Ryle on microphysics and the everyday world

Science, we’re often told, gives us a description of the world radically at odds with common sense.  Physicist Arthur Eddington’s famous “two tables” example illustrates the theme.  There is, on the one hand, the table familiar from everyday experience – the extended, colored, solid, stable thing you might be sitting at as you read this.  Then there’s the scientific table – a vast aggregate of colorless particles in fields of force, mostly empty space rather a single continuous object, and revealed by theory rather than sensory perception.  What is the relationship between them?  Should we say, as is often done, that the first table is an illusion and only the second real?

What is free speech for?

In a new article at Postliberal Order, I discuss the teleological foundations of, and limitations on, the right to free speech, as these are understood from the perspective of traditional natural law theory’s approach to questions about natural rights.

All One in Christ at Public Discourse

At Public Discourse, John F. Doherty kindly reviews my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory.  From the review:

In Feser’s book, Catholics, other Christians, and even non-Christians will find much to help them confront CRT and the perennial challenges of living in a racially diverse society…

Critical race theorists routinely use confusing, tough-to-pin-down logical fallacies.  Feser does us the service of laying these fallacies out methodically and succinctly…

For anyone who knows nothing about CRT, All One in Christ is an excellent place to start.  It has a decidedly negative perspective on the movement, but Feser takes pains to be fair to his opponents.

The Thomist's middle ground in natural theology

The Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition holds that knowledge must begin with sensory experience but that it can nevertheless go well beyond anything that experience could directly reveal.  Its empiricism is of a moderate kind consistent with the high ambitions of traditional metaphysics.  For example, beginning a posteriori with the fact that change occurs, it claims to be able to demonstrate the existence of a divine Prime Unmoved Mover.  Similarly demonstrable, it maintains, are the immateriality and immortality of the soul.

Two crucial components of this picture of human knowledge are the theses that concepts are irreducible to sensations and mental images, but can nevertheless be abstracted from imagery by the intellect.  As I have discussed before, a key difference between the Aristotelian-Thomistic position on the one hand and early modern forms of rationalism and empiricism on the other is that each of the latter kept one of these Aristotelian-Thomistic theses while rejecting the other.  Rationalism maintained the thesis that concepts are irreducible to sensations and mental images, but concluded that many or all concepts therefore could not in any way be derived from them.  Hence, rationalists concluded, many or all concepts must be innate.  Modern empiricism held on to the thesis that concepts derive from mental imagery, but concluded that they must not really be distinct from them.  Hence the modern empiricist tendency toward “imagism,” the view that a concept just is an image (or an image together with a general term).

Cartwright on reductionism in science

In her superb recent book A Philosopher Looks at Science, Nancy Cartwright revisits some of the longstanding themes of her work in the philosophy of science.  In an earlier post, I discussed what she has to say in the first chapter about theory and experiment.  Let’s look now at what she says in her second chapter about reductionism, of which she has long been critical. 

Reductionism does not have quite the same hold in philosophy of science that it once did, having been subjected to powerful attack not only from Cartwright, but from Paul Feyerabend, John Dupré, and many others.  (I discuss the anti-reductionist literature in detail in Aristotle’s Revenge.)  Still, the idea that whatever is real is somehow ultimately nothing more than what can in principle be described in the language of a completed physics exerts a powerful hold on many.  Cartwright cites James Ladyman and Don Ross as adherents of this view, and Alex Rosenberg is another prominent advocate.  As Cartwright notes, in contemporary writing about science, the lure of reductionism is especially evident in discussions of the purported implications of neuroscience for topics like free will.

Thomism and the Nouvelle Théologie

My review of Jon Kirwan and Matthew Minerd’s important new anthology The Thomistic Response to the Nouvelle Théologie appears in the November 2023 issue of First Things.

A little logic is a dangerous thing

Some famous and lovely lines from Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism” observe:

A little learning is a dangerous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

And drinking largely sobers us again.

Think of the person who has read one book on a subject and suddenly thinks he knows everything.  Or the beginning student of philosophy whose superficial encounter with skeptical arguments leads him to deny that we can know anything.  A deeper inquiry, if only it were pursued, would in each case yield a more balanced judgement.

Michael F. Flynn (1947-2023)

It is with much sadness that I report that Michael F. Flynn, well-known science fiction writer and longtime friend of this blog, has passed away.  Mike’s daughter made the announcement at his blog yesterday. 

