Monday, June 16, 2025

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.”

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4 comments:

  1. WOLF BRONSKYJune 17, 2025 at 5:04 AM

    Immortal Souls isn’t an easy read because it’s difficult subject matter, but I don’t think it could be any clearer than Feser makes it. If you’ve only read Feser, read a philosophy book by anyone else so you don’t take him for granted.

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  2. AnonymousJune 17, 2025 at 2:56 PM

    David Weinberger also has a great review about "The Seat of Wisdom." A book about philosophy in the Catholic tradition. This is a link to that book.

    https://www.amazon.com/Seat-Wisdom-Introduction-Philosophy-Tradition/dp/0813234654/ref=pd_bxgy_thbs_d_sccl_1/138-9993861-1841855?pd_rd_w=Yidd5&content-id=amzn1.sym.dcf559c6-d374-405e-a13e-133e852d81e1&pf_rd_p=dcf559c6-d374-405e-a13e-133e852d81e1&pf_rd_r=HH88HC563TQN59CFF67A&pd_rd_wg=HF0Aa&pd_rd_r=25601da0-79de-45a0-bba6-0e8269be3cae&pd_rd_i=0813234654&psc=1&asin=0813234654&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1

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  3. AnonymousJune 18, 2025 at 11:38 PM

    (Part 1)

    In an earlier comments section, I mentioned I would discuss a novel argument about physicalism and intentionality - Richard Johns' paper "Why Physicalism Seems to Be (and Is) Incompatible with Intentionality." This is a topic Dr. Feser has discussed in *Immortal Souls*, but this argument is a different way to support a similar point, and one I've seen no real criticism of elsewhere. It's one that originally made me go "Cute, but there has to be a flaw in it somewhere..." but I'm not sure where the flaw is, if there is one. Here's the link, but I'll summarize it too: https://www.newdualism.org/papers-Jul2020/Johns-ActaAnalytica2020_WhyPhysicalismSeemsToBeAndIsIn.pdf What do people, especially materialist commenters, here think?

    So, the paper begins by suggesting that opposition to a physical explanation of the mind comes from the idea of physical systems as conceptually transparent - that physical properties are fully understandable, with nothing fundamentally mysterious about them. Physics describes the world in mathematical terms, and mathematical concepts are perfectly clear and unambiguous. So the idea goes that if a physical system could have a mind, we should be able to understand how it could have a mind, but we cannot understand that, so purely physical systems cannot have minds. This is an interesting idea, especially because I more often hear the idea that consciousness is conceptually transparent. However, the transparency of physics ties into points that Dr. Feser (and some others) have made - some aspects of the "mind-body problem" in current philosophy arise due to the assumption that current physics' description of the world in purely mathematical terms is complete, but we don't have to make that assumption. For instance, perhaps matter has purposes and sensory qualities that can't be described mathematically, and while physics gives true information as far as it goes, it doesn't provide the whole story.

    The paper also notes that conceptual transparency doesn't mean that humans specifically can understand something, because there might be transparent ideas that are too complex. It means that a powerful enough mind, such as Laplace's demon, would be able to fully understand it. The author discusses how a posteriori physicalists would say that the relationship between minds and the physical world involves metaphysical, not logical necessity, so they reject the conceptual transparency of the physical. In that view, no mind, no matter how capable, would be able to derive mental facts from the physical facts alone despite the objective supervenience.

    However, the author says that this seems to be giving up on "the core idea of physicalism," and I agree. David Chalmers makes a similar point when he discusses this sort of materialist position (which he calls "Type-B materialism"). Chalmers argues that in the rest of science, all identities and necessities are conceptually transparent and can in principle be derived from fundamental physics and the relevant concepts. A reductionist explanation shows how everything about a whole logically follows from its parts. So while a posteriori physicalism is popular and the paper's main argument doesn't deal with it, I think there's no good reason to accept inexplicable necessities, and any real reduction of intentionality should be a priori in the relevant sense.

    I know this is long, but this contains some ideas that aren't in the paper itself. Also, I wanted to make it very clear what position the *main* argument is directed against. (Actually, the argument also requires that intentionality exists in the first place, and therefore that eliminativism is false. The author briefly mentions that denying the existence of intentionality seems to be self-refuting. I agree that eliminativism is false, due to the arguments people such as Dr. Feser have made). Anyway, here's a summary of the main argument as I understand it (in next post):

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  4. AnonymousJune 18, 2025 at 11:39 PM

    (Part 2)

    - Some thoughts are about physical properties (this seems true, and thinking about physical properties is necessary to understand the meaning of "physicalism").
    - On physicalism, with enough physical information, a sufficiently powerful mind (such as Laplace's demon) would be able to infer the content of any thoughts a physical system had. (Note that any amount of physical information that is necessary would be available - even everything in the whole universe. Also, this accommodates positions such as functionalism, because with sufficient physical information, the functional roles of a physical property could be inferred.)
    - If a thought is about a physical property, and the thought itself is physical, either the thought itself possesses that property or it does not. And given that we can understand the meaning of physicalism, we can think about this fact. (A rough example, on physicalism: "My brain is active" versus "My brain is inactive.")
    - The paper defines "inclusive" (a thought that has the physical property it is about) and "noninclusive" (a thought that does not have the physical property it is about) and shows that under the relevant physicalist position, these are themselves physical properties (as they are disjunctions of physical properties, and Laplace's demon should be able to tell whether a thought is inclusive or not with the knowledge of all physical facts).
    - The problem happens for the thought "Some thoughts are noninclusive" (some thoughts do not contain the physical property they are about). Under physicalism, the physical property this is about is "being a thought that does not contain the physical property it is about." Therefore, it is "noninclusive" if and only if it is "inclusive." This is a contradiction.

    As Johns notes, this is similar to the Grelling-Nelson paradox (the word "heterological" describes itself if and only if it does not describe itself, and a similar problem applies to various other ways to express the same idea), but English still works despite the paradox. The author says that in the natural language case, terms such as "heterological" are defined only indirectly, as you need to know the meaning of a word before knowing it is heterological or not. This is fine for most words, which are already defined, but this causes a self-contradictory circle in the case of "heterological" itself. Johns then argues that the problem for physicalism is that this sort of circularity should not arise for it. A sufficiently powerful mind with all the physical information *should* be able to know whether a physical state has or does not have any given physical property, because of conceptual transparency.

    The author suggests that this doesn't apply if the vehicles of intentionality are not transparent. What about (what I think is) Feser's view that the ultimate grounds of intentionality are formal signs, concepts and thoughts, which are just content with no separable "vehicle"? If this argument shows that view is self-contradictory as well, there's an issue. We can indeed have thoughts about concepts and thoughts, but I think (though I'm not sure) that because of a lack of a separate vehicle from which content can be inferred, issues such as "Some thoughts do not contain the property they're about" may be more like the Grelling-Nelson paradox than a reductio ad absurdum (in this view, you can't logically infer meaning from non-meaning properties). Also, maybe a physicalist could get around the issue by denying the law of the excluded middle! I myself have thought about separate potential reasons to reject that law, but I'm not sure how many physicalists, especially non-eliminativist ones who don't want to revise logic, really want to take that option.

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