Edward Feser: The New Neo-Scholasticism

Friday, April 10, 2026

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.”

24 comments:

AnonymousApril 10, 2026 at 2:27 PM
Most of the theologians I have read from the 20th century (Rahner, Balthasar, and Lubac) and others who I keep meaning to read and who constantly show up on the great list of theologians (Tracy, Lonergan, ect) seem to be reacting against scholastic because it had become calcified. Do you think that a renewal of a calcification of Catholic thought is a threat that comes with this renewal in Neo-Scholastic thought, or is this iteration, for some reason, shielded from these threats?
ReplyDelete
Replies
NLRApril 10, 2026 at 7:44 PM
A very interesting article. I particularly liked the way it traced the history.

The ebb and flow of interest in Aristotelianism and Thomism shows that, in intellectual history (as well as history in general), there are many possibilities, not only one thing that could occur. What happens happens, but it comes about from particular circumstances and if those were to change, the events would change as well.
ReplyDelete
Replies
AnonymousApril 11, 2026 at 2:50 PM
I remember going to a university library many years ago and seeing bound volumes of the journal "The New Scholasticism."
ReplyDelete
Replies
AnonymousApril 13, 2026 at 7:46 PM
Why do you think Trump supports dictators like those in Hungary and Russia?
ReplyDelete
Replies
AnonymousApril 14, 2026 at 11:00 AM
Those footnotes have given me a lot of books to read. I feel like a hungry man who has been given six months of food by a gracious stranger.

Thank you, sir.
ReplyDelete
Replies
TonyApril 14, 2026 at 11:34 AM
The style of Neo-Scholastic writing has frequently been characterized as spiritually arid or dry as sawdust, for which reason it was denigrated as “sawdust Thomism.” Neo-Scholastic manuals were also accused of largely repeating each other and of presenting stock ideas and arguments in a rote manner.

I suspect that a large part of the motive force behind the criticisms is not from problems within the actual texts of these neo-scholastics, but from the pedagogical framework from which the texts were approached. In the late 19th century, and much more in the 20th century, there was a nearly universal abandonment of teaching the classical grounding sources of scholarship in the classical manner, the liberal arts and the liberal education. As a result, the "manuals" ended up being taught not principally as the summarizing reference works from which the student could remind himself of the (already sifted, elaborated, and grasped) principles that apply to specific situations, and instead read them as if they were the root material that "explains" the teaching, which they are not. It's like looking at a catechism for the deepest root sources of the teachings: that's not its job, it's just a summary. Hence such critiques were valid only on the basis of students mistakenly using the manuals for a task they weren't geared for. It's a valid complaint - to which the correct response would have been to return to making sure the students got the right grounding education first, so that they didn't have any reason to treat the manuals that way.

When I have read stuff by Rahner or de Lubac, I have usually found that where their approach departs importantly from the scholastic model, there their work suffers from ambiguity, defective grounding in prior principles, or (sometimes) being just plain wrong, and where their conclusions did not differ from that of the scholastics, the account would have been better made (clearer, simpler, easier to use correctly, harder to use incorrectly) using the scholastic approach than their approach. That might be another way of saying "I'm a Thomist", but it's not because I don't think Thomas ever made mistakes or cannot be improved upon by additional work.
ReplyDelete
Replies
AnonymousApril 14, 2026 at 2:29 PM
Appreciate this article very much--especially your fair-minded take on the (real) stagnation of certain moments of scholastic thought and the (lazy) caricatures of its opponents. Whatever its faults, when it comes to Christian philosophy there is simply nothing comparable to scholasticism in terms of its aspirations to explanatory rigor and breadth.
ReplyDelete
Replies
AnonymousApril 14, 2026 at 8:11 PM
I attended Providence College in the late 60s. The philosophy and theology faculty were mostly Dominican friars, most of whom were educated in Europe, some of whom had two doctorates. All were fluent in English, Latin, Italian, French and/or German. They demanded a lot from us undergraduates, including being able to translate Latin and French by our senior year. Yes, we studied the manuals, but also primary sources as well.
ReplyDelete
Replies
Intentionality AnonApril 15, 2026 at 10:37 AM
Maybe not entirely related because I'm pretty sure Philip Goff is hardly a (Neo-)Scholastic, but Goff recently made an interesting Substack post about Kripke's "quus" argument: https://philipgoff.substack.com/p/can-calculators-add-can-brains-add
Given that Feser himself has used that argument in the past as part of a defense of the immateriality of the mind, it's interesting to see more people discussing it. Though of course, there are a lot of critical comments on that Substack post. From a look, they seem to be of a similar nature to the criticisms of (Feser's discussion of) the quus argument earlier. I think some ways of stating the argument that might help deal with them are:

- Emphasize that the physical processes in, say, a calculator have no intrinsic meaning whatsoever - whatever they mean comes entirely from outside interpreting minds. I think most people, at least if reminded, understand that the symbols of language are arbitrary and have no intrinsic meaning, so remind them of that!