That Mike will be remembered for his work in science fiction goes without saying.  But it is worth emphasizing too that he was an irreplaceable presence in the blogosphere, who showed the potential of the medium for work of substance and lasting value.  I doubt he ever posted anything that didn’t reward his readers’ attention, with writing that wore lightly Mike’s learning not only in the sciences but also in philosophy, theology, and history.  He was for many years a regular and welcome contributor to the comments section of this blog, raising the tone simply by virtue of his presence.  One of the things I most admired about him was the calm and patient manner with which he would respond to even the most obnoxious and ignorant interlocutors.  He never had to say that he knew what he was talking about, while his opponent didn’t.  He simply showed it by typing up a few sentences.

Aquinas on the will’s fixity after death

My essay “Aquinas on the Fixity of the Will After Death” appears in New Blackfriars.  (It’s behind a paywall, I’m afraid.)  Here’s the abstract:

Aquinas holds that after death, the human soul can no longer change its basic orientation either toward God or away from him.  He takes this to be knowable not only from divine revelation but by purely philosophical reasoning.  The heart of his position is that the basic orientation of an angelic will is fixed immediately after its creation, and that the human soul after death is relevantly like an angel.  This article expounds and defends Aquinas's position, paying special attention to the action theory underlying it.

Augustine on false community

In a new article at Postliberal Order, I discuss the perverse forms of human community identified and criticized by Augustine in the Confessions, and how what he has to say applies to our times.

The Death Penalty and Genesis 9:6: A Reply to Mastnjak (Guest article by Timothy Finlay)

Genesis 9:6 famously states: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image” (RSV). This has traditionally been understood by Jews and Christians alike as sanctioning capital punishment. In a recent article at Church Life Journal, Nathan Mastnjak has argued on grammatical grounds for an alternative reading of the passage, on which it does not support the death penalty. What follows is a guest article replying to Mastnjak by Timothy Finlay, who is Professor of Biblical Studies at Azusa Pacific University and a member of the National Association of Professors of Hebrew.

In his article, Nathan Mastnjak writes, “The translation ‘by a human shall that person’s blood be shed’ is not strictly impossible, but given the norms of Classical Hebrew grammar, it should be viewed as prima facie unlikely especially since there is a much more plausible translation that is contextually appropriate and grammatically mundane.” This has it completely backward. It is Mastnjak’s claim that the ב in Genesis 9:6 be construed as expressing price or exchange that, while not strictly impossible, flies in the face of Hebrew lexicons and grammars – in contrast to the standard translations (both Jewish and Christian) which are contextually and canonically appropriate and grammatically mundane.

Hartshorne on the project of natural theology

Process theism denies some of the key attributes ascribed to God by classical theism, such as immutability and impassibility.  Charles Hartshorne (1897-2000) was among its chief representatives.  As a Thomist, I am the opposite of sympathetic to process theism.  However, I’ve always found Hartshorne an interesting thinker.  Many twentieth-century philosophers had a regrettable tendency toward overspecialization, and also often ignored all but a handful of thinkers of the past.  Hartshorne, by contrast, was a philosopher of the old-fashioned stripe.  He addressed a wide variety of philosophical problems, was deeply read in the history of philosophy, and that history informed his work on contemporary issues.  He was also old-fashioned insofar as his theism (flawed though it was from my point of view) was integral to his more general metaphysics and ethics.  Like the greatest thinkers of the past, Hartshorne knew that the question of God was at the very heart of philosophy, not something that could be ignored by any serious philosopher, or at best tacked on to an otherwise complete system.

Fastiggi on Capital Punishment and the Change to the Catechism, Part II

In 2018, Pope Francis authorized a revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which now states that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”  This might be read as implying that capital punishment is intrinsically wrong, which would contradict scripture and two thousand years of magisterial teaching.  As a result, the change has been criticized as at least badly formulated.  In a recent four-part series at Where Peter Is, theologian Robert Fastiggi criticizes the critics of the revision.  The first part of my response to Fastiggi addressed what he has to say about the obligations of Catholics vis-à-vis the Magisterium of the Church.  In this second part, I will address what he says about the teaching of scripture, the Fathers, and previous popes on the topic of capital punishment.

