Other minds and modern philosophy

The “problem of other minds” goes like this.  I have direct access to my own thoughts and experiences, but not to yours.  I can perceive only your body and behavior.  So how do I know you really have any thoughts and experiences?  Maybe you merely behave as if you had them, but in reality you are a “zombie” in the philosophy of mind sense, devoid of conscious awareness.  And maybe this is true of everyone other than me.  How do I know that any minds at all exist other than my own?

The virtue of patriotism

Patriotism involves a special love for and reverence toward one’s own country.  These days it is often dismissed as sentimental, unsophisticated, or even bigoted.  In fact it is a moral virtue and its absence is a vice.  Aquinas explains the basic reason:

A man becomes a debtor to others in diverse ways in accord with the diverse types of their excellence and the diverse benefits that he receives from them.  In both these regards, God occupies the highest place, since He is the most excellent of all and the first principle of both our being and our governance.  But in second place, the principles of our being and governance are our parents and our country, by whom and in which we are born and governed.  And so, after God, a man is especially indebted to his parents and to his country.  Hence, just as [the virtue of] religion involves venerating God, so, at the second level, [the virtue of] piety involves venerating one’s parents and country.  Now the veneration of one’s parents includes venerating all of one’s blood relatives... On the other hand, the veneration of one’s country includes the veneration of one’s fellow citizens and of all the friends of one’s country.  (Summa Theologiae II-II.101.1, Freddoso translation)

The popes against the revolution

The Church has consistently condemned doctrinaire laissez-faire forms of capitalism and insisted on just wages, moderate state intervention in the economy, and the grave duty of the rich to assist the poor.  Everyone knows these things because they are frequently talked about, and rightly so.  But the Church has also consistently and vigorously opposed socialism in all its forms and all left-wing revolutionary movements, for reasons grounded in natural law and Christian moral theology.  This is less frequently talked about, but especially important today, when much of what is being done or called for in the name of justice is in fact gravely immoral. 

ACPQ symposium on Aristotle’s Revenge

The American Catholic Philosophical Association meeting in Minneapolis last November hosted an Author Meets Critics session on my book Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science.  The proceedings have now been published in the Summer 2020 issue of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly.  In the first essay I provide a précis of the book.  In the second essay, philosopher Robert Koons addresses what I say in the book about the A-theory and B-theory of time, and argues that the latter is easier to reconcile with an Aristotelian philosophy of nature than I suggest.  In the third essay, physicist Stephen Barr puts forward some criticisms of my views about method, space, and substantial form.  In the final essay, I respond to Koons and Barr.

Envy cancels justice

Envy is often mistaken for anger at injustice, because both can issue in hatred.  But the hatred that issues from a desire for justice is righteous, whereas the hatred that issues from envy is wicked.  How can we know the difference?  One telltale sign is the object of one’s hatred.  Is it what a person does?  Or the person himself?  Aquinas writes:

It is lawful to hate the sin in one's brother, and whatever pertains to the defect of Divine justice, but we cannot hate our brother's nature and grace without sin.  Now it is part of our love for our brother that we hate the fault and the lack of good in him, since desire for another’s good is equivalent to hatred of his evil.  Consequently the hatred of one's brother, if we consider it simply, is always sinful.  (Summa theologiae II-II.34.3)

Apt pupil

Justice Neil Gorsuch was a student of John Finnis, foremost proponent of the “New Natural Law Theory” (NNLT).  Is that relevant to understanding the Bostock decision?  It might seem not, given that NNLT thinkers like Robbie George (here and here) and Ryan Anderson have strongly criticized Gorsuch’s reasoning.

Locke’s “transubstantiation” of the self

Locke’s agnosticism about substance led him to treat the self as essentially a bundle of attributes.  Given his empiricism, he takes it that the most we can say of a substance – whether material or immaterial – is that it is a “something, I know not what” that underlies attributes.  And that is too thin a conception to lend confidence to the thesis that the self qua substance can survive death and be rewarded or punished in the afterlife.  What to do?  Locke’s solution was to ignore substance as beside the point.  What matters for Locke is that one’s consciousness, and in particular one’s memories, can carry over after the death of the body, whether or not there is a soul for them to inhere in.

Great minds on wokeness

If you want to understand woke totalitarianism, I recommend reading Plato on democracy, Aristotle and Aquinas on envy, and Nietzsche on ressentiment.
  

Or you could just watch a few minutes of John Cleese, Seinfeld, South Park, and Family Guy.   (But do it soon, before it’s all removed.)

Theology and the analytic a posteriori

Philosophers traditionally distinguish between analytic and synthetic propositions.  An analytic proposition is one that is true or false by virtue of the relations between its constituent concepts.  A stock example is “All bachelors are unmarried,” which is true because the concept of being unmarried is included in the concept of being a bachelor.  A synthetic proposition is true by virtue of something beyond the relations between its constituent concepts.  For example, the proposition “Some bachelors are lonely” is true by virtue of a contingent empirical relation between being a bachelor and being lonely, rather than a necessary conceptual relation between them.

Pod people

With woke fanatics suddenly overrunning The New York Times, the public health profession, peaceful protests, and even the knitting community (!), life in these United States is starting to look a little like the 1978 sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers.  If you’re looking for something timely to watch this evening, I recommend it.  (It’s a great flick anyway.) 

The metaphor is near perfect.  People are transformed into robotic pod people only after first falling asleep and (get this) waking up.  One moment they’re polite fellow citizens, the next they are all gaping maws, shrieking at you so as to summon the rest of the mob over for reeducation or a beat down.  After their transformation, even longtime friends and loved ones suddenly turn on you.  And in a nice touch, much of the focus of the movie is on the pod people’s commandeering of… the local health department.

If you want to turn it into film festival, next rent The Last Emperor and check out its chilling portrayal of the Maoist Red Guard.  (Some of our wokesters have apparently seen it, and thought it a “How to” video.)

And then, to see where this mentality leads if unchecked, The Killing Fields. 

What “the science” is saying this week (Updated)

Andrew Sullivan calls our attention to epidemiologist Tara C. Smith, who moves with that curious herd of “experts” suddenly not terribly concerned about social distancing when the protesters filling the streets are left-wing rather than right-wing.  Writes Sullivan: “The message to normies: going outside is killing grandma. The message to woke kids: never mind!”

So which is it?  Were people like Smith lying before about the danger of spreading the virus, in order to promote a political agenda?  Or being honest about it but now willing to endanger countless lives, in order to promote a political agenda?

Metaphysical taxidermy

I’ve often emphasized that the reason consciousness poses such a persistent problem for materialism has less to do with consciousness itself than it has to do with the desiccated conception of matter that we’ve inherited from early modern philosophy and science.  Barry Dainton makes the same point a couple of times in his book Self.  For example, he writes:

The lockdown is no longer morally justifiable

As I have said before, I think that the lockdown that was put in place in the United States two months ago was morally justifiable given the circumstances at the time.  In my opinion, under current circumstances, it is no longer morally justifiable.  To be sure, I am not denying that some social distancing measures are still justifiable and even necessary.  I am also not denying that a more modest lockdown may still be defensible in some localities.  But the draconian total lockdown that was put in place across most of the country is at this point no longer defensible, and state and local authorities who are relaxing it are right to do so.

Oderberg on the hierarchy of being

In February, David Oderberg gave a lecture in Oxford on the theme “Recovering the Hierarchy of Being.”  You can now watch it on YouTube.  Be sure also to check out David’s new book The Metaphysics of Good and Evil (about which you can find information at the publisher’s website).

The lockdown and appeals to authority

Here are two things every serious student of logical fallacies understands.  First, if what is at issue is the soundness of an argument, then the motives and expertise of the person giving the argument are completely irrelevant.  To fail to see this is to commit an ad hominem fallacy of “poisoning the well.”  Second, if what is at issue is the credibility of expert testimony, then the motives and expertise of the person giving the testimony are highly relevant.  To fail to see this is to commit a fallacy of “appeal to authority.”

