UPDATE 12/20: The review is no longer behind a paywall.
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"One of the best contemporary writers on philosophy" National Review
"A terrific writer" Damian Thompson, Daily Telegraph
"Feser... has the rare and enviable gift of making philosophical argument compulsively readable" Sir Anthony Kenny, Times Literary Supplement
Selected for the First Things list of the 50 Best Blogs of 2010 (November 19, 2010)
About Me
- Edward Feser
- I am a writer and philosopher living in Los Angeles. I teach philosophy at Pasadena City College. My primary academic research interests are in the philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. I also write on politics, from a conservative point of view; and on religion, from a traditional Roman Catholic perspective.
Followers
Main website
Books by Edward Feser
- Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature
- All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory
- Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science
- Five Proofs of the Existence of God
- By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment (with Joseph M. Bessette)
- Neo-Scholastic Essays
- Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction
- Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics
- Aquinas
- The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism
- Locke
- The Cambridge Companion to Hayek
- Philosophy of Mind
- On Nozick
Articles by Edward Feser available online
Recommended philosophers' websites
- Alexander Bird
- Alexander Hall
- Alexander Pruss
- Alfred Freddoso
- Angus Menuge
- Brian Davies
- Brian Leftow
- Christopher Brown
- Christopher Martin
- Crawford Elder
- David Braine
- David Oderberg
- David Stove
- David Twetten
- Dennis Des Chene
- E. J. Lowe
- Eleonore Stump
- Francis Beckwith
- Gaven Kerr
- Gyula Klima
- Howard Robinson
- J. P. Moreland
- J. R. Lucas
- James F. Ross
- James Lennox
- John Haldane
- John Hawthorne
- Jonathan Sanford
- Joshua Hochschild
- Katherin Rogers
- Kathrin Koslicki
- Kit Fine
- Lloyd Gerson
- Lydia McGrew
- Mark Anderson
- Michael Gorman
- Michael Pakaluk
- Michael Rota
- Monte Ransome Johnson
- Nancy Cartwright
- Patrick Toner
- Paul Symington
- Robert Koons
- Roger Scruton
- Stephen Boulter
- Stephen Mumford
- Thomas Pink
- Timothy McGrew
- Timothy Pawl
- Travis Dumsday
- Tuomas Tahko
- Tyler McNabb
- Walter Ott
- William Jaworski
- William Lane Craig
- William Vallicella
Aristotelico-Thomism and Neo-Scholasticism: Online resources
- Actus Essendi
- Alan Aversa's Aristotelian Thomism Page
- Aristotelian philosophy of nature
- Center for Thomistic Studies
- Centre for Thomistic Studies (Australia)
- Classical Theism Forum
- Coalition for Thomism
- In medias PHIL
- Institute for the Study of Nature
- Ite ad Thomam
- Leo Elders Home Page
- Maritain Center online archive of Thomistic and Neo-Scholastic works
- Mortimer J. Adler Archive
- Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange: A Biographical Sketch
- Resources on Aristotelian Thomism
- Society for Aristotelian Studies
- St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles
- St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae
- Thomas Aquinas in English: A Bibliography
- Thomas International Project
- Thomistica.net
- Twenty-Four Thomistic Theses
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Catholic websites
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- Fr. Ray Blake
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Oh my goodness! Just reading this tittle is driving me crazy to read! I hope that the paywall drops soon.
ReplyDeleteYou mean we Kant read it yet?
DeleteHaha, yeah!
DeleteUnfortunately, we don't have the phenomenon, much less the noumenon... for now.
Kant was the greatest of all philosophers. He foresaw quantum mechanics.
ReplyDeleteHahaha, yeah sure. Could you justify that bizarre statement please?
DeleteGoogle it. Haha.
DeleteKant lost himself in the metaphysical carnival while crossing Descartes' ghost house and Hume's fun house of mirrors. No surprise, he later became an attraction of the circus itself: the Catatropic Spider of the metaphysical horror house!
DeleteThat was good, Vini. Feliz Navidad.
DeleteThanks, Anon. Glad you liked it!
DeleteMerry Christmas for you and yours too!
ReplyDeleteOne of the best observations on Kant (curtesy of Edmund Husserl) was that he failed to see how metal events and entities would also need their own ontology (it doesn’t matter if some of the mind is inaccessible) and to complain this was merely conditioned by subjective necessity was self-defeat by kicking the problem up a stage. As such trying to separate Epistemology from Metaphysics was like trying to outmanoeuvre one’s reflection.
That sounds interesting. Can you give more? Even a article would help.
DeleteIt does seems like a good observation. Sounds like something not that far from Schopenhauer critique of the Transcendental Idealism.
I don't have a Claremont account so I only read the first couple of lines. What has struck me over the last many years, though, is that the rough difference between conservatives and liberals - at least in America - is the distinction you describe between taking external reality as the given and starting with our own internal dispositions.
ReplyDeleteYou don't need to read Ed's review (although I would like to) to know that he (like all Thomistic philosophers) takes a dim view of Kant. For a favorable review of this book, read this article that has no paywall:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/03/kant-a-revolution-in-thinking-marcus-willaschek-book-review
Prof. Marcus Willaschek is a brilliant philosopher in his own right. This is a review of his book explaining Kant's views on metaphysics:
ReplyDeletehttps://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/kant-on-the-sources-of-metaphysics-the-dialectic-of-pure-reason/
I've dropped the paywall.