Fastiggi on Capital Punishment and the Change to the Catechism, Part I

In 2018, Pope Francis revised the section of the Catechism of the Catholic Church dealing with the topic of capital punishment, so that it now states that “the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person.”  Flatly to assert that capital punishment is “an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person” might be read as implying that the death penalty is intrinsically evil, or immoral of its very nature and not just under the wrong circumstances.  Such a claim would contradict scripture and two millennia of consistent magisterial teaching.  For this reason, the revision has been criticized as at least badly formulated, even by some Catholic thinkers who support the abolition of capital punishment.  For example, after the revision was announced, an appeal was made by forty-five prominent Catholic academics and clergy to the cardinals of the Catholic Church to call upon the pope clearly to reaffirm traditional teaching on the subject.

Aquinas and Nietzsche on the politics of envy

Recently, I joined Postliberal Order as a regular contributor.  Today, my essay “Against the Politics of Envy” appears at the site.  It discusses Aquinas’s account of the nature and effects of the sin of envy, Nietzsche’s account of the nature and effects of ressentiment, and how woke politics is clearly an expression of envious ressentiment as Aquinas and Nietzsche understand it.

All One in Christ on EWTN Bookmark

Some time back I was interviewed about my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory for EWTN Bookmark with Doug Keck.  The episode airs on Sunday, August 27 at 10 a.m. ET.  It encores on Monday, August 28 at 5 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET, and on Saturday, September 2 at 9:30 a.m. ET.  Here’s the advert for the episode.

Haugeland on hylomorphism

In his essay “Ontological Supervenience” (in his anthology Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind), John Haugeland puts forward an unusual criticism of hylomorphism, essentially accusing it of being too parsimonious.  The standard objection to hylomorphism is that it posits more distinctions and entities than are necessary.  Haugeland suggests that it posits too few, thereby failing to capture all of reality.

Open-minded open thread

It’s time for an open thread.  So dust off those otherwise off-topic comments you’ve been aching to post.  Because from M.C. Escher to MC Hammer, from pick-up sticks to Kubrick flicks, from panpsychism to pan pizza, everything is now on-topic.  Just keep it civil and in good taste, as always.  Previous open threads archived here.

Stove and Searle on the rhetorical subversion of common sense

One of the stranger aspects of contemporary political and intellectual life is the frequency with which commentators put forward extremely dubious or even manifestly absurd claims as if they were obvious truths that no well-informed or decent person could deny.  Examples would be woke assertions to the effect that women have penises or that everything from professionalism to exercise to disliking body odor to getting a good night’s sleep is “racist.”  In his book The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies, David Stove characterized a similar rhetorical move sometimes made by philosophers as “reasoning from a sudden and violent solecism” (p. 142).

A comment on the Lofton affair

For any readers of my recent reply to Michael Lofton who have not been following events at Twitter and YouTube, Lofton has, over the course of the last few days, posted a series of tweets at the former and a series of videos at the latter strongly taking exception to my article.  I have to say that I am mystified at the number and vehemence of these responses.  But Lofton seems especially angry about my characterization of his initial video as “defamatory” and “libel.”  What follows are some brief remarks that I hope will put his mind at ease and allow us to move on from this affair.

Lofton’s YouTube straw man (Updated)

There’s a popular mode of online intellectual discourse that I rather dislike, which might be labeled “the extended YouTube hot take.”  It involves a talking head riffing, for an hour or so, on something someone has written on a complex philosophical or theological topic (an article, a book, a lecture, or whatever).  My impatience with this kind of thing is no doubt partly generational, but there is more to it than that.  The written form is more conducive to intellectual discipline.  A good article on a philosophical or theological topic, even when written for a popular rather than academic audience, requires the careful exposition of ideas and lines of argument, both the writer’s own and those of anyone he’s responding to.  It also has to be clearly written and well-organized.  You can’t achieve all this by simply pouring out on the page whatever pops into your stream of consciousness.  It takes time, and as a writer tries to whip a piece into shape, he’s likely to mull over the ideas and come to see flaws in interpretation and reasoning he would otherwise have overlooked.  A video, because it is so much quicker and easier to make, is for that very reason likelier to be of considerably lower intellectual quality. 

What is classical theism?

Recently, I was interviewed by John DeRosa for the Classical Theism Podcast.  The focus of our discussion is my essay “What is Classical Theism?,” which appears in the anthology Classical Theism: New Essays on the Metaphysics of God, edited by Jonathan Fuqua and Robert C. Koons.  We also address some other matters, such as the book on the soul that I’m currently working on.  You can listen to the interview here.

