In the Beginning Is Philosophy On Desire and the Good

«There are many insightful writers, but Brayton Polka is not content to be merely insightful. In this ambitious study, Polka invites his readers to rethink the beginning of philosophy by rethinking the Bible. In the process, Polka puts philosophy and theology on trial for ignoring the biblical foundations of modern thought while they uphold ancient Greece as the true origin of philosophy. The price of ignoring our intellectual debt to the Bible's metaphysics of desire, the good, and honest self-critique is evident in the common failure of scholars to understand how even the greatest Greek philosophers (Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle) are fatally ignorant of the good, which is desired yet never known by ordinary mortals. Greek thought sees only conflict between the divine (which is unknowable) and the human (which is ignorant). The good news which Polka demonstrates in his masterful interpretations of the Bible, Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Vico, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche is that the biblical tradition shatters all false oppositions between the religious and the secular. Polka's work is a brilliant and necessary corrective to the conflicts of our age, which are so often fuelled by the dogmatic misuse of religion and the skeptical adulteration of reason.» (Grant Havers, Trinity Western University)
«Brayton Polka is an outstanding historian of ideas, combining deep insights into philosophical texts from ancient Greece to modern Europe with a fine appreciation of their historical contexts and effects. This work deepens his powerful case that Spinoza is central to understanding the modern world - its faith, rationality, ethics and politics - by focusing on the fundamental question: what is the relationship of desire and the good?» (David Lovell, University of New South Wales)