Immortal Souls provides as ambitious and complete a defense of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical anthropology as is currently in print. Among the many topics covered are the reality and unity of the self, the immateriality of the intellect, the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, the critique of artificial intelligence, and the refutation of both Cartesian and materialist conceptions of human nature. Along the way, the main rival positions in contemporary philosophy and science are thoroughly engaged with and rebutted.
“Edward
Feser's book is a Summa of the nature of the human person: it is, therefore,
both a rather long – but brilliant – monograph, and a valuable work for
consultation. Each of the human faculties discussed is treated comprehensively,
with a broad range of theories considered for and against, and, although
Feser's conclusions are firmly Thomistic, one can derive great benefit from his
discussions even if one is not a convinced hylomorphist. Every philosopher of
mind would benefit from having this book within easy reach.”
Howard
Robinson, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Central European University
“Feser
defends the Aristotelian and Thomistic system, effectively bringing it into
dialogue with recent debates and drawing on some of the best of both analytic
(Kripke, Searle, BonJour, Fodor) and phenomenological (Heidegger,
Merleau-Ponty, Dreyfus) philosophy. He deftly rebuts objections to Thomism,
both ancient and modern. Anyone working today on personal identity, the unity of
the self, the semantics of cognition, free will, or qualia will need to engage
with the analysis and arguments presented here.”
Robert C.
Koons, Professor of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin
CONTENTS
Preface
Part I: What
is Mind?
1. The Short
Answer
2. The
Self
3. The
Intellect
4. The
Will
Part II:
What is Body?
5. Matter
6. Animality
Part III:
What is a Human Being?
7. Against
Cartesianism
8. Against
Materialism
9. Neither
Computers nor Brains
Part IV:
What is the Soul?
10.
Immortality
11. The Form
of the Body
Index
More information about the book is available at the publisher’s website.
I am curious if any of your books have been adopted as textbooks for a college.
ReplyDeleteWell, Professor Feser, have any been adopted by a college or university as a textbook? They are certainly textbook-worth, and much better written.
DeleteYes, the graduate philosophy program at Holy Apostles College and Seminary uses one for sure. Dr. Timothy Smith (the head of their philosophy department, and the finest professor I’ve ever encountered) carefully goes through Scholastic Metaphysics.
DeleteAre there plans for a Kindle edition? - A reader in Southeast Asia.
ReplyDeleteIf we harass Ed enough, he will usually make it available on Kindle. :)
DeleteI can buy an Immortal Soul?
ReplyDeleteFrom Milhouse.
DeleteIt's much cheaper to buy an immoral soul.
Delete"Yesterday morning, Immortal Souls was listed at Amazon for pre-order. Yesterday evening, Amazon indicated that the book in fact ships in 8-10 days. This morning, Amazon says it is “Temporarily out of stock”! Thank you, dear readers."
ReplyDeleteThat's right. Dr. Feser. Take of your readers and they will take care of you.
I wished the moved movers over at amazon would get more in stock so i can buy one
ReplyDeleteI'm a simple man; Dr. Feser publishes a new book, I order that book.
ReplyDeleteThere will be a Spanish edition?
ReplyDeleteDr Feser, it says that it is out of stock on Amazon now. Any knowledge when it will go back in stock?
ReplyDeleteHello Dr. Feser, wanted to comment my support for your work. I’ve been following your career for a few years now, and your treatment of Catholic philosophy contributed to my reversion back to Catholicism not too long ago. I was wondering if you could provide some resources for further reading on the topic of immanent teleology, it is one of the most engaging ideas I’ve come across in contemporary Catholic thought, despite being rooted in a concept more than 2,000 years old.
ReplyDeleteQuestion: Hylemorphic dualism sounds like it might explain how the mind originates in humans, who have bodies. But how does it explain the origin of the mind in angels or deities, who do not have bodies?
ReplyDeleteAngels do not have minds.
DeleteEr, angels do not exist.
DeleteEd Feser would differ with you on that and so would many other professional philosophers and theologians.
Delete@Anonymous
DeleteOf course they do. And they have personality types as well. What right-thinking Catholic would think that St. Michael the Archangel and Old Scratch have the same personality?! (That was a reductio ad absurdum.)
You can always find a clique of philosophers who believe anything at all, while what some theologians might think is not worth considering. I think it safe to say though that the overwhelming majority of professional philosophers do not think that angels exist.
DeleteWCB
DeleteDoes Satan, and devils exist? Any hard evidence for these things? Do devils have minds?
WCB
The majority of philosophers are non-theists. The majority of philosophers who specialize in the philosophy of religion are theists. It's not a clique.
