Torna da Roma

Buongiorno!

I’m glad to be back from a fantastic trip. Hopefully I’ll get the next sentiments post up in the coming week or so, but until then, I figured that some photos would be in order…

In partenza per Roma…

I get the chance to travel to the Eternal City with a group of students from the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University. We’ll be studying art, architecture, and aesthetics as a general philosophical category. Needless to say, I am most determinedly not bringing my computer with me. I return on the 24th of this month, and will continue posting sometime in that general temporal vicinity.

For the trip, we read a great number of great books, but two in particular stand out so completely that I feel all but compelled to recommend them. These are Leo Tolstoy’s What is Art?, which, like most of Tolstoy, is beautiful, compelling, and deeply flawed, and Dorothy Sayers’ article Toward a Christian Aesthetic, a very intriguing exploration of the relationship between Trinitarian/Incarnational theology and aesthetic theory… the result is a beautiful vision of a Christian aesthetic. Consider them Grossly recommended.

With that, therefore, I bid you, by the power of the Google Language Translator, addio.

Sentiments: What are the standards for choosing one theory over another?

The first question to be addressed in this series on the extent that questions of correctness and incorrectness apply in the realm of the sentiments was expressed in the introductory post like this:

1. What are the standards by which one properly chooses between two or more plausible theories? What tools should be used, what questions should be asked, what things ought to be examined in order to make a valid judgment?

This is an admittedly cerebral subject for a series on the sentiments. I choose to include it not because it is particularly suited to this conversation, but because it is a general prerequisite for any philosophical conversation. If it is well written, I should be able to refer to it in future posts about widely varying topics. However, since it is showing up here first, all of the examples and demonstrations will be crafted to complement and lead into the more specific discussion on the sentiments.

In the introduction I said, referring to this topic, “This is one of the most difficult, most important questions that could possibly be asked. For reason of that latter descriptor, I will address it. For reason of the former, I have little hope of answering it here and now.” Nothing has changed; I do not expect to solve the world’s philosophical problems in a half-baked blog post. If any of the posts in this series will need reformation through the critique of its readers, I expect it will be this one. Proceed with me, therefore, lightly.