Presentism and analogical language

Terms are used univocally when they are used in the same sense, as the word “bat” is in both “The baseball player swung the bat” and “The cricket player swung the bat.”  Terms are used equivocally when why are used in completely unrelated senses, as the term “bat” is in “The baseball player swung the bat” and “A bat flew in through Bruce Wayne’s window.”  The analogical use of terms is a middle ground kind of usage.  I gave an example when discussing Aristotelian realism in my recent First Things review of William Lane Craig’s book God Over All:

Joe Biden Superstar

For something lighter as you go into the weekend, have a listen to songstress Hannah Hoffman’s “You Know the Thing,” a setting to music of Joe Biden’s deep thoughts on the foundations of human rights.  This promises to become something of a new genre, given that we’ve already had The Gregory Brothers’ now-classic Biden-penned hit “Hairy Legs.”  Certainly you can take it to the bank that Biden will keep providing us with interesting lyrics.

While you’re at it, you should check out also the jazzy Ms. Hoffman’s philosophical tunes “Euthyphro,”  “Fallacy Funk,” and “The Trolley Problem.”

The burden of proof is on those who impose burdens (Updated)

I have argued both that the lockdown was a justifiable initial reaction to the Covid-19 crisis, and that skeptics ought nevertheless to be listened to, and listened to more earnestly the longer the lockdown goes on.  Here’s one front line doctor who argues that it has gone on long enough and should be eased up.  Is he right?  Maybe, though I don’t have the expertise to answer with certainty, and I’m not addressing that question here anyway.  What I am sure of is this much: The burden of proof is not in the first place on him and people of like mind to show that the lockdown should be ended.  The burden is on defenders of the lockdown to show that it shouldn’t be.

Links for the lockdown

Thomas Osborne’s new book Aquinas’s Ethics, part of the Cambridge Elements series, is available online for free for a month.

How should a Thomist deal with a pandemic?  Robert Koons proposes some general principles, at Public Discourse.

At Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Thomas Nagel reviews Richard Swinburne’s Are We Bodies or Souls?

Kremer on classical theism

At YouTube, philosopher Elmar Kremer provides a useful multi-part introduction to the dispute between classical theism and theistic personalism, as part of the Wireless Philosophy video series.  Here are links to each of the installments:

The lockdown’s loyal opposition

At First Things, Fr. Thomas Joseph White has defended the Covid-19 lockdown, whereas Rusty Reno has criticized it.  As I said last week, I agree with Fr. Thomas Joseph but I also believe that reason, charity, and the common good require serious engagement with skeptics like Rusty – and that this is more true, rather than less, the longer the lockdown goes on.  Meanwhile, at The Bulwark, conservative lockdown defender Jonathan V. Last tells us that he won’t link even to Fr. Thomas Joseph’s article, let alone Rusty’s.  The reason is that Fr. Thomas Joseph’s article “made matters worse, not better” by granting “legitimacy” to the idea that “there are really two sides to the issue, and that reasonable and intelligent people can disagree.”  He compares Rusty’s skepticism to that of flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers.

Review of Scientism

My brief review of the anthology Scientism: Prospects and Problems, edited by Jeroen de Ridder, Rik Peels, and René van Woudenberg, appears in the December 2019 issue of Review of Metaphysics.  (The preview you see in that link leaves out only the last paragraph and a half or so of the review.)

The lesson of the Resurrection

The lesson of the Resurrection is that the significance of our bodily life and its sufferings should be neither overstated nor understated.  It is to see the middle ground between materialism and Platonism.  In our decadent sensualist age, the anti-materialist message is perhaps the more obvious one.  The secularist can see no fate worse than unfulfilled earthly ambitions, unhappy marriages, unpaid bills, poor health, and the deathbed.  And no greater good than the avoidance of such things.  Woody Allen captures the mindset well: “Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering – and it’s all over much too soon.” 