DeleteWCB:
I do like some of your political/social posts, but not those about phil or theo. I don't have the time to debate the issue, but if one accepts the existence of God (and I believe you don't) then belief in Satan and angels follows. No, there is no "hard evidence" for that.
https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2017/07/cartesian-angelism.html
https://aquinasonline.com/angels
As I understand it, hylomorphic dualism doesn't explain how the mind originates in humans in the sense of how it emerges from other more fundamental things. Rather, it takes the mind is a fundamental aspect of a human being, though some of its powers are incorporeal and some are corporeal.
DeleteLikewise, the angels' minds are considered to be fundamental aspects of their nature as immaterial beings.
WCB
Delete@Anonymous
"...but if one accepts the existence of God (and I believe you don't) then belief in Satan and angels follows. "
Gallup polls claim 74% of Americans believe in God. But only 68% believe in Satan. So it does not necessarily mean belief in Satan must follow belief in God. 9% are atheist/agnostic. But Pew Research shows many people believe instead of God in a Greater Power/Spiritual Force. Including 23% of people who claim to believe in God in this fashion. Who do not seem then to believe in Satan. Belief is not that simple it would seem.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/508886/belief-five-spiritual-entities-edges-down-new-lows.aspx
WCB
WCB, Gallup polls of what people believe are not a good barometer of truth. You can see that there is generally strong support for laws that limit abortion once the fetal hearbeat is present while also support of abortion ip through the first trimester even though the heartbeat occurs well before the first trimester is up.
DeleteAccording to your logic, what we ought to take from this is not that people can have internally inconsistent beliefs, but that it is reasonable to hold both that abortion should be illegal once the feta heartbeat is detects but also that it should only be illegal after the first trimester.
One can believe in God and be a deist or something, so not believe in angels or demons. Angels are only a must-have if God communicates with humans or if one follows s classical metaphysics were immaterial beings existence would be more probable so creation can have more variety.
DeleteOf course, if one believes in God, most objections to the existence of angels, that immaterial beings can't exist etc, are not a problem, so it is easier to a theist to believe in they.
WCB
Delete@ Anonymous
WCB, Gallup polls of what people believe are not a good barometer of truth.
True. But such surveys are good at telling us what some people are believing. But still, there are certain problems. Satan. A creature who causes much evil. And devils. In a Universe with an all powerful and perfectly good God, Satan and devils make no logical sense. Why would God tolerate Satan and devils? or why not change their nature to good instead of evil?
If I was a perfectly good and all powerful God, that is what I would do. And this is a question as of late I contemplate, "If you were God....".
Tolerate Satan and Devils? Order genocides? Kill all the first born of Egypt including cattle?
WCB
If I was a perfectly good and all powerful God, that is what I would do. And this is a question as of late I contemplate, "If you were God....".
DeleteWCB sounds like a totalitarian dictator. They all say what they are doing is for the good.
If he were God he would make sure everyone would do exactly as he wished or that person would not exist. Bet he would be lonelier than he is now.
"Why would God tolerate Satan and devils? "
DeleteDepends on how real you insist your creation be. If you are satisfied playing chess with yourself, or moving stick figures around, or engaging with automatons while pretending as if they have minds of their own, then being the kind of God you imagine, in the kind of reality you prefer, makes perfect sense.
"... or why not change their nature to good instead of evil? "
The story goes that it is not their nature that was created evil, but it lay the willfully antagonistic, order of creation resenting, expression of their choices.
Even old St. Fursey, had a more sophisticated understanding of the diabolical mode of expression than you do.
"...If I was a perfectly good and all powerful God, that is what I would do "
Yeah, you and your fundamentalist Wizard of Oz comic book version of a God LOL
Evidently, WCB is the kind of person who sees Magnus Carleen make moves he does not understand and deduces that Carleen must be a bad chess player.
DeleteIt says it is out of stock? At Amazon? And has as publication date May 31st, 2024?
ReplyDeleteI recently encountered a pretty thorough argument to the effect that Thomas’s Delayed Hominization isn’t the result of poor biology. Rather, it’s logically entailed by his metaphysics. Do you cover this in the book?
ReplyDeleteWhether or not Ed covers this in the book, Maureen and Samuel Condic go pretty in depth on these ideas in their book:
Deletehttps://www.amazon.com/Human-Embryos-Beings-Scientific-Philosophical/dp/0813230233/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2SXAW079ZZ4CT&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.R0QKQPfnjEMcbmtYQsk8Zw2psqbjXU3oYM_WR_qt1Wo.zQHB7yqu0-QINUdoNvu1IGizUBklWCPR6_xVxlx7cu0&dib_tag=se&keywords=maureen+condic+embryos&qid=1718238069&sprefix=maureen+condic+embryos%2Caps%2C128&sr=8-1
Does it engage with Thomas’s metaphysics specifically? Like identifying which of his metaphysical principles can be accepted and which cannot be?
