One of my mentors, Kobus Smit, drew my attention as an undergraduate student to the comparison between Rembrandt's Bathsheba and Rubens' Bathsheba. What can we learn of the very different approaches to the human person of these two artists from this comparison?









(See also this list of paintings on the same theme.)

There are few no painters from whom we can learn more about being human than Rembrandt and Vermeer. In the second class on philosophical anthropology in this terms Introduction to Philosophy course, one of the things we will do is to try and see what we can learn from these two masters.

Here is a link to a map of thumbnails of all the paintings of Vermeer.

And here is a link to some of Rembrandt's wry, wise self-portraits.

Last night we watched the final movie in my Introduction to Philosophy course: the director's cut of Ridley Scott's Bladerunner. (See a transcript of the complete script of the earlier version here, and a mess of related links here.)

This was the first of two classes on philosophical anthropology. The question we are asking is "What does it mean to be human?"

Frank Schaeffer (Francis Schaeffer's Eastern Orthodox pro-life activist son and the proud father of a U.S. Marine Corps corporal) has said this about Bladerunner:

And if you want to see a movie that I would suggest you all rent sometime, whether you are nice Christians that don't watch R rated movies or not I suggest you make the exception for this one, go down to your local video store and rent Ridley Scott's "Bladerunner." "Bladerunner" is the future of the United States of America if the pro-abortion side wins. A country, a country divided into two peoples living in one land. One group, the yuppie fascists that control the society living in the high towers of the mythical Los Angeles, while on the street, it rains perpetually on second-class citizens, mutants, mere, mere creations of genetic engineering in which false life forms are toyed with and experimented with, in which human life is trivialized, in which the meaning of sacredness and dignity is squandered for profit and filthy greed, in which the freedoms so hard won in the Second World War and by our forefathers are squandered as we ourselves create the Nazi totalitarian nightmare as if we had lost the war and were now forty or fifty years into the eugenics program.

(Note that this quote is sourced from a website that offers it as part of an intended exposé of the younger Schaeffer.)