Edward Feser

"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)

Tuesday, May 23, 2023

Hell and conditional prophecy

In a recent talk at the Angelicum (which can be viewed at YouTube ), Fr. Simon Gaine addresses the question of whether scripture teaches tha...

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

Capital punishment and the law of nations

What is the nature of Pope Francis’s 2018 change to the Catechism’s teaching on capital punishment? Does it amount to a reversal of traditi...

Monday, May 8, 2023

Substance, teleology, and intentionality

There is an illuminating parallel between the traditional Aristotelian distinction between substances , artifacts , and aggregates , and the...

Tuesday, May 2, 2023

A Festschrift for Gyula Klima

My essay “Truth as a Transcendental” appears in the Festschrift Metaphysics Through Semantics: The Philosophical Recovery of the Medieval Mi...

Saturday, April 29, 2023

The Catechism and Capital Punishment: A Reply to Annett

Some years back, in my article “Three questions for Catholic opponents of capital punishment,” I argued that Pope Francis’s statements on t...

Thursday, April 20, 2023

Hazony and Gottfried on wokeism and Marxism

Right-wingers often characterize wokeism as a kind of Marxism, and left-wingers routinely dismiss the characterization as a cheap smear that...

Thursday, April 13, 2023

What is a Law of Nature?

Some time back I gave a lecture at Fermilab on the topic “What is a Law of Nature?” I’ve posted the text of the lecture at my main website ...

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

All One in Christ on EWTN Live

Recently I recorded an interview about my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory for the televisio...

Thursday, April 6, 2023

Talking philosophy and natural theology

Recently, on the Thomistic Institute’s Off-Campus Conversations program, Fr. Gregory Pine and I had a discussion about Aquinas’s Five Ways, ...

Wednesday, April 5, 2023

Strawson on free will and interpersonal relationships

In his classic paper “Freedom and Resentment,” P. F. Strawson addresses the question of what difference the widespread acceptance of determ...

Saturday, April 1, 2023

All One in Christ on Bookmark Brief

Recently I recorded interviews about my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory for the television p...

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

McCaig and Reilly on All One in Christ

At Twitter, Bishop Scott McCaig kindly recommends my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory . He w...

The philosophy of capital punishment

My essay “The Justice of Capital Punishment” appears in The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Punishment , edited by Matthew C. Altman....

Saturday, March 25, 2023

Putnam on reason, reductionism, and relativism

Naturalism holds that what is real is what can be accounted for in terms acceptable to science. More or less the orthodoxy in contemporary ...

Saturday, March 18, 2023

How to define “wokeness”

A common talking point among the woke is the claim that “woke” is just a term of abuse that has no clear meaning. Whether many of them real...

Friday, March 10, 2023

This month at First Things

My review of Thomas Ward’s superb new book Ordered by Love: An Introduction to John Duns Scotus appears in the current issue of First Thin...

Friday, March 3, 2023

Naturalism versus Katz’s Platonism

Naturalism holds that there is nothing more to reality than the world of concrete entities causally related to one another within space and ...

Sunday, February 26, 2023

Open thread combox

Here’s the latest open thread, by popular demand. Actually, it was one guy, but I’ll bet there at least twice as many as that who are inter...

Friday, February 24, 2023

Catholicism, CRT, and the spirit of the age

Recently I was interviewed by the Catholic Herald ’s Katherine Bennett about Critical Race Theory and the need for Catholics not to let them...

Saturday, February 18, 2023

Pope Francis contra life imprisonment

The white supremacist Buffalo shooter who murdered ten people has been sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. A...

Friday, February 10, 2023

The Faith Once for All Delivered

Coming soon, the important new anthology The Faith Once for All Delivered: Doctrinal Authority in Catholic Theology , edited by Fr. Kevin Fl...

Talking about All One in Christ

The latest on my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory : Recently I was interviewed for the EDIFY ...

Tuesday, February 7, 2023

An anonymous saint?

When we think of saints, we often associate them with mighty spiritual feats – dramatic martyrdoms, the production of works of great theolog...

Thursday, February 2, 2023

Avicenna on non-contradiction

We’ve been talking about the law of non-contradiction (LNC), which says that the statements p and not- p cannot both be true. (In symbol...

Friday, January 27, 2023

Quantum mechanics and the laws of thought

It isn’t news that much pop philosophy nonsense is peddled in the name of quantum mechanics. Perhaps the best-known example is the claim th...

Friday, January 20, 2023

Cartwright on theory and experiment in science

Nancy Cartwright’s A Philosopher Looks at Science is a new treatment of some of the longstanding themes of her work. It is written in her ...

Saturday, January 14, 2023

Benedict XVI, Cardinal Pell, and criticism of Pope Francis

In the wake of the deaths of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and Cardinal George Pell, it has emerged that each of them raised serious criticisms...

Saturday, January 7, 2023

More about All One in Christ

The latest on my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory : I was interviewed about the book by Carl O...

Monday, January 2, 2023

Koons on Aristotle and quantum mechanics

My review of Robert Koons’s excellent new book Is St. Thomas’s Aristotelian Philosophy of Nature Obsolete? appears at Public Discourse .

Sunday, January 1, 2023

The wages of gin

My review of Jane Peyton’s The Philosophy of Gin appears in the Christmas 2022 issue of The Lamp magazine.

Saturday, December 31, 2022

On the death of Pope Benedict XVI

I’m not sure when I first became aware of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who was later to become Pope Benedict XVI. During my high school years...

Friday, December 23, 2022

Why did the Incarnation occur precisely when it did?

Why did the second Person of the Trinity become man two thousand years ago – rather than at the beginning of the human race, or near the end...

Saturday, December 17, 2022

When do popes teach infallibly?

It is well-known that the Catholic Church teaches that popes are infallible when they speak ex cathedra or exercise their extraordinary mag...

Thursday, December 8, 2022

Is God’s existence a “hypothesis”?

Over at Twitter I’ve caused some annoyance by objecting to the phrase “the God hypothesis.” The context was a discussion of Stephen Meyer’...

Thursday, December 1, 2022

Davies on classical theism and divine freedom

I’ve long regarded Brian Davies’ An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion as the best introduction to that field on the market. A fou...

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Augustine on divine punishment of the good alongside the wicked

Many today labor under the delusion that the reality of suffering is a difficulty for Christianity – as if Christian doctrine would lead us ...

Tuesday, November 22, 2022

Update on All One in Christ

Recently I was interviewed by Steve and Becky Greene on The Catholic Conversation about my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of R...

Thursday, November 10, 2022

Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part VII: The influence of Kant

Immanuel Kant was, of course, not an atheist. So why devote an entry to him in this series, thereby lumping him in with the likes of Nietzs...

Friday, November 4, 2022

All One in Christ at Beliefnet

Recently I was interviewed at length by John W. Kennedy at Beliefnet about my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Cri...

Thursday, November 3, 2022

The teleological foundations of human rights

My essay “The Teleological Foundations of Human Rights” appears in The Cambridge Handbook of Natural Law and Human Rights , edited by Tom An...

View web version

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.

View my complete profile

Powered by Blogger.