Sunday, July 3, 2022
Problems for Goff’s panpsychism
Panpsychism is the view that conscious awareness pervades the physical world, down to the level of basic particles. In recent years, philosopher Philip Goff has become an influential proponent of the view, defending it in his books Consciousness and Fundamental Reality and Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. He builds on ideas developed by contemporary philosophers like David Chalmers and Galen Strawson, who in turn were influenced by early twentieth-century thinkers like Bertrand Russell and Arthur Eddington (though Russell, it should be noted, was not himself a panpsychist).
Monday, June 27, 2022
Aristotle on the middle class
Sunday, June 19, 2022
What is conscience and when should we follow it?
Sunday, June 12, 2022
Economic and linguistic inflation
Friday, June 10, 2022
The New Apologetics
Tuesday, June 7, 2022
COMING SOON: All One in Christ
1. Church
Teaching against Racism
2. Late
Scholastics and Early Modern Popes against Slavery
3. The
Rights and Duties of Nations and Immigrants
4. What is
Critical Race Theory?
5.
Philosophical Problems with Critical Race Theory
6. Social
Scientific Objections to Critical Race Theory
7. Catholicism versus Critical Race Theory
Monday, June 6, 2022
Anti-reductionism in Nyāya-Vaiśesika atomism
Tuesday, May 31, 2022
Indeterminacy and Borges’ infinite library
Monday, May 23, 2022
The hollow universe of modern physics
Saturday, May 14, 2022
Nietzsche and Christ on suffering
But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a hindrance to me; for you are not on the side of God, but of men.” Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. (Matthew 16:22-25)
Monday, May 9, 2022
End of semester open thread
Thursday, May 5, 2022
Benedict is not the pope: A reply to some critics
Saturday, April 30, 2022
Socratic loyalty
Monday, April 25, 2022
Fr. Gregory Pine on prudence
Friday, April 22, 2022
Whose pantheism? Which dualism? A Reply to David Bentley Hart
Hello David,
Many thanks for your enjoyable and vigorous rejoinder. If your eyes fall on this, I know they will be rolling at the prospect of yet another round. But I cannot resist a reply to what seem to me basic misunderstandings, along with crucial concessions disguised as rebuttals. I do promise to refrain from Photoshop antics and cheap puns, for the sake of preserving our armistice and basic good taste. Plus, I wouldn’t want any of your readers to spill their sherry.
Monday, April 18, 2022
Tales from the Coffin
Tuesday, April 12, 2022
Benevacantism is scandalous and pointless
Tuesday, April 5, 2022
Two Harts beaten as one
Sunday, April 3, 2022
Touring the fifth circle
Thursday, March 31, 2022
Hart’s post-Christian pantheism
Sunday, March 27, 2022
Unjust war and false masculinity
Monday, March 21, 2022
Conspiracy theories, spontaneous order, and the hermeneutics of suspicion
Nobody denies that conspiracies occur. They happen every time two or more people collude in order to secure some malign end. When people criticize “conspiracy theories,” it is a particular kind of conspiracy that they find implausible. I’ve written several times before about some of the marks of conspiracy theories of this dubious kind. They tend to be grounded in “narrative thinking” rather than a rigorous and dispassionate consideration of the merits and deficiencies of all alternative possible explanations. They tend to violate Ockham’s razor, posit conspiracies that are too vast and complicated to be psychologically and sociologically feasible, and reflect naiveté about the way modern bureaucracies function. The vastness of the posited conspiracy often has implications for the reliability of news media and other sources of information that make the theory epistemically self-defeating and unfalsifiable. (For simplicity’s sake, from here on out I’ll use the expression “conspiracy theories” to refer, specifically, to theories having vices like these – acknowledging, again, that there are conspiracies of a more plausible kind, and thus conspiracy theories of a more plausible kind.)
