Boreas Podcast

Send us Fan Mail Dr. E Michael Jones is back, this time to discuss the historical influence of philosophy and science on culture. How modern science has been used to justify modern forms of political oppression. The conversation references Dr. Jones' book Logos Rising, and is relevant to the serial theme I've been running lately on the history of metaphysics.

Send us Fan Mail The fifth and final part of the "Metaphysics Scandal" series asks what happened after Scholasticism broke. The answer is two roads — empiricism and rationalism — that look like opposites but in the extreme arrive at the same destination: a world scrubbed of God and person, leaving only function. What drove both roads is older than either. It is the Promethean spirit — the will to possess knowledge by force rather than receive it as gift. Today, an endpoint of that arc is arti...

Send us Fan Mail Parts I through III traced mimesis in Ancient Greek philosophy, René Girard's mimetic theory, the Scripture and the Church Fathers. Here in Part IV, we arrive at Medieval Scholasticism. It is said to have baptized Aristotle. With that, it also built a great intellectual edifice that set off the modern Western academia. But Aristotelian demonstratio and scientia is based on natures and teleology, not persons and imitation. The change of focus set a chain reaction that caused t...

Send us Fan Mail Parts I and II covered the role of imitation in philosophy: essential, but incomplete. In this Part III we compare the account of imitation in René Girard's mimetic theory to the scriptural narrative of the Fall. We are made to imitate: Scripture says man is created in the image and likeness of God. The trouble in Eden starts not because Adam and Eve decided to imitate God. It's the mode of their imitation. In turning to perceive God as their rival, they take the Serpent as t...

Send us Fan Mail Part 2 after René Girard and the Philosophers. Girard argued that Plato and the philosophers who followed him sidelined imitation — neglecting the rivalrous, appropriative mimesis that drives human conflict. Plato did quiet over the dangerous side of imitation. But imitation is everywhere in classical metaphysics. It's the engine of Plato's cosmos and Aristotle's telos, and the master principle of the Platonic-Christian tradition that follows. This episode traces how imitatio...