DeleteFrom a distance, it doesn’t appear to.
The authors are Thomists (Samuel a philosopher and Maureen a neurobiologist), and they interact with other Thomists on the matter. I was actually surprised when I initially read the book how much content was related to issues surrounding questions like whether the proximate matter is sufficiently proportional to receive a rational soul. The first half especially is thoroughly metaphysical. Now whether they reply to the specific formulations of the specific arguments you have in mind, I'm not sure, but they do explicitly treat such Thomistic objections to the rational soul being infused a the moment of conception (rather than some point later).
ReplyDeleteAlright, I may well have misjudged it. Will take a look.
DeleteSorry, this was meant in response to Anonymous above.
DeleteThis following observation does not comport with Christian beliefs, and is ruled out by them on a priori faith based grounds. But, given that it is not logically impossible once you accept anti-realist epistemological and metaphysical claims for the sake of argument, it might be that some of the primates commonly denoted as human beings have souls of the traditionally conceived type, i.e. a personality that survives the death of the body, and that others do not.
ReplyDeleteThus it is a continuing puzzle to me that the so-called free thinking anti-theist secularists, should nowadays cling so desperately to the notion of not only a taxonomic version of "one humanity", but also an implicative moral version of it. [Well, maybe not so much of a puzzle given the axiological implications of a decohered 'humanity']
Their common humanity preservation project is particularly incoherent and even comical, given that the interpretive principles entailed by their subjectivist and social constructivist identity based anthropologies, their nominalist stance on the problem of universals, and their eventual deconstruction of personal identity itself, indicate, and quite explicitly so, the exact opposite.
Thus, apart from the pantomime natural law collective moralities generated by atheists who personify and then deify "evolution " (taken as some metaphysical principle of 'objective progress'), their 'if you, then me too!' inclusion desperation has to be right up there among the four or five most intellectually and morally contemptible tacks taken by the soulless organisms of the left as they try to negotiate headwinds of their own making.
...it might be that some of the primates commonly denoted as human beings have souls of the traditionally conceived type, i.e. a personality that survives the death of the body, and that others do not.
DeleteI would be hard-pressed to prove definitively that some other "animals" do not have intelligence / rational souls in the traditional sense, e.g. dolphins. Nor am I aware that Christian theology has spoken definitively as to the possibility that God made other rational beings besides humans, either on this Earth or on other worlds. But interestingly, one of the notional hypotheses attempting to marry evolutionary theory with Genesis has God using primates that entirely like other primates of the irrational type, and creatively intervening in the conception of a new child to make Adam with a rational, immortal soul, as the (new species?) offspring of the old primates...AND that this new Adam could have been morphologically indistinguishable from his parents. The hypothesis implies that for many generations, it would not have been obvious which beings were human (rational) and which were not, just from appearance.
Not all that helpfully, the Dune books have a group that considers some (many? most?) of those that appear to be human are "animals" because they are unable to behave rationally, and use a test in which a true human will put up with the pain of having his arm burnt to a crisp (slowly) than to move it and immediately die. This is not helpful because it ignores what original sin did to our use of reason, i.e. the obstacles to its full use. To be human is to be a sort of thing capable of using reason, not to always use reason perfectly, just as to be a cheetah is to be the sort of being that (under the right conditions) can run fast, not that all cheetahs run fast at all times.
As to the modern liberal mind: C.S. Lewis was pointing out their philosophical inconsistencies 80 years ago, e.g. as to their (theoretically) no longer believing humans are anything special or important, but then insisting that it is important to keep the human race going. In fact, they have attachments to the survival of the race that cannot be supported by anything in their theory. (Even the "selfish DNA" imperative to produce offspring with the same DNA allows that under varying conditions, anything that was descended from humans might have to have (and in time WILL have) utterly different DNA from what we have, so that doesn't serve either.)
Well, general speculation aside, Catholicism defined the human soul dogmatically as identical to the form of the substance in the context of Thomistic metaphysics at the Ecumenical Council of Vienne. It did so precisely because theologians at the time had begun to call into question Thomas’s view. Pecham and others thereafter had begun arguing a human soul could be united to the embryo long before it had fulfilled the metaphysical requirements to allow for a human form proper. So far as I can tell, Catholicism is doctrinally committed to delayed hominization and simply obscures this by equivocation on the term “conception” as used today over and against the way it was used by Thomas.
