Résultats lu par "Marie D. Cole" dans Toutes les catégories

Seven hundred years ago, in a drafty lecture hall, a Franciscan whom everyone had written off as a slow boy picked up the sharpest instrument the medieval mind ever forged and began cutting reality at joints no one else could see. John Duns Scotus lost the great argument of his age to the...

Nine hundred years before “think for yourself” became a slogan, Pierre Abélard, known to English readers as Peter Abelard, said it out loud in a world that answered such talk with fire and the knife. He argued that we should understand in order to believe, not the reverse. He insisted that guilt lives in intention, not in the deed. He held that even saints and scriptures could be wrong, and that doubt was not a sin but a method.

We are taught to treat innocence as a phase. It is the thing the world is supposed to take from us, the softness we are expected to outgrow on the way to becoming serious, competent, unfoolable adults. To be called innocent, past a certain age, is to be gently insulted. This book argues that we have misread one of the rarest and most valuable capacities a human being can possess.