Dumsday and Vallicella on Neo-Scholastic Essays

At Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, philosopher Travis Dumsday kindly reviews my book Neo-Scholastic Essays.  From the review:

Edward Feser writes as an historically informed Thomist who is also thoroughly conversant with the analytic tradition…

[T]his volume nicely exhibits Feser's clear writing style and uncommonly strong facility with both the Scholastic and analytic traditions. Those of us attempting to integrate these traditions can profit from his example.

Summarizing and commenting on the contents of the book, Dumsday focuses on those essays concerned with topics in metaphysics, philosophy of nature, and natural theology.  When discussing my essay on Aristotelian and Newtonian accounts of motion, he summarizes one of the points I make as follows:

Aristotelian natural philosophy and Newtonian science are addressing different domains: the former seeks underlying causes and natures, while the latter seeks merely the accurate mathematical description of observed regularities. As such they cannot conflict.

Dumsday then goes on to comment:                                                

I would dispute that fifth point, at least when taken as a characterization of the aims of contemporary physicists. It smacks of the anti-realist perspective that remains far too prevalent in analytic philosophy of science; in fact physicists are typically after underlying causes and real natures, not merely mathematical description and accurate prediction. For better or worse, Scholastic philosophy of nature and the natural sciences constitute partially overlapping magisteria. (Elsewhere in this volume Feser seems to turn away from scientific anti-realism; see especially his approving comments concerning the work of Nancy Cartwright on 82, 191, and 328. There is a tension here. However, in Feser's most in-depth discussion of the disciplinary boundaries of physics (Scholastic Metaphysics 2014, 12-18) the tendency is again toward anti-realism, or at best a version of structural realism.)

A couple of remarks in response to this: First, where philosophy of physics is concerned, I wouldn’t call myself an anti-realist, certainly not as a way of characterizing my general position.  If one insists on a label, “a version of structural realism” (as Dumsday suggests in passing) would be a better one, though here too qualifications would be in order.  Anyway, I agree that “Scholastic philosophy of nature and the natural sciences constitute partially overlapping magisteria.” 

But second, I’m reluctant to endorse any single, across-the-board label, because the different areas of modern physics (not to mention modern science more generally) each raise difficult metaphysical issues of their own and to some extent need to be treated in a case-by-case way.  (The difficult issues arise, by the way, whether or not one is an Aristotelian.  Needless to say, modern science is, empirically, a great success story.  But metaphysically it is something of a mess.)  Anyway, this is a set of topics I will be saying much more about in the book on the philosophy of nature on which I am working.

Commenting on my essay “Natural Theology Must be Grounded in the Philosophy of Nature, Not in Natural Science,” which calls for a return to Aristotelian-Scholastic foundations in natural theology, Dumsday writes:

While I agree with Feser on the distinctive strengths of a natural theology rooted in Scholastic philosophy of nature, he is too hard on early modern mechanistic thought and its contemporary analogues. As Robert Boyle and others pointed out at the time, certain cosmological arguments can actually be run more simply on an ontology of corpuscularianism + extrinsic governing laws than on hylomorphism. (And contra Feser, these needn't be seen as leading no further than a desiccated deism -- there are potential routes to classical theism here.) Further, the early modern switch from an Aristotelian conception of time as merely the measure of motion to time as a real background condition provided fuel for new cosmological arguments unavailable to Scholastics (e.g., the argument that the persistence of the temporal stream itself requires an extrinsic sustaining cause). And the core Thomistic argument from the real distinction between essence and existence in finite substances can be run on any philosophy of nature. (Admittedly that last claim would require considerable elaboration, including development of the arguably un-Thomistic idea that the essence vs. existence distinction needn't be formulated in terms of potency vs. act.)

Dumsday makes three points here: first, the one about Boyle and cosmological arguments; second, the one about the persistence of the temporal stream as in need of a sustaining cause; and third, the one about the status of the real distinction between essence and existence on non-Aristotelian philosophies of nature.

I am dubious about the first and third points.  I’d need to see the specifics of a cosmological argument run on an ontology of “corpuscularianism + extrinsic governing laws,” and of an appeal to essence and existence which is not “formulated in terms of potency vs. act,” and Dumsday doesn’t offer examples (which is fair enough given that it’s a book review rather than a full-length treatment of the issue).  The essay of mine Dumsday is commenting on purports to show that the theory of act and potency is needed in any successful cosmological argument, so that without offering specifics, Dumsday’s remarks by themselves don’t really give a reason to think that I’m mistaken but only express the opinion that I am mistaken. 

The second point, about time, does offer a specific example, and a very interesting one.  However, I would say that an “argument that the persistence of the temporal stream itself requires an extrinsic sustaining cause” would, when fully spelled out, still require an appeal to the theory of act and potency, so that the example doesn’t really affect the main point of my essay.  Anyway, time is another subject which will be dealt with at length in the forthcoming philosophy of nature book.

Bill Vallicella also kindly calls attention to my book.  Commenting on my workload, Bill writes: “The phenomenal Edward Feser.  How does he do it?”  But Bill should know that the phenomenal Edward Feser is a mere appearance rather than a ding an sich, and that he “does” things only insofar as we bring to bear on our experience of him the category of causality.  What Bill should be asking is how the noumenal Edward Feser does it.  Unfortunately, as Kant showed, that question is unanswerable.

But seriously, ladies and germs, if you’re interested in further information about Neo-Scholastic Essays, the cover copy and table of contents can be found here.