Harrington on “Thomophobia”

Earlier this month, British author Mary Harrington delivered a First Things Lecture titled “Our Crisis is Metaphysical” in Washington, D.C.  You can now watch the lecture at YouTube.  Just past the eleven minute mark, Harrington makes some very kind remarks about my book Scholastic Metaphysics, about which she says: “I don’t think Professor Feser intended it as a page turner, but I tore through it like it was an airport novel.”  As she explains in her lucid and important talk, she finds in Aristotelian-Thomistic metaphysics the vocabulary needed properly to understand today’s deepest moral and political controversies.  Especially important, as she says, are the distinctions between (a) act and potency, (b) substance, accident, and substantial form, and (c) the four causes.  She notes that it was the moderns’ attack on and burial of Aristotle, Aquinas, and Scholasticism that would pave the way for developments such as feminism, contraception, and the trans phenomenon.  And she says that these are held in place by a “Thomophobia” (great coinage!) that dismisses traditional metaphysics a priori as a tool of oppression.  Give her lecture a listen.