Kenny on TLS in TLS

Sir Anthony Kenny very kindly reviews The Last Superstition in the July 22 issue of The Times Literary Supplement.  From the review:

Edward Feser’s book The Last Superstition sets out to give a definitive death blow to all of [the New Atheists] at once.  

In this good cause he does not hesitate to use the same weapons as his atheist adversaries: tendentious paraphrase, imputation of bad faith, outright insult.  Fortunately, the book contains far more argument than invective, and in order to keep the reader’s attention Feser has no need to descend to vulgar abuse, because he has the rare and enviable gift of making philosophical argument compulsively readable.  The book fascinates because of the boldness of its metaphysical claims combined with the density of the arguments offered in their support.  One of its major merits is to present a forceful revisionist picture of the entire history of Western philosophy.

There is a popular master-narrative of the history of philosophy… Feser rightly rejects this entire story.  He tells us that abandoning Aristotelianism, as the founders of modern philosophy did, was the single greatest mistake ever made in the entire history of Western thought… It was the abandonment of Aristotelianism, he claims, that threw up the pseudo-problems that still haunt us… 

In preparation for his thesis, Feser takes the reader through the history of philosophy from the Presocratics to Aquinas.  He moves at such a steeplechase gallop that an informed reader constantly expects him to be unhorsed at some of the major fences of ancient and medieval metaphysics; but no, he keeps in the saddle despite the obstacles, and never seriously misleads the reader…

It is sometimes thought that Darwinism gave the final death blow to teleology; but that, as Feser stresses, is the opposite of the truth.  Darwinian scientists have not given up the search for final causes.  On the contrary, contemporary biologists are much more adept at discerning the functions of structures and behaviour than their ancient, medieval, or Cartesian precursors … [Darwin’s] successors propose to translate final causes into efficient causes… Feser ingeniously argues that this translation is not possible…

Feser also presents dense and plausible versions of the First and Second Ways [of Aquinas], but each of them, I believe, is ultimately fallacious… 

But Feser has serious reasons for all of his assertions.  Unlike many of the other contributors to the recent theism-atheism debate, he is always well worth arguing with.

The publisher’s blurb tells us that this book has been widely hailed as the strongest argument ever made against the New Atheists.  Having read and reviewed quite a number of other similar books, I concur with this judgment.  (The Last Superstition, in fact, is something rather more than that, and while reading it at times I felt it would have been a better book if it had never mentioned Dawkins and co at all.)  But though Feser offers decisive criticisms of the arguments for atheism, his own forceful arguments for theism, I have maintained, are less than conclusive.  The default position, after as before the debate, is surely one of agnosticism.

I am honored by and grateful for Prof. Kenny’s review.  In defense of his rejection of Aquinas’s proofs for God’s existence, Prof. Kenny refers us to arguments he has defended in his book The Five Ways and summarizes a point he defends in Aquinas on Being -- books I have profited from and which Prof. Kenny does not need me to recommend to others.  (I recommend them anyway.)  For readers who are interested, I respond to Kenny’s criticisms of Aquinas in my later book Aquinas.