ReplyDeleteYay! Thank you!
DeleteThe article is now unlocked.
ReplyDeleteGreat article explaining Kant, Prof. Feser! Thank you.
ReplyDeleteI have two points: 1.
Because Descartes took the self’s knowledge to begin with what can be established by reason alone apart from sensory experience...
I assume someone has noticed that Descartes (and his progeny) pretty much assume adults who have come to sit before Lady Philosophy to be enlightened. Has he (or the others) ever considered the newborn baby? They DON'T "think" in any sense worthy of the name.
The experiments with sensory deprivation (on adults, of course) are interesting. I hope nobody has ever attempted this, but suppose we extrapolate the experiment to a newborn baby (actually, I would prefer it to extend even to the baby in the womb), where they deprive the baby of all sensory experience: all senses (somehow) shuttered from input. It is highly doubtful that this person will ever come to think.
2. Kant holds that no knowledge would be possible unless certain notions were built into the very structure of the human mind prior to sensory experience. These include time and space, along with what Kant calls the “categories”—unity, plurality, substance and accident, cause and effect, and eight others. Apart from these, what enters the mind by way of sensory experience would be an unintelligible jumble,
Is Kant's proposal here completely immune to a pair of objections? The first is simpler, Objector A says: "maybe YOUR mind is built that way, but my mind is different." On what basis could he prove this is impossible? I assume he can't use empirical evidence, and even if he claims he can, it seems unlikely he can prove the case.
For the second, Objector B says "you have prepared a large list of categories, in several groups, to constitute a class of a priori conceptual filters for experience. This is complex. There can be no fact this complex but by being caused by some cause pre-arranging this, and (because the effect is mental) by an intelligent agent who MADE this situation. It is absurd and self-defeating to imagine that mind is subject to the same pre-conditions of thought. Hence it is not the MERE FACT of being "mind" that makes our minds to be cast in the formulation you posit. Indeed, that a mind must think in terms of space and time is obviously contingent, since space and time are contingent. So, even if our human minds are (to a large degree) all alike in structure, this cannot be taken to prove that ALL mind must also be alike."
Which, of course, leads to considering whether aspects of our minds are given by our physical context, and sensory input, and that what he thinks is "built-in" to mind really isn't.
Objector A says: "maybe YOUR mind is built that way, but my mind is different." On what basis could he prove this is impossible?
DeleteHe couldn't prove this is impossible for the simple reason that it's not even clear what the objection is. (Built what way? Different how?)
To Objector B I believe Kant would say that he never intended to prove anything about mind as such. The categories are categories of understanding, i.e., of Erfahrung-experience, experience as intelligible to us, not of mere Erlebnis-experience (what we merely "live through" without being able to give any rational account of it), nor of some "thing-in-itself experience," that would pretend to circumscribe the meaning of experience for God.
This is just the Gottingen Review all over again. It's a very common reading but it ignores what Kant says about the thing in itself in chapter 3 of the analytic - it's not really any sort of thing at all but a limiting concept. It also fails to account for the difference between empirical realism and transcendental idealism, reading Kant's deductions as a sort of dogmatic mechanism. Admittedly Kant is a bad writer, he was not clear on his own insights which is why there are so many apparent inconsistencies and absurdities. But this reading of Kant as a radical, skeptical dualist is misguided.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Dr. Feser. In one of the previous open threads I asked about a possible thomistic critique of Kant. This piece is a review for a book about Kant written by another author, so of course it has a completely different intention, but I find the summary of the background to Kant as well as Kant's own philosophy to be very instructive for me.
ReplyDeleteI received some interesting comments in the previous open thread, as for instance a pointer to Kant's critique by Rob Koons, but this review has renewed my curiosity and I wonder if Dr. Feser, or other users, have anything else to say about how a thomist philosopher would reply to Kant's system.
"Edward Feser has a definite gift for making fairly abstruse philosophical material accessible to readers from outside the academic world, without compromising the rigor of the arguments or omitting challenging details." David Bentley Hart is proven right once again!
ReplyDelete(Sorry, I know this was a somewhat backhanded compliment, but I couldn't help msyelf. Great review!)
An alternative to get around Kant, or indeed all the post-Lockean problems, is to deny the blank slate "tabula rasa" view of the mind. The idea that there is nothing in the mind that isn't first in the senses, cannot itself be derived from the senses. And with innate ideas and/or divine illumination, the whole thrust of Post-Lockean epistemology becomes besides the point.
ReplyDeleteOn Kant's 'legacy' -- which would have horrified Kant -- the argument in a nutshell seems to be: "Look what happened: a horrifying betrayal of your thought; but still, this is *your* fault." Seems a sterile polemic. Of course it's originally Descartes's fault. And his 'cogito' is derived from Augustine's 'fallor' so the blame really is on the (in)famous bishop of Hippo. Then trace back further, there's Jesus and Plato and ancient Hindu thought and -- why not? -- all the way back to Adam, creating reality for himself by naming things. But then that was the capacity God gave him, wasn't it? First principles of reason, categories of understanding, the human mind: makes reality (human reality) -- does it not?? -- but certainly not "rather than the divine mind," since the divine mind is what made the human mind, in its own (creative) image and likeness.
ReplyDelete