Some thoughts on the COVID-19 crisis

I commend to you Fr. Thomas Joseph White’s First Things essay on the COVID-19 situation and the bishops’ response to it.  It exhibits his characteristic good sense and charity.  First Things editor Rusty Reno, with whom Fr. Thomas Joseph disagrees, exhibits his characteristic magnanimity and intellectual honesty in running it.  My sympathies are with Fr. Thomas Joseph’s views rather than Rusty’s, but I have been appalled by the nastiness of others who have responded to Rusty (who is a good man and a serious thinker and writer who deserves to be engaged with seriously).  Our situation calls for patience with one another and the calm exchange of opposing views, for the sake of the common good.  Too many have instead treated the debate over COVID-19 as an extension of hostilities that pre-existed the crisis.  This is gravely contrary to reason and charity.

Damnation denialism

Here’s a narrative we’re all by now familiar with.  Call it Narrative A:

Those who initially downplayed the dangers of COVID-19 were guilty of wishful thinking, as are those who think the crisis can be resolved either easily or soon.  This is what the experts tell us, and we should listen to them.  Even though those most at risk of death from the novel coronavirus are the elderly and those with preexisting medical conditions, this is a large group.  Moreover, many people who won’t die from the virus will still suffer greatly, and even those with mild symptoms or none at all can still infect others.  Draconian measures are called for, even at the risk of massive unemployment, the undoing of people’s retirement plans, and the depletion of their savings.  Better safe than sorry.  To resist these hard truths is to be guilty of “coronavirus denialism.”

Franklin on Aristotelian realism and mathematics

At YouTube, mathematician and philosopher James Franklin, author of An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics, offers a brief introduction to the subject.  Also check out the website he and some others have devoted to Aristotelian realism, as well as Franklin’s personal website.

A public lecture on mathematics and ethics that Franklin is scheduled to give on April 2 will, in light of the COVID-19 situation, be pre-recorded and posted online.

Craig, conventionalism, and voluntarism

At his personal Facebook page and also at the Reasonable Faith Facebook page, William Lane Craig briefly comments on my First Things review of his book God Over All.  Bill says:

For our philosophically inclined readers who are interested in divine aseity and Platonism, here's a great little philosophical exercise: Where does this review by Ed Feser go wrong? (Hint: do I hold that mathematical truth is conventional? Why think I should?)

Aquinas anticipated everything

So notes a friend who sent me this image of the cover of a dissertation from the 1950s.  (No doubt the author was using the phrase in a different sense than has now become familiar.  Any guesses as to the true subject matter?)

Craig contra the truthmaker objection to presentism

Presentism holds that, in the temporal realm (that is to say, apart from eternal and aeviternal entities), only present objects and events exist.  Now, if statements about past events and objects are true, then there must be something that makes them true.  But in that case, the “truthmaker objection” to presentism holds, past objects and events must exist.  I’ve argued in previous posts that this objection is greatly overrated.  Indeed, for the reasons I gave there, I can’t myself fathom what all the fuss is about.  William Lane Craig seems to agree.  In his book God Over All (which I reviewed recently in First Things), he has occasion briefly to address the issue.  Craig writes:

Coronavirus complications

For reasons most of which have to do directly or indirectly with the COVID-19 coronavirus situation, none of the remaining public lectures for the first half or so of the year that I had announced a couple of months ago will occur.  (There are still events planned for the latter half of the year, which I will announce closer to the time.)

Also, in light of the situation, my college, like many others, has abruptly transitioned to online teaching.  The resulting new workload promises to be as heavy as it was sudden and unexpected. 

I fully intend to keep this blog going to doomsday and beyond, but if things temporarily get a little slower here in the next couple of weeks as I adjust to this new reality, that is why!

Review of Craig’s God Over All

My review of William Lane Craig’s book God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism appears in the April 2020 issue of First Things.  You can read it online here.

On-topic open thread (and a word on trolls)

Folks, please don’t post off-topic comments in the comboxes.  I will delete them, and any responses to them, as soon as I see them, and (since I don’t always see them immediately) sometimes that means that a long thread will develop that is destined to end up in the ether.  Remember, if your comment begins with something like “This is off topic, but…,” then it isn’t a comment you should be posting.  And remember too, there is always that remedy for concupiscence known as the open thread.  Here’s the latest.  This time, everything is on topic, from acid jazz to Thomas Szasz, from Family Guy to Strong AI, from the coronavirus to Miley Cyrus.