- If someone argues that human thought is indeterminate after all, emphasize that science and rationality depend on mathematics and logic. So if there is no determinate meaning, there can be no scientific support or rational argument for any claim, including the claim that there is no determinate meaning. Oops. Therefore, we have no reason to accept this absolute indeterminacy.
ReplyDelete
Replies
MortainApril 15, 2026 at 12:03 PM
Dr. Feser,

Thank you so much for this magnificent article and for your hard work and invaluable contribution to restoring the Scholastic tradition in our day!
ReplyDelete
Replies
NormApril 24, 2026 at 7:27 AM
Hi Prof

I just wanted to clarify a simple thing,

Given Donald Davidson's thesis that there can't be any strict law like correelation between the mental and the physical entails, so that even if someone wants to make any claims of supervenience, this supervenience cannot entail any strict dependency of the mental on the physical (however one conceivesof the physical) right ?

At most only a contingent dependence given the current circumstances or something like that.

So for example intentionality, qualitative truths about redness , hotness that Russell took to be essential to the practice of physics cannot have any necessary relationship with the mathematical structure of the brain (if one takes the brain to be nothing more then mathematical structure for the sake of argument).

At most it would only be a very contingent sort of dependence of any.

Am I right here ?

I think I am

This should be easy for you to answer :)
ReplyDelete
Replies
AnonymousMay 4, 2026 at 12:57 PM
Very Cool! I noted Brian Davies' work as a good birthday present for my friend who now teaches high school and who studied Philosophy of Religion.
ReplyDelete
Replies
IgenMay 12, 2026 at 8:16 AM
"The style of Neo-Scholastic writing has frequently been characterized as spiritually arid or dry as sawdust, for which reason it was denigrated as “sawdust Thomism.” Neo-Scholastic manuals were also accused of largely repeating each other and of presenting stock ideas and arguments in a rote manner"

I have seen this kind of argument many times in my attempts to understand the decline of neo-scholasticism in post-conciliar period, and frankly, I never understood it.

I mean, doesn't every ordinary high-school and university science textbook (e.g. a physics textbook, a chemistry textbook, etc.) "largely repeat each other and present stock ideas and arguments in a rote manner"? And what's wrong with that? Nobody even complains there is something wrong. That's how it's supposed to be once that the body of knowledge is settled. You don't expect originality from a textbook. And you usually don't expect students to read Newton or Einstein themselves; you rely on textbooks that set forth the same ideas in more approachable way. So if that approach is fine for other sciences - *today* as always, why wouldn't the same approach be fine for theology and philosophy?

The same applies for the accusation of "dryness". Every math or physics or any exact science textbook is necessarily in some sense a bit "dry". So what? I don't expect poetry from a textbook. I expect clarity, systematic approach, readability, exactness... And if that's normal for other academic subjects, why not in philosophy and theology?

So, in my opinion, such accusations don't seem intellectually honest and instead represent a form of a rhetoric device to evade the real explanation. And while I don't know the real explanation, and there might be as many different real reasons as there are different opponents of scholasticism, I suspect many of the real reasons have to do with a preference for modernist ideas that scholasticism famously opposed.
ReplyDelete
Replies
NormMay 14, 2026 at 11:17 AM
I'll just try to summarise what I think the correct answer is according to you Prof.

If someone were relying on pure scientific motivations for idealism as in the case of eddington above in trying to understand everything to be mathematical, then the idealism would be self undermining because the senses point to an external world, I think you provide good phenomenological arguments for this in Immortal Souls, so this idealist would have to say that the senses are decieving us but that would undermine the "scientific" foundations/motivations ofhis theory.

If someone wanted to argue for idealism using some theory like " externalism, again one problem would still be that it seems to undermine everyday experience.

As you write in a critique of Mcdowell

"What exactly does the Wilshire Grand Center being a constituent of my thought about it amount to? Obviously it is not a constituent of my thought in the same sense in which it is, say, a constituent of a certain city block in Los Angeles."

Given that the aristotelian position fits well with our experience, embracing any other position would seem to beg the question.

Do you think externalist theories like the one above suffering from other defects as well?

For example in an old 2009 post, you wrote that the externalist theories are still making some Cartesian assumptions, in what sense did you mean that ?

Would you say any idealism would be making the mistake of reifying our perceptual experiences outside of it's bodily context?

Would really appreciate you response Prof cheers.

I think I did a lot of the work for ya.

I have been on a reading spree of late.

Cheers.

And thanks for the measure sanity you provide on current affairs.
ReplyDelete
Replies