The New Neo-Scholasticism

My article “The New Neo-Scholasticism” appears in the Winter 2026 issue of the American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly.  It is available for free download here.  Here is the abstract: “The last quarter of a century has seen the rise of what can aptly be labeled a new Neo-Scholastic trend in philosophy and theology. After explaining what Scholasticism and Neo-Scholasticism are, the article describes the origins, themes, and key thinkers of this latest iteration of Scholasticism that is taking up the mantle of the old.”

Rational social animals and addiction

Roger Scruton’s book Beauty contains an interesting brief treatment of addiction.  Too much discussion of this topic today overemphasizes neurochemistry.  That is by no means to deny that that aspect of the issue is real and important.  But it addresses only what Aristotelians would call the material and efficient causes of habituation, and not the formal and final causes.  The latter concern our nature as rational social animals, and as Scruton’s discussion indicates, addiction involves disorders related to both the social and rational aspects of that nature.

Of the connection between addiction and pleasure, Scruton writes:

Addiction arises when the subject has full control over a pleasure and can produce it at will.  It is primarily a matter of sensory pleasure, and involves a kind of short-circuiting of the pleasure network.  Addiction is characterized by loss of the emotional dynamic that would otherwise govern an outward-directed, cognitively creative life.  Sex addiction is no different in this respect from drug addiction; and it wars against true sexual interest – interest in the other, the individual object of desire.  Why go to all the trouble of mutual recognition and shared arousal, when this short cut is available to the same sensory goal? (p. 186)

Will “a whole civilization die tonight”?

From Twitter/X, on the president’s deranged post of this morning (which managed to top even his deranged Easter post):

Contra White and Graham

From Twitter/X, on the comments made at the White House yesterday by Paula White and Franklin Graham: