'A Prodigal Johnnie Reports Back'
Antón Barba-Kay, The Catholic University of America, at the St. John's Review
".. so long as we understand philosophy as clinically disengaged thought, we will continue to prize guarded and ungenerous forms of speech that pretend to a scientific certainty they cannot achieve (e.g., scholarship), we will continue to disagree about first principles erratically and without end, we will continue to excel only at the philosophical genre of critique, we will continue to be tempted toward forms of irrationality as the only exits from a stifling objectivity, and we will continue to find ourselves stuck at Cartesian square one. Square one is no doubt a fine square. But if a conversation is such that I can always undercut an argument by refusing my agreement—if that is the exemplary form of critical thinking—then no conversation can exceed my current view of how things stand."
See Descartes, Great Books of the Western World (first edition, 52 Vol., 1952) volume 31, (second edition, 60 Vol., 1990) volume 28
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