Rene' Descartes (15961650), the father of modern rationalism, abandoned traditional paths to knowledge and developed a new method of seeking truth. Descartes doubted everything to eliminate preconceptions, and to test all candidates for true knowledge but he discovered he could not doubt his own existence as a conscious being. Through rigorous selfexamination, he offered an account of the nature and reality of mind, body, God, and their interconnections. He aimed to affirm human individuality, freedom, and spirituality in a way that was consistent with his revolutionary, unified, mathematical approach to science. Descartes argued that philosophies based on sense experience are unreliable; he said that the human soul and God can and must be known before we know anything about the physical world. He noted that our capacity for error results from the gift of free will but he argued that by using his method for seeking knowledge we can infallibly know the timeless nature of things. Descartes said that humans are not merely physical beings; each of us is a composite, in which an unthinking, spatially extended, physical body is combined with a free, conscious, nonspatial mind or soul (which is the true self). The body and soul intimately interact, yet each can exist separately so it's metaphysically possible that the soul may survive the death of the body. Francis Bacon (15611626) pioneered the other major earlymodern philosophical method known as empiricism; unlike Descartes, Bacon based all genuine knowledge on sense experience. He said the growth of knowledge is inhibited by faulty assumptions, habits of mind and methods of investigation, and he developed experimental procedures to enable otherwise limited human minds to interpret nature correctly.
With the same passionate scholarship and analytical audacity he brought to the character of God, Jack Miles now approaches the literary and theological enigma of Jesus. In so doing, he tells the story of a broken promise–God’s ancient c...
Aurelius Augustinus was a key figure in the transition from classical antiquity to the Middle Ages. He lived at a time when no distinction was made between philosophy and theology, and the purpose of both was to show the way to wisdom, happiness, an...
Renowned psychiatrist and educator Armand Nicholi here presents a fascinating comparison of the beliefs of Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis. For all the variety of specific religious beliefs, there are fundamentally only two kinds of people: believe...
Kierkegaard wasnt really a philosopher in the academic sense. Yet he produced what many people expect of philosophy. He didnt write about the world, he wrote about life, about how we live and how we choose to live. His subject was the individual and...
Following the extraordinary success of the New York Times bestseller Bonhoeffer, Eric Metaxas latest book offers inspirational and intellectually rigorous thoughts about the great questions surrounding us all today.
The Greek philosopher Socrates f...
Narrator: Eric Metaxas and the contributing authors Published: 10/13/2011
In 2006, Christianity Today voted The God Who Is There as one of the top fifty books that have shaped evangelicals.
For decades, The God Who Is There has been the landmark book that changed the way the church sees the world. In Francis Schaeffers r...
Through interviews with twelve distinguished philosophers-including atheists, agnostics, and believers-Talking God works toward a philosophical understanding and evaluation of religion. Along the way, Gary Gutting and his interviewees challenge many...
Orthodoxy was named as one of Publishers Weekly's 10 indispensable spiritual classics of the past 1500 years. It is the personal journal of one man's search for understanding culminating in his conversion to Catholicism. Written with wisdom and wit,...
Narrator: John Franklyn-Robbins Published: 09/17/2013
Twenty-seven years ago, Matthieu Ricard gave up a promising career as a scientist to study Tibetan Buddhism-not as a detached observer but by immersing himself in its practice under the guidance of its greatest living masters. Years later, this proj...