Delete"As to the modern liberal mind: C.S. Lewis was pointing out their philosophical inconsistencies 80 years ago, e.g. as to their (theoretically) no longer believing humans are anything special or important, but then insisting that it is important to keep the human race going. In fact, they have attachments to the survival of the race that cannot be supported by anything in their theory. "
DeleteYeah, you are right; and as I recall in some cases he was remarking that he thought that some of his intellectual and ideological opponents in England were better men in social terms than their ideologies would indicate.
I have three observations.
1. Although at the time he wrote, Hitlerism and Stalinism, and Darwinism, and positivism logical and otherwise were known, the radically reductionist impulse was confined largely to the intellectual class and to the apostatizing Anglican hierarchy. And although he also actively parodies the brutishly leveling "I'm as good a bloke as any" type, the general populace was still living [apparently] off the moral fumes of the previous age.
2. During the time he wrote, the views he critiqued were even more limited and confined in the United States, and it was only as the Baby Boomers grew up that hedonic nihilism, Meadian cultural relativism, aggresive nominalism and social constructionist theories began to blossom more fully in the university and spread out. Though of course Freudianism, Marxism, Logical Positivism, Behaviorism, Secular Humanism/Scientism, and other reductive theories concerning the nature of man and morality were present and had already been present for some generations.
3. He gets an "A" mark as a prophet for drawing out the implications fully, even though he kind of had an advanced preview of what was coming due to the academic environment of which he was part, and an insider of a kind.
But now, the nihilism which was once confined to fashionable intellectual 'elites" on the one hand, and the lumpenproletariat and criminal class on the other, is on view each and every day throughout our "society".
But then, a society of exactly what ? Of objectively like kinds? Members of the same moral species sharing the same fundamental interests and life aims?
No. Not, if you take seriously what the organisms of the left preach, and then aim the logical implications back at them.
So, apart from Christians who are self-sacrificially committed to seing these creatures as wounded like-kinds, and as poor souls, what game is it that the rest of us not interested in underwriting the distributed costs of perversion, nihilism, and psychic disorder, are supposed to be playing?
Tony,
Delete“I would be hard-pressed to prove definitively that some other "animals" do not have intelligence / rational souls in the traditional sense, e.g. dolphins.”
It would be hard to prove definitively either position on that issue. However, I am quite certain that dolphins and other mammals are not rational beings. Nor do they have souls like human beings have.
In my view only a language using being that is able to give reasons for their actions can be said to be a rational being. And only a rational being that has knowledge of good and evil can be said to have a soul.
From your final paragraph I deduce that you are not a Christian DNW. Just out of curiosity, what is your theological standpoint?
Delete@ Tony,
DeleteIn looking back at my ramble, I see that it appears I might have said conctructivist, rather than constructionist.
But at the moment I wrote I was mentioning Mead, and the older Baby Boomers and their mentors, and had in mind Berger and Luckmann, circa early mid 60's rather than the theory now more explicitly thought of as being incorporated into postmodernism.
"From your final paragraph I deduce that you are not a Christian DNW. Just out of curiosity, what is your theological standpoint?"
DeleteWhether your conclusion abstracted as a stand-alone proposition is ultimately defensible, or not, your "deduction" or the reason for your mooting it, is not.
The framing was of a generalized logical landscape type; the "us" refers to other members of the/our political class, who find themselves associating however disagreeably with the fundamentally nihilist and life energy theiving, redistributionist, organisims of the left within this polity.
For the sake of sheer critical analysis and hypotheticals we all naturally adopt a neutral a-theistic stance.
And as I have mentioned many times before, I previously addressed that issue in response to "another" curious anonymous back in September of 2023.
Feel free to look it up.
Does this work integrate the decisive logical works of Józef Maria Bocheński on the immortality of the soul ?
ReplyDeleteLouis
This book is now available to purchase as an ebook (ePub for Adobe Digital Editions) on the publisher's site. I downloaded and installed it last night.
ReplyDeleteI have noticed an issue with the formatting of the text. After an italicized word a capital 'k' begins the following word. Here is an example near the end of Ch. 1:
"We will see later on that in fact angelic minds are Kpossible..."
The word "are" is italicized in the book. Sorry, but I don't now to italicize a word in this response.
I've encountered this error at least half a dozen times but it doesn't happen after every italicized word.
Not a big issue but I still think the publisher should correct it.
Also, the ePub is not compatible with Kindle app. Hopefully they will release a Kindle version. Adoble Digital Editions is one of the worst apps for reading books.
Try Calibre for epubs. I find that works well.
DeleteThanks for the suggestion. Have heard good things about Calibre but haven't good around to trying it out.
DeleteI ended up loading it into the the Bluefire Reader app on my iPad. Works much better than the Adobe one. Also, it links to my Adobe account so didn't have to worry about the drm.