics apart from a rich philosophical anthropology and metaphysics always bends towards conformism. Those who practice virtue without philosophy, as Socrates puts it, are reborn as social insects, bees or wasps or ants. (Cf. Phaedo 82a-d)
The human person is at once both unique in its presence, and yet relational with others; most interior of all beans, it most open to others, not only to other humans, but to all being….
– Kenneth Schmitz, Person and Psyche xi
Jacob Sherman retweeted
In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity.
If there were nothing eternal in man, he could not despair at all.
– Søren Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 21