Archbishop Fernandez’s clarification

Recently, it was announced that Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernandez would become the new prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF).  As I noted in an article last week, Pope Francis has stated that he wants the DDF under the new prefect to operate in a “very different” way than it has in the past, when “possible doctrinal errors were pursued.”  The archbishop himself has said that he wants the DDF to pursue “dialogue” and to avoid “persecutions and condemnations” or “the imposition of a single way of thinking.”  He also indicated that he took this to mark a difference from the way the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (as the DDF was known until recently) has operated in recent decades.  As I argued in the article, the logical implication of the pope’s and archbishop’s words seemed to be that the DDF would largely no longer be exercising its traditional teaching function. 

Cardinal Newman, Archbishop Fernandez, and the “suspended Magisterium” thesis

St. John Henry Newman famously noted that during the Arian crisis, “the governing body of the Church came short” in fighting the heresy, and orthodoxy was preserved primarily by the laity.  “The Catholic people,” he says, “were the obstinate champions of Catholic truth, and the bishops were not.”  Even Pope Liberius temporarily caved in to pressure to accept an ambiguous formula and to condemn St. Athanasius, the great champion of orthodoxy.  Newman wrote:

The body of the Episcopate was unfaithful to its commission, while the body of the laity was faithful to its baptism… at one time the pope, at other times a patriarchal, metropolitan, or other great see, at other times general councils, said what they should not have said, or did what obscured and compromised revealed truth; while, on the other hand, it was the Christian people, who, under Providence, were the ecclesiastical strength of Athanasius, Hilary, Eusebius of Vercellae, and other great solitary confessors, who would have failed without them.

The vice of insensibility

Temperance or moderation is the virtue governing the enjoyment of sensory pleasures.  In particular, and as Aquinas says, “temperance is properly about pleasures of meat and drink and sexual pleasures.”  These pleasures reflect our bodily nature (which is why angels, unlike us, neither need the virtue of temperance nor exhibit the vices opposed to it).  Specifically, they reflect our needs for self-preservation and for preservation of the species.  Eating and drinking exist in order to meet the first need and sex exists in order to meet the second.  The pleasures associated with these activities exist in turn so that we will be drawn to carrying them out.  And temperance is needed so that the pleasures will perform that motivating task successfully.  In short, temperance exists in order that we will be drawn to the right kinds of sensory pleasures and to the right degree; those pleasures exist for the sake of encouraging eating, drinking, and sexual intercourse at the right times and in the right ways; and those actions exist, in turn, in order that the individual and species will carry on.

Pilkington responds

Philip Pilkington sent me a response to my reply to his American Postliberal article. I thank him for it and am happy to post it here:

Feser's response to my piece is a welcome effort at clarification. We need such clarification if postliberalism and related thought is to move from the abstract to the concrete. Here I will address the key points, as best I can.

Postliberalism, economics, and culture

I commend to you economist Philip Pilkington’s fine essay “Towards a Postliberal Political Economy,” at The American Postliberal.  It is in part a response to my recent Postliberal Order article “In Defense of Culture War.”  It seems to me that we are essentially in agreement, and that for the most part the essays complement rather than contradict one another.  But there might be some differences over details, or at least of emphasis.  Let’s take a look.

In defense of culture war

From Marxists on the left to former House Speaker Paul Ryan on the right, many voices in the political discussion assure us that the “culture war” is a distraction and that what matter most are economic issues.  But economic order has cultural prerequisites, and indeed economic phenomena themselves cannot even be conceptualized apart from cultural presuppositions.  I make the case for the priority of culture to economics in my essay “In Defense of Culture War,” which appears this week at Postliberal Order.

The associationist mindset

When Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers say that human beings are by nature rational animals, they don’t mean that human beings always reason logically (which, of course, is obviously not the case).  They mean that human beings by nature have the capacity for reason, unlike other animals.  Whether they exercise that capacity well is another question.  Human beings are often irrational, but you have to have the capacity for reason to be irrational.  A dog or a tree doesn’t even rise to the level of irrationality.  They are non-rational, not irrational.

Reconsidering corporal punishment

Debates about crime and punishment today typically concern disagreements about the death penalty, or about the length, and in some cases the appropriateness, of prison sentences.  Largely neglected is the topic of corporal punishment – the infliction of bodily pain as a penalty for an offense.  No doubt many will regard the very idea as a relic of a less enlightened age.  But that is not a view shared universally.  And the practice made headlines in the West within living memory, when, in 1994, the American teenager Michael Fay was caned in Singapore for vandalism (specifically, for stealing road signs and damaging a number of cars).