Monday, March 14, 2022
Chomsky’s “propaganda model” of mass media
Friday, March 4, 2022
Just war theory and the Russo-Ukrainian war
At one and the same time:
- the damage inflicted by the
aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and
certain;
- all other means of putting an end
to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
- there must be serious prospects of
success;
- the use of arms must not produce
evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modern means of destruction
weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.
End quote. I submit that Russia’s invasion clearly fails to meet the first, second, and fourth criteria, and NATO military action against Russia would clearly fail to meet the second, third, and fourth criteria.
Friday, February 25, 2022
Taylor on cognition, teleology, and God
Monday, February 21, 2022
Sex and metaphysics
Friday, February 18, 2022
The failure of Johnson’s critique of natural theology
Friday, February 11, 2022
Johnson contra Aquinas
Wednesday, February 9, 2022
McDowell’s Aristotelian near miss
Wednesday, February 2, 2022
If you’ve been missing links
At the Claremont Review of Books, Joseph M.
Bessette sets out a critique of
the Eastman memos.
Aidan
Nichols on the
Herbert McCabe he knew, at The
Lamp.
At UnHerd, Thomas Fazi and Toby Green make the left-wing case against vaccine mandates. At The Tablet, Alex Gutentag on the continual, unacknowledged, shifts in expert opinion about Covid-19. “Mandatory panic”: Freddie deBoer on Covid as the liberal 9/11. A Johns Hopkins University study concludes that lockdowns did no good and caused much damage.
Thursday, January 27, 2022
Hell is not empty
Let it be said at the outset that theological hope can by no means apply to this power. The sphere to which redemption by the Son who became man applies is unequivocally that of mankind… [O]ne cannot agree with Barth’s claim that the angels had no freedom of choice and that the myth of a “fall of the angels” is thus to be rejected absolutely… [T]he doctrine of a fall of the angels, which is deeply rooted in the whole of Tradition, becomes not only plausible but even, if the satanic is accepted as existent, inescapable. (pp. 113-14)
Friday, January 21, 2022
A fallacy in Balthasar (Updated)
If it is said of God that: “God our Savior … desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Tim 2:4-5), then this is the reason for the fact that the Church should make “supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings … for all men” (1 Tim 2:1), which could not be asked of her if she were not allowed to have at least the hope that prayers as widely directed as these are sensible and might be heard. If, that is, she knew with certainty that this hope was too widely directed, then what is asked of her would be self-contradictory. (pp. 23-24)
Saturday, January 15, 2022
Barron on “diversity, equity, and inclusion”
Sunday, January 9, 2022
Geach on authority and consistency
Saturday, January 1, 2022
New Year’s open thread
Wednesday, December 29, 2021
Geach on Hell
Saturday, December 25, 2021
The still, small voice of Christmas
A great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice. And when Elijah heard it, he wrapped his face in his mantle and went out and stood at the entrance of the cave. And behold, there came a voice to him, and said, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” (1 Kings 19:11-13)
Among the lessons of Christmas is the truth of the principle illustrated by this famous Old Testament passage. We often expect, or at least desire, special divine assistance to be instant and dramatic, like a superhero swooping to the rescue in a Marvel movie. And we lose hope when that doesn’t happen. But God only rarely works that way, and such dramatics have to be rare lest grace smother nature. Special divine assistance is in the ordinary course of things subtle and gradual – a still, small voice rather than a whirlwind, earthquake, or fire – but nevertheless unmistakable when the big picture is kept in view.
Sunday, December 19, 2021
The Catholic middle ground on Covid-19 vaccination
Monday, December 13, 2021
Western cultural suicide as apostasy (Updated)
Ours is a civilization in decline, and at a rapidly accelerating pace. That isn’t new in human history. But the precise manner in which it is disintegrating seems to be unprecedented, which is the reason for the title of Anton’s essay. What has effectively become the ideology of the ruling classes, which goes by many names – political correctness, “wokeness,” “critical social justice,” the “successor Ideology,” the baizuo mentality, and so on – manifests a perverse self-destructiveness and nihilism that, as Anton argues, appears sui generis.