DE Weekly: Augustine, Sartre, & Ex Nihilo
Creatio ex nihilo is a Latin phrase which means “creation out of nothing.” In a religious context, it infers that God created the universe and everything in it out of absolutely nothing: no pre-existing materials. It differentiates the act of creation in the human sense (say, me creating this newsletter) from God’s creation.
St. Augustine of Hippo, one of my favorite writers, once said that in light of this creatio ex nihilo, every creature on the earth carries with it the heritage of nonbeing. In other words, there is a palpable sense of true nothingness that haunts us and every other finite thing in this world.
DE Weekly: Consciousness, Faith, & Free Will
The major question the existentialists sought to answer was, “What is the meaning of life?” Complementary to that question is another: does life even have meaning? Of course, they weren’t the first philosophers to ask this question. People had been thinking about this for thousands of years before them.
There are a lot of different ways to approach the potentiality of a grand, overarching meaning to life itself. Existentialism attempted to ground meaning in what we can actually see; it placed our perception above all else and used it to explain what might give each of our lives meaning.
DE Weekly: The Good, the True, & the Beautiful
What lies at the core of every philosophical inquiry, every invented line of thinking, and every word on every page of every philosophical treatise ever written? I would argue that philosophy’s aim throughout human history has been to ascertain “the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.”
The Good, the True, and the Beautiful is a classical philosophical concept with roots in Ancient Greece, conceptualized by Socrates and later by Plato and Aristotle.
DE Weekly: Augustine, Knowledge, & Faith
“I know that I know nothing” is a quote attributed to Socrates, the ancient Greek philosopher from whom much of modern wisdom can be traced back to. This quote can be credited to Plato’s Apology, and many variations of the quote exist.