The other way to lose a war

Rod Dreher comments on the U.S. deal with the Taliban to withdraw, at long last, from Afghanistan.  He writes: “The Taliban whipped… the United States… We simply could not prevail.  The richest and most powerful nation in the world could not beat these SOBs.”  Well, that’s obviously not true in the usual sense of words like “whipped” and “beat.”  Suppose you effortlessly beat me to a bloody pulp and I fall to the ground, desperately panting for air and barely conscious.  You put your boot on my neck and demand that I cry “Uncle.”  I refuse, despite your repeated kicks to the gut, and after fifteen minutes or so of this you get bored and walk away.  It would be quite absurd if, wiping the blood off my face and pulling myself up to my wobbling knees, I proudly exclaim: “Did you see how I whipped that guy?”

Agere sequitur esse and the First Way

Aquinas’s First Way is also known as the argument from motion to an Unmoved Mover.  The most natural way to read it is as an argument to the effect that things could not change at any given moment if there were no divine cause keeping the change going.  But some Thomists have read it instead as an argument to the effect that changing things could not even exist at any given moment if there were no divine cause keeping them in being.  That’s the reading I propose in my book Aquinas and my ACPQ article “Existential Inertia and the Five Ways,” and it’s a line of argument I develop and defend in greater depth in chapter 1 of Five Proofs of the Existence of God.

Morgan on Aristotle’s Revenge

At The Imaginative Conservative, Prof. Jason Morgan kindly reviews my book Aristotle’s Revenge.  From the review:

In 456 very well-written pages… (followed by a treasure trove of a bibliography), Dr. Feser shows in Aristotle’s Revenge that, point for point, Aristotle got science right, or as right as he could given the limitations in instrumentation and communication with other researchers during his time.  Scientists since the so-called Enlightenment have been trying to detach Aristotle’s greatest insight, the telos of things, from the world around them.  But the telos is the linchpin of the material world, so without it, everything, as is apparent from most philosophy lectures one attends nowadays, or nearly any philosophy book one reads, falls apart…

The socialist state as an occasionalist god

Hobbes famously characterized his Leviathan state as a mortal god.  Here’s another theological analogy, or set of analogies, which might illuminate the differences between kinds of political and economic orders – and in particular, the differences between socialism, libertarianism, and the middle ground natural law understanding of the state.

Recall that there are three general accounts of divine causality vis-à-vis the created order: occasionalism, mere conservationism, and concurrentism (to borrow Fred Freddoso’s classification).

Sandstad and Jansen on Aristotle’s Revenge

At the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, philosophers Petter Sandstad and Ludger Jansen review my book Aristotle’s Revenge.  From the review:

Feser’s book adds to a growing body of literature on neo-Aristotelian approaches in metaphysics and the philosophy of science.  However, Feser stands out from other analytic neo-Aristotelians with his in-depth knowledge and discussion of 20^th and 21^st century neo-Thomistic literature, and one can learn a lot from reading this book…

Discussion with Graham Oppy

Earlier today on Cameron Bertuzzi’s Capturing Christianity program, I had a very pleasant and fruitful live exchange with Graham Oppy.  You can watch it on YouTube.  This is the second exchange Oppy and I have had on the show.  The first was last July, and you can still watch that on YouTube as well.  In that earlier exchange we discussed my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God.  The book comes up in the latest exchange as well, as does Oppy’s Religious Studies article “On stage one of Feser’s ‘Aristotelian proof.’”

Review of Kerr

My review of Gaven Kerr’s excellent book Aquinas's Way to God: The Proof in De Ente et Essentia appears in the current issue of The Thomist (Vol. 83, No. 2).

Preternatural theology

Natural theology is traditionally distinguished from revealed theology.  Natural theology is concerned with knowledge about God’s existence and nature that is available to us via the use of our natural cognitive faculties, such as by way of philosophical arguments.  It does not require an appeal to any special divine revelation, whether embodied in scripture, the teachings of a prophet backed by miracles, or what have you.  There might happen to be teachings in some source of special divine revelation that overlap with the deliverances of natural theology, but what makes something a matter of natural theology is that it can at least in principle be known apart from that.