Hell and conditional prophecy

In a recent talk at the Angelicum (which can be viewed at YouTube), Fr. Simon Gaine addresses the question of whether scripture teaches that some will in fact be damned.  He notes that certain prophecies of Christ might seem to imply this, but suggests that they may plausibly be read as conditional prophecies rather than descriptions of what will in fact happen.  Let’s take a look at his argument.

Capital punishment and the law of nations

What is the nature of Pope Francis’s 2018 change to the Catechism’s teaching on capital punishment?  Does it amount to a reversal of traditional teaching?  A development of doctrine that is consistent with that teaching?  A prudential judgment?  And if the latter, is assent to the new formulation binding on the faithful?  Barrett Turner offers an important analysis in his Nova et Vetera article “Pope Francis and the Death Penalty: A Conditional Advance of Justice in the Law of Nations.”  Let’s take a look.

Substance, teleology, and intentionality

There is an illuminating parallel between the traditional Aristotelian distinction between substances, artifacts, and aggregates, and the distinction John Searle draws between intrinsic intentionality, derived intentionality, and as-if intentionality.  This might seem odd given that the Aristotelian distinction is concerned with very general questions about the metaphysics of physical objects, whereas Searle is concerned with a very specific topic in the philosophy of mind.  But on closer inspection the parallel is quite natural and obvious, and the connecting link is the notion of teleology.  Let’s first consider each distinction, and then we’ll be in a position to see the parallels.

A Festschrift for Gyula Klima

My essay “Truth as a Transcendental” appears in the Festschrift Metaphysics Through Semantics: The Philosophical Recovery of the Medieval Mind: Essays in Honor of Gyula Klima, edited by Joshua P. Hochschild, Turner C. Nevitt, Adam Wood, and Gábor Borbély.  Gyula’s work has contributed mightily to the revival of interest in medieval and Scholastic philosophy, and this honor is most deserved and welcome!  You can check out the table of contents at Josh Hochschild’s Twitter feed or at the publisher’s website. 

The Catechism and Capital Punishment: A Reply to Annett

Some years back, in my article “Three questions for Catholic opponents of capital punishment,” I argued that Pope Francis’s statements on the death penalty cannot plausibly be read in a way that would make assent to them binding on Catholics.  This week, in an article at Where Peter Is, Tony Annett offers a reply.  Let’s take a look.

Hazony and Gottfried on wokeism and Marxism

Right-wingers often characterize wokeism as a kind of Marxism, and left-wingers routinely dismiss the characterization as a cheap smear that reflects ignorance of Marxist theory.  Who is right?  In his book Conservatism: A Rediscovery, Yoram Hazony argues that there is indeed a significant link between wokeism and Marxism.  Paul Gottfried responds at Chronicles, arguing that the similarities between the two have been overstated.  Let’s take a look at their arguments.

What is a Law of Nature?

Some time back I gave a lecture at Fermilab on the topic “What is a Law of Nature?”  I’ve posted the text of the lecture at my main website.  You can watch the video of the lecture either at the Fermilab website or at YouTube.

All One in Christ on EWTN Live

Recently I recorded an interview about my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory for the television program EWTN Live with Fr. Mitch Pacwa.  The show airs today – at 5 pm Pacific time, again at 10:30 pm, and then tomorrow morning (Thursday) at 7 am.  The recording will be available for viewing later at the show’s website and at YouTube.

Talking philosophy and natural theology

Recently, on the Thomistic Institute’s Off-Campus Conversations program, Fr. Gregory Pine and I had a discussion about Aquinas’s Five Ways, their metaphysical presuppositions, and the moral and spiritual preconditions of doing philosophy well.  You can watch it at YouTube or listen to it at Soundcloud.

Strawson on free will and interpersonal relationships

In his classic paper “Freedom and Resentment,” P. F. Strawson addresses the question of what difference the widespread acceptance of determinism would make to our everyday ways of dealing with each other.  He judges that our commonsense conception of human behavior is too deeply rooted in our nature to be dislodged even in such a scenario.  As in Strawson’s other work, he urges attention to details of ordinary experience that are ineliminable but often overlooked by revisionist systems of metaphysics.