The U.S. should stay out of Israel’s war with Iran

Let me say at the outset that I agree with the view that it would be bad for the Iranian regime to acquire a nuclear weapon.  How close it is to actually acquiring one, I do not know.  I do know that the claim that such acquisition is imminent has been made for decades now, and yet it has still not happened.  In any event, it is Israel rather than the U.S. that would be threatened by such acquisition, and Israel has proven quite capable of taking care of itself.  There is no need for the U.S. to enter the war, and it is in neither the U.S.’s interests nor the interests of the rest of the region for it to do so.

Immortal Souls in Religion & Liberty

In the Summer 2025 issue of the Acton Institute’s Religion & Liberty, David Weinberger kindly reviews my book Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature.  From the review: “Feser combines… rigor with his talent for making difficult ideas digestible… An admirable feature of Feser’s treatise is how thoroughly he engages opposing positions.”

Riots should be suppressed swiftly and harshly

In an article at Postliberal Order, I argue that the Trump administration has the right under natural law to intervene to suppress riots of the kind seen in Los Angeles this week.

MacIntyre on Hegel on human action

Phrenology was the pseudoscience that aimed to link psychological traits to the morphology of the skull.  Physiognomy was the pseudoscience that aimed to link such traits to facial features.  In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel critiques these pseudosciences.  Since they are now widely acknowledged to be pseudosciences, it might seem that Hegel’s critique can be of historical interest only.  But as the late Alasdair MacIntyre pointed out in his essay “Hegel: On Faces and Skulls,” Hegel’s main points can be applied to a critique of today’s fashionable attempts to predict psychological traits and human actions from physiological and genetic traits.  (The essay appears in the collection Philosophy Through Its Past, edited by Ted Honderich.)