Immortal Souls… is a major philosophical contribution to the metaphysics of human nature and the praeambula fidei… Feser’s work merits the highest praise… Impressively organized, thematically systematized, and distinctively philosophical, [its] depth, scope, and contributions are manifest even to the most vociferously hostile opponent… [It] will remain a timeless contribution to the revival of [Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy] as the serious competitor to alternative theories of human nature.
Commenting
on some “minor drawbacks,” Rehman opines that the book should have devoted less
space to some issues and more space to others.
In particular, he suggests that I could have shortened the discussion of
eliminative materialism given that I take the view to be self-defeating, and
that the discussion of the semantic indeterminacy of material properties and
processes is forbiddingly technical to readers new to these issues. Meanwhile, he thinks the absence of any treatment
of the distinction between the sexes makes the book’s treatment of human nature
incomplete.
However, I
stand by these particular choices about what to include and what to omit. Eliminative materialism is a position that
many regard, quite rightly in my view, as too absurd to take seriously as a
live option. All the same, it has some prominent
and clever defenders. Moreover, I think
that some version of eliminativism is impossible to avoid if one consistently
pushes through the implications of materialism, and no one would deny that a
book like mine ought to have a lot to say about materialism and its implications. The particular section of the book Rehman
refers to is eight pages long, and there are maybe seven or eight further pages
scattered elsewhere in the book that are relevant to the topic. In a book of well over 500 pages, that does
not seem to me to be excessive.
As to the
discussion of semantic indeterminacy, this is in my judgment one of the central
issues that must be understood in order to see why a materialist account of the
intellect is impossible in principle. The
technicalities are simply unavoidable given the nature of the topic and of the
literature that has to be addressed in dealing with it. They are also necessary in order to respond adequately
to the various materialist attempts to get around the problem. In any event, Immortal Souls is not an introductory book or a
popularization. While I think there’s a
lot in it that the non-specialist will find useful, there is also a lot in it
that readers with little familiarity with academic philosophy are going to find
difficult. But the point of the book is
precisely to present as rigorous a defense as possible of the
Aristotelian-Thomistic view of human nature.
Finally, in
my view a treatment of current controversies over sex and gender would simply
have been out of place in a book of this sort.
From the point of view of Scholastic thought, Immortal Souls falls into the category of philosophical anthropology,
and from the point of view of analytic philosophy it falls into the category of
philosophy of mind. You simply wouldn’t see
a treatment of the differences between the sexes in a general work of
Scholastic philosophical anthropology or analytic philosophy of mind, given the
topics they traditionally deal with. It
would seem very odd and shoehorned in.
Of course,
that’s partly because the nature of the sexes was not a matter of controversy
until relatively recently. But while
philosophical anthropology is certainly highly relevant to that controversy, no
less relevant to dealing with it are issues that would normally arise instead
in the context of a natural law treatment of matters of sexual morality. Hence, in my judgment the current controversies
over sex and gender are best dealt with in a book on that topic, which I have
planned in any case.
Anyway, I thank Rehman for his critical engagement with the book, and for his very kind words about it.
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