Extract
A perfect game: was Bob Feller's fastball a bolt from heaven? David B. Hart considers the metaphysical meaning of baseball.
In his later philosophy, Heidegger liked to indulge in eccentric etymologies because he was certain that there are truths deeply hidden in language. It is one of the more beguilingly magical aspects of his thought and therefore--to my mind--one of the more convincing. Consider, for instance, the wonderful ambiguity one finds in the word invention when one considers its derivation. The Latin invenire means principally "to find," "to encounter," or (literally) "to come upon." Only secondarily does it mean "to create" or "to originate." Even in English, where the secondary sense has now entirely displaced the primary, the word retained this dual connotation right through the seventeenth century. This pleases me for two reasons. The first is that, as an instinctive Platonist, I naturally believe that every genuine act of human creativity is simultaneously an innovation and a discovery, a marriage of poetic craft and contemplative vision that captures traces of eternity's radiance in fugitive splendors here below by translating our tacit knowle...
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