Neo-Scholastic Essays

I am pleased to announce the publication of Neo-Scholastic Essays, a collection of previously published academic articles of mine from the last decade, along with some previously unpublished papers and other material.  Here are the cover copy and table of contents:

In a series of publications over the course of a decade, Edward Feser has argued for the defensibility and abiding relevance to issues in contemporary philosophy of Scholastic ideas and arguments, and especially of Aristotelian-Thomistic ideas and arguments.  This work has been in the vein of what has come to be known as “analytical Thomism,” though the spirit of the project goes back at least to the Neo-Scholasticism of the period from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth.
 

Neo-Scholastic Essays collects some of Feser’s academic papers from the last ten years on themes in metaphysics and philosophy of nature, natural theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics.  Among the diverse topics covered are: the relationship between Aristotelian and Newtonian conceptions of motion; the varieties of teleological description and explanation; the proper interpretation of Aquinas’s Five Ways; the impossibility of a materialist account of the human intellect; the philosophies of mind of Kripke, Searle, Popper, and Hayek; the metaphysics of value; the natural law understanding of the ethics of private property and taxation; a critique of political libertarianism; and the defensibility and indispensability to a proper understanding of sexual morality of the traditional “perverted faculty argument.”

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Metaphysics and philosophy of nature

1. Motion in Aristotle, Newton, and Einstein

2. Teleology: A Shopper’s Guide

3. On Aristotle, Aquinas, and Paley: A Reply to Marie George

Natural theology

4. Natural Theology Must Be Grounded in the Philosophy of Nature, Not in Natural Science

5. Existential Inertia and the Five Ways

6. The New Atheists and the Cosmological Argument

7. Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way

8. Why McGinn is a Pre-Theist

9. The Road from Atheism

Philosophy of mind

10. Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought

11. Hayek, Popper, and the Causal Theory of the Mind

12. Why Searle is a Property Dualist

Ethics

13. Being, the Good, and the Guise of the Good

14. Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation

15. Self-Ownership, Libertarianism, and Impartiality

16. In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument