Five Proofs around the net

Strange Notions has kindly hosted a Q and A on my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God (which you can order either from Amazon – though they are temporarily out of stock – or directly from Ignatius Press).  They chose ten of the questions submitted and have now posted my responses.  Among the topics that arise are the nature of proof, polytheism, divine simplicity, and the relationship between Thomism and idealism.

Part II of the two-part interview on the book I recently did for The Patrick Coffin Show has now been posted (and can be viewed either at Patrick’s website or at YouTube).  This part is a Q and A session with the audience.  Among the topics that arise are Thomas Nagel, process theology, the problem of evil, and invincible ignorance.

McGinn on mind and space

Thoughts and experiences seem to lack spatial location.  It makes sense to say of a certain cluster of neurons firing that they are located several centimeters in from your left ear.  But it seems to make no sense to say that your experience of feeling nervous, or your thought about the Pythagorean Theorem, is located several centimeters in from your left ear.  After all, no one who opened up your skull or took an X-ray of your head would see the thought or the experience, nor would either be detectible through any other perceptual means.  In his book The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World, Colin McGinn defends this commonsense supposition that mental states and processes are not locatable in space.

Get linked

At The New York Review of Books, Thomas Nagel reviews Daniel Dennett’s new book From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds.

Charles Murray versus the campus brownshirts: His personal account of the Two Hours Hate at Middlebury.  Commentary from Noah Millman at The Week, Ronald Radosh at The Daily Beast, Peter Beinart at The Atlantic, and Peter Wood at The Federalist.

At Physics Today, physicist Richard Muller says that the flow of time is not an illusion.

I am overworked, therefore I link

Physicist Lee Smolin and philosopher Roberto Unger think that physics has gotten something really important really wrong.  NPR reports.

The relationship between Aristotelian hylemorphism and quantum mechanics is the subject of two among a number of recent papers by philosopher Robert Koons.

Hey, he said he would return.  At Real Clear Defense, Francis Sempa detects a revival of interest in General Douglas MacArthur.  The New Criterion reviews Arthur Herman’s new book on MacArthur, while the Wall Street Journal and Weekly Standard discuss Walter Borneman’s new book.

At The Catholic Thing, Matthew Hanley discusses Dario Fernandez-Morera’s book The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain.

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.

Conjuring teleology

At The Philosophers’ Magazine online, Massimo Pigliucci discusses teleology and teleonomy.  His position has the virtues of being simple and clear.  Unfortunately, it also has the vices of being simplistic and wrong.  His remarks can be summarized fairly briefly.  Explaining what is wrong with them takes a little more doing.

There’s no such thing as “natural atheology”

In his brief and (mostly) tightly argued book God, Freedom, and Evil, Alvin Plantinga writes:

[S]ome theologians and theistic philosophers have tried to give successful arguments or proofs for the existence of God.  This enterprise is called natural theology… Other philosophers, of course, have presented arguments for the falsehood of theistic beliefs; these philosophers conclude that belief in God is demonstrably irrational or unreasonable.  We might call this enterprise natural atheology.  (pp. 2-3)

Cute, huh?  Actually (and with all due respect for Plantinga), I’ve always found the expression “natural atheology” pretty annoying, even when I was an atheist.  The reason is that, given what natural theology as traditionally understood is supposed to be, the suggestion that there is a kind of bookend subject matter called “natural atheology” is somewhat inept.  (As we will see, though, Plantinga evidently does not think of natural theology in a traditional way.)

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.

Progressive dematerialization

In the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) tradition, it is the intellect, rather than sentience, that marks the divide between the corporeal and the incorporeal.  Hence A-T arguments against materialist theories of the mind tend to focus on conceptual thought rather than qualia (i.e. the subjective or “first-person” features of a conscious experience, such as the way red looks or the way pain feels) as that aspect of the mind which cannot in principle be reduced to brain activity or the like.  Yet Thomistic writers also often speak even of perceptual experience (and not just of abstract thought) as involving an immaterial element.  And they need not deny that qualia-oriented arguments like the “zombie argument,” Frank Jackson’s “knowledge argument,” Thomas Nagel’s “bat argument,” etc. draw blood against materialism.  So what exactly is going on here?

Haldane on Nagel and the Fifth Way

Next week I’ll be at the Thomistic Seminar organized by John Haldane.  Haldane’s article “Realism, Mind, and Evolution” appeared last year in the journal Philosophical Investigations.  Thomas Nagel’s book Mind and Cosmos is among the topics dealt with in the article.  As Haldane notes, Nagel entertains the possibility of a “non-materialist naturalist” position which:

would explain the emergence of sentient and then of rational beings on the basis of developmental processes directed towards their production.  That is to say, it postulates principles of self-organization in matter which lead from the physico-chemical level to the emergence of living things, which then are further directed by some immanent laws towards the development of consciousness, and thereafter to reason for the sake of coming to recognize value and act in response to it, a state of affairs which is itself a value, the good of rational life. (p. 107)

As the phrases “directed towards” and “immanent laws” indicate, what Nagel is speculating about is a return to a broadly Aristotelian notion of natural teleology.

Gelernter on computationalism

People have asked me to comment on David Gelernter’s essay on minds and computers in the January issue of Commentary.  It’s written with Gelernter’s characteristic brio and clarity, and naturally I agree with the overall thrust of it.  But it seems to me that Gelernter does not quite get to the heart of the problem with the computer model of the mind.  What he identifies, I would argue, are rather symptoms of the deeper problems.  Those deeper problems are three, and longtime readers of this blog will recognize them.  The first two have more to do with the computationalist’s notion of matter than with his conception of mind.

The pointlessness of Jerry Coyne

People have asked me to comment on the recent spat between Jerry Coyne and Ross Douthat.  As longtime readers of this blog know from bitter experience, there’s little point in engaging with Coyne on matters of philosophy and theology.  He is neither remotely well-informed, nor fair-minded, nor able to make basic distinctions or otherwise to reason with precision.  Nor, when such foibles are pointed out to him, does he show much interest in improving.  (Though on at least one occasion he did promise to try actually to learn something about a subject concerning which he had been bloviating.  But we’re still waiting for that well-informed epic takedown of Aquinas we thought we were going to get from him more than two years ago.)

Nagel on Nozick

Robert Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia has recently been reissued with a new Foreword by Thomas Nagel.  You can read the Foreword via Google books.  In it Nagel describes the situation in moral and political philosophy in analytic philosophy circles in the late 1960s.  A group of thinkers that included Nozick, Nagel, and other notables such as John Rawls and Judith Jarvis Thomson, who participated in a discussion group called the Society for Ethical and Legal Philosophy (SELF), reacted against certain then common tendencies.  First, as Nagel writes, they rejected the logical positivists’ “general skepticism about value judgments, interpreted as essentially subjective expressions of feeling.”  Second, they rejected utilitarianism in favor of “principles that limit the means that may be used to promote even the best ends.”

Present perfect

Dale Tuggy has replied to my remarks about his criticism of the classical theist position that God is not merely “a being” alongside other beings but rather Being Itself.   Dale had alleged that “this is not a Christian view of God” and even amounts to “a kind of atheism.”  In response I pointed out that in fact this conception of God is, historically, the majority position among theistic philosophers in general and Christian philosophers in particular.  Dale replies:

Three comments. First, some of [Feser’s] examples are ambiguous cases. Perfect Being theology goes back to Plato, and some, while repeating Platonic standards about God being “beyond being” and so on, seem to think of God as a great self. No surprise there, of course, in the case of Bible readers. What’s interesting is how they held – or thought they held – these beliefs consistently together. Second, who cares who’s in the majority? Truth, I’m sure he’ll agree, is what matters. Third, it is telling that Feser starts with Plato and ends with Scotus and “a gazillion” Scholastics. Conspicuous by their absence are most of the Greats from early modern philosophy. Convenient, because most of them hold, with Descartes, that our concept of God is the “…idea of a Being who is omniscient, omnipotent and absolutely perfect… which is absolutely necessary and eternal.” (Principles of Philosophy 14)

Around the web

Was the twentieth-century Thomist Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange unduly influenced by Leibnizian rationalism, as followers of Etienne Gilson often allege?  No, argues Steven Long, over at Thomistica.net.  (Be sure to read the discussion in the comments section as well as the original post.)

The debate over Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos never ends.  Raymond Tallis reviews the book in The New Atlantis, and Jim Slagle reviews it for Philosophy in Review.

You’ve read Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story and checked in regularly at its companion blog.  Now brace yourself for Blake Bell and Michael J. Vassallo’s The Secret History of Marvel Comics, which has a blog of its own.  It’s a look at the seamier, pulp magazine side of the company’s early history.

Philip Kitcher, bait-and-switcher

Here’s a thumbnail history of philosophy and science since the early modern period, in three stages.  First, the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition had by the beginning of this period hammered out a conception of the natural world that is at the same time unified and radically anti-reductionist.  It is unified insofar as to all natural phenomena we can apply the theory of act and potency, the hylemorphic analysis of material substances, the doctrine of the four causes, and other components of Aristotelian philosophy of nature.  It is radically anti-reductionist insofar as it affirms that certain divisions in nature -- between the inorganic and the organic; between the merely “vegetative” or non-sentient forms of life and the sensory or animal forms; and between the merely sensory or animal forms of life and the distinctively rational or human form -- are nevertheless differences in kind rather than degree.

Man is Wolff to man

As a follow-up to my series of posts on the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, let’s take a look at philosopher Robert Paul Wolff’s recent remarks about the book.  Wolff is not nasty, as some of the critics have been -- Nagel is Wolff’s “old friend and one-time student” -- but he is nevertheless as unfair to Nagel as some of them have been. 

Most of his post is not about Nagel at all, but consists of an anecdote about Edward O. Wilson and some remarks about the wealth of knowledge Wolff has found in the biology books he’s read.  The point is to illustrate how very meticulous good scientists can be, and how much they have discovered about the biological realm.  All well and good.  But so what?  What does that have to do with Nagel?

The return of final causality

I commend to you the late historian of philosophy Paul Hoffman’s paper “Does Efficient Causation Presuppose Final Causation?  Aquinas vs. Early Modern Mechanism.”  The paper appeared in the 2009 volume Metaphysics and the Good: Themes from the Philosophy of Robert Merrihew Adams, edited by Samuel Newlands and Larry Jorgensen, and I am pleased to find that it is available online.  It is part of a growing number of works by contemporary thinkers outside the Thomistic orbit which sympathetically reconsider or even defend (as Hoffman does) something like an Aristotelian conception of teleology.

Churchland on dualism, Part V

Paul Churchland has just published a third edition of Matter and Consciousness, his widely used introductory textbook on the philosophy of mind.  The blog Philosophy of Brains has posted a symposium on the book, with contributions from Amy Kind, William Ramsey, and Pete Mandik.  Prof. Kind, who deals with Churchland’s discussion of dualism, is kind to him indeed -- a little too kind, as it happens.  Longtime readers will recall a series of posts I did several years ago on the previous edition of Churchland’s book, in which I showed how extremely superficial, misleading, and frankly incompetent is its treatment of dualism.  Prof. Kind commends Churchland’s “clear writing style and incisive argumentation” as “a model for us all.”  While I agree with her about the clarity of Churchland’s style, I cannot concur with her judgment of the quality of the book’s argumentation, for at least with respect to dualism, this new edition is as bad as the old. 

Out on the links

I called attention recently to the special issue of the National Catholic Bioethics Quarterly devoted to the theme “Critiques of the New Natural Law Theory.”  The issue is now available for free download.  (Keep in mind that my own contribution to the issue is an excerpt from a forthcoming longer article.)

I notice that Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics, the anthology I edited for Palgrave Macmillan’s Philosophers in Depth series, is at the time of this posting selling at a whopping 40% discount on Amazon -- $57, down from the steep $95 list price.  Prices may change, so buy now!

The Catholic Center at New York University will be hosting a symposium this November 9 on the theme “Thomas Aquinas and Philosophical Realism.”  The speakers are James Brent, OP, John Haldane, William Jaworski, Candace Vogler, J. David Velleman, Edward Feser, and Thomas Joseph White, OP.  The event begins at 11 am.