Monday, August 17, 2026

Berkeley’s God

In my latest article at Postliberal Order, I discuss how the novel metaphysical assumptions that modern philosophy brought to the traditional project of establishing the existence and nature of God often either led to heterodoxy or greased the skids for atheism, using George Berkeley as a case study.

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4 comments:

  1. ingx24August 17, 2026 at 1:37 PM

    Sort of off-topic, I have a quick clarification question with regard to the A-T approach to the mind-body relation.

    From what I've come to understand, the A-T tradition handles the mind-body relation via formal causation: the neuromuscular events are the material/efficient-causal side of which our thoughts and intentions are the formal/final-causal side. This makes a lot of sense to me and seems like a very elegant "solution" (or maybe pre-emption) of the mind--body problem.

    However, I'm a little unclear on where mental images fit into this. To me, mental images seem clearly to be immaterial to some degree ("form without matter", as Aristotle himself put it). But I repeatedly see Dr. Feser say that mental images are "entirely material", and in some blog posts it sounds like he wants to assimilate mental images to the material/efficient side of things. And this would seem to put is right back into the unattractive alternative between reductionism and property dualism (with all the causal problems that come with the latter).

    So I'm a bit confused. Are mental images on the formal/final-causal side (as I feel they should be), or are they on the material/efficient-causal side?

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  2. La Puissance Du YaourtAugust 17, 2026 at 2:24 PM

    The picture at the head of the article and the first two paragraphs are repeated. Assuming a copy-paste error.

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  3. AnonymousAugust 17, 2026 at 8:32 PM

    Entered my email at Postliberal Order, but couldn't link up to the article.

    ReplyDelete

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