Coming to a campus near you

On Thursday, October 19, I will be giving a talk on the topic of scientism at UC Berkeley, sponsored by the Thomistic Institute.  Details available at the Institute’s website and at Facebook.

On Saturday, November 4, I will be giving a talk on the topic of conscience, at a conference devoted to that theme at Holy Rosary Parish in Portland, Oregon.  Conference details here.

On Saturday, November 11, Joe Bessette and I will participate in a panel discussion of our book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed at the annual Fall Conference put on by the Center for Ethics and Culture at Notre Dame.

On Friday, December 1, I will be giving a talk on the subject of scientism at Cal Tech in Pasadena, sponsored by Science and Faith Examined.  More details to come.

Ward on Scholastic Metaphysics

In the Winter 2017 issue of Pro Ecclesia, Baylor University philosopher Thomas M. Ward kindly reviews my book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction.  From the review:

This accessible, insightful, entertaining book introduces and defends Scholastic, mostly Thomistic, metaphysics in dialogue with important figures from contemporary analytic metaphysics… Feser is blessed with a clear and entertaining prose style, which makes it all the more enjoyable to engage his philosophical work.  I highly recommend this book…

Goldman on Dreher’s The Benedict Option

People have been asking me to comment on David Goldman’s review of Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option.  The reason is that among Goldman’s criticisms of Dreher (some of which I agree with) are a set of objections to metaphysical realism, which has its roots in Plato and Aristotle, was central to the thought of medieval philosophers like Aquinas, and was abandoned by nominalists like Ockham – an abandonment which prepared the ground for some of the aspects of modernity Dreher rightly deplores.  (I’ve discussed the nature and consequences of this philosophical shift myself in several places, such as The Last Superstition.)

Nagel v Nietzsche: Dawn of Consciousness

While we’re on the subject of Nietzsche: The Will to Power, which is a collection of passages on a variety of subjects from Nietzsche’s notebooks, contains some interesting remarks on consciousness, sensory qualities, and related topics.  They invite a “compare and contrast” with ideas which, in contemporary philosophy, are perhaps most famously associated with Thomas Nagel.  In some ways, Nietzsche seems to anticipate and agree with points made by Nagel.  In other respects, they disagree radically.

Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part I: Nietzsche

Atheism, like theism, raises both theoretical and practical questions.  Why should we think it true?  And what would be the consequences if it were true?  When criticizing New Atheist writers, I have tended to emphasize the deficiencies of their responses to questions of the first, theoretical sort -- the feebleness of their objections to the central theistic arguments, their ignorance of what the most important religious thinkers have actually said, and so forth.  But no less characteristic of the New Atheism is the shallowness of its treatment of the second, practical sort of question.

Four Causes and Five Ways

Noting parallels and correlations can be philosophically illuminating and pedagogically useful.  For example, students of Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) philosophy are familiar with how soul is to body as form is to matter as act is to potency.  So here’s a half-baked thought about some possible correlations between Aquinas’s most general metaphysical concepts, on the one hand, and his arguments for God’s existence on the other.  It is well known that Aquinas’s Second Way of arguing for God’s existence is concerned with efficient causation, and his Fifth Way with final causation.  But are there further such parallels to be drawn?  Does each of the Aristotelian Four Causes have some special relationship to one of the Five Ways?   Perhaps so, and perhaps there are yet other correlations to be found between some other key notions in the overall A-T framework.

Self-defeating claims and the tu quoque fallacy

Some philosophical claims are, or at least seem to be, self-defeating.  For example, an eliminative materialist who asserts that there is no such thing as meaning or semantic content is implying thereby that his own assertion has no meaning or semantic content.  But an utterance can be true (or false) only if it has meaning or semantic content.  Hence the eliminative materialist’s assertion entails that it is itself not true.  (I’ve addressed this problem, and various futile attempts to get around it, many times.)  Cognitive relativism is also difficult to formulate in a way that isn’t self-defeating.  I argue in Scholastic Metaphysics that scientism, and Hume’s Fork, and attempts to deny the existence of change or to deny the principle of sufficient reason, are also all self-defeating.  This style of criticism of a position is sometimes called a retorsion argument.

Around the web

Busy, busy couple of weeks.  So, I’ll let others do the writing.  Here’s a large load of links:

David Oderberg on the current state of bioethics: Interview at BioEdge (reprinted at MercatorNet).

Neo-Aristotelian meta-metaphysician Tuomas Tahko is interviewed at 3:AM Magazine.   He also has recently published An Introduction to Metametaphysics. 

Michael Novak revisits the topic of Catholicism and social justice in a new book co-written with Paul Adams.  Interview at National Review Online, commentary at First Things, the Law and Liberty blog, and The Catholic Thing.

Dragging the net

My recent Claremont Review of Books review of Scruton’s Soul of the World and Wilson’s The Meaning of Human Existence is now available for free online.

Should we expect a sound proof to convince everyone?  Michael Augros investigates at Strange Notions (in an excerpt from his new book Who Designed the Designer? A Rediscovered Path to God's Existence).

Intrigue!  Conspiracy!  Comic books!  First, where did the idea for Spider-Man really come from?  The New York Post reports on a Brooklyn costume shop and an alleged “billion dollar cover up.”

Then, according to Variety, a new documentary reveals the untold story behind Roger Corman’s notorious never-released Fantastic Four movie.  (I’ve seen the new one.  It’s only almost as bad as you’ve heard.)

Feyerabend on empiricism and sola scriptura

In his essay “Classical Empiricism,” available in Problems of Empiricism: Philosophical Papers, Volume 2, philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend compares the empiricism of the early moderns to the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura.  He suggests that there are important parallels between them; in particular, he finds them both incoherent, and for the same reasons.  (No, Feyerabend is not doing Catholic apologetics.  He’s critiquing empiricism.)

Caught in the net

Some of the regular readers and commenters at this blog have started up a Classical Theism, Philosophy, and Religion discussion forum.  Check it out.

Philosopher Stephen Mumford brings his Arts Matters blog to an end with a post on why he is pro-science and anti-scientism.  Then he inaugurates his new blog at Philosophers Magazine with a post on a new and improved Cogito argument for the reality of causation.

Speaking of which: At Aeon, Mathias Frisch discusses the debate over causation and physics.

The Guardian asks: Is Richard Dawkins destroying his reputation?  And at Scientific American, John Horgan says that biologist Jerry Coyne’s new book “goes too far” in denouncing religion.

Toner and McInerny on Scholastic Metaphysics

Two new reviews of Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction.  First, in the Spring 2015 issue of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Prof. Patrick Toner (pictured at left) kindly reviews the book.  From the review:

This is an excellent little survey of scholastic metaphysics, written more or less from the perspective of “analytic Thomism”…

The refutation of scientism is elegant and thoroughly successful…

Feser explains the rationale behind [the] principle [of causality], distinguishes it from the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and defends it against many objections, including a standard from Hume, as well as more recent worries, from Newton, and from quantum mechanics.  Very useful material.

Pigliucci on metaphysics

At Scientia Salon, philosopher Massimo Pigliucci admits to “always having had a troubled relationship with metaphysics.”  He summarizes the reasons that have, over the course of his career, made it difficult for him to take the subject seriously.  Surprisingly -- given that Pigliucci is, his eschewal of metaphysics notwithstanding, a professional philosopher -- none of these reasons is any good.  Or rather, this is not surprising at all, since there simply are no good reasons for dismissing metaphysics -- and could not be, given that all purported reasons for doing so themselves invariably embody unexamined metaphysical assumptions.  Thus, as Gilson famously observed, does metaphysics always bury its undertakers.

Accept no imitations

Given that he’s just become a movie star, Alan Turing’s classic paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence” seems an apt topic for a blog post.  It is in this paper that Turing sets out his famous “Imitation Game,” which has since come to be known as the Turing Test.  The basic idea is as follows: Suppose a human interrogator converses via a keyboard and monitor with two participants, one a human being and one a machine, each of whom is in a different room.  The interrogator’s job is to figure out which is which.  Could the machine be programmed in such a way that the interrogator could not determine from the conversation which is the human being and which the machine?  Turing proposed this as a useful stand-in for the question “Can machines think?”  And in his view, a “Yes” answer to the former question is as good as a “Yes” answer to the latter.

Post-intentional depression

A reader asks me to comment on novelist Scott Bakker’s recent Scientia Salon article “Back to Square One: toward a post-intentional future.”  “Intentional” is a reference to intentionality, the philosopher’s technical term for the meaningfulness or “aboutness” of our thoughts -- the way they are “directed toward,” “point to,” or are about something.  A “post-intentional” future is one in which we’ve given up trying to explain intentionality in scientific terms and instead abandon it altogether in favor of radically re-describing human nature exclusively in terms drawn from neuroscience, physics, chemistry, and the like.  In short, it is a future in which we embrace the eliminative materialist position associated with philosophers like Alex Rosenberg and Paul and Patricia Churchland.

Working the net

The Daily Beast nominates Aristotle for a posthumous Nobel prize.  (Even Aristotle’s mistakes are interesting: Next time you see a European bison, you might not want to stand behind it.  Just in case.)

Physicist George Ellis, interviewed at Scientific American, criticizes Lawrence Krauss, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and scientism in general.  Some choice quotes: “[M]athematical equations only represent part of reality, and should not be confused with reality,” and “Physicists should pay attention to Aristotle’s four forms of causation.”

Richard Bastien kindly reviews my book Scholastic Metaphysics in Convivium Magazine.  From the review: “Feser’s refutation [of scientism]… alone makes the purchase of the book well worthwhile.”

Symington on Scholastic Metaphysics

At Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, philosopher Paul Symington kindly reviews my book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction.  From the review:

Edward Feser demonstrates a facility with both Scholastic and contemporary analytical concepts, and does much to span the divide…

The final chapter [is]… a nice example of the service that Feser renders to the task of enhancing points of commonality between scholastic and analytic thinkers.  In this chapter, Feser defends a realist form of essentialism as well as argues for a real distinction between essence and existence.  As is characteristic of the book as a whole, Feser brings in contemporary views in way that makes good use of, and is charitable to, contemporary developments in metaphysics…

In all, Feser's new book is a welcome addition for those interested in bringing the concepts, terminology and presuppositions between scholastic and contemporary analytic philosophers to commensuration. In fact, I would contend that Feser's book will constitute an important piece in its own right for guiding the research program for contemporary Thomistic metaphysicians into the future.

Carroll on laws and causation

People have been asking me to comment on the remarks about causation made by atheist physicist Sean Carroll during his recent debate with William Lane Craig on the topic of “God and Cosmology.”  (You’ll find Craig’s own post-debate remarks here.)  It’s only fair to acknowledge at the outset that Carroll cannot justly be accused of the anti-philosophical philistinism one finds in recent remarks by physicists Stephen Hawking, Lawrence Krauss, and Neil deGrasse Tyson.  Indeed, Carroll has recently criticized these fellow physicists pretty harshly, and made some useful remarks about the role of philosophy vis-à-vis physics in the course of doing so.

Summer web surfing

My Claremont Review of Books review of John Gray’s The Silence of Animals is now available for free online.

Keith Parsons has now wrapped up our exchange on atheism and morality at The Secular Outpost.

The latest from David Oderberg: “Could There Be a Superhuman Species?”  Details here.

Liberty Island is an online magazine devoted to conservatism and pop culture.  Music writer extraordinaire (and friend of this blog) Dan LeRoy is on board. 

James Franklin asks “What is mathematics about?”  (See also his new book An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics.)

Pre-Christian apologetics

Christianity did not arise in a vacuum.  The very first Christians debated with their opponents in a cultural context within which everyone knew that there is a God and that he had revealed himself through Moses and the prophets.  The question, given that background, was what to think of Jesus of Nazareth.  Hence the earliest apologists were, in effect, apologists for Christianity as opposed to Judaism, specifically.  That didn’t last long.  As Christianity spread beyond Judea into the larger Mediterranean world, the question became whether to accept Christianity as opposed to paganism.  Much less could be taken for granted. 

Still, significant common ground for debate was provided by Greek philosophy.  In Book VIII of The City of God, Augustine noted that thinkers in the Neoplatonic tradition had seen that God is the cause of the existence of the world; had seen also that only what is beyond the world of material and changeable things could be God; had understood the distinction between the senses and their objects on the one hand, and the intellect and its objects on the other, and affirmed the superiority of the latter; and had affirmed that the highest good is not the good of the body or even the good of the mind, but to know and imitate God.  In short, these pagan thinkers knew some of the key truths about God, the soul, and the natural law that are available to unaided human reason.  This purely philosophical knowledge facilitated Augustine’s own conversion to Christianity, and would provide an intellectual skeleton for the developing tradition of Christian apologetics and theology.