Friday, May 14, 2021

Intellectuals in hell

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It is by virtue of our rational or intellectual powers that we are made in God’s image and have a dignity nothing else in the material worl...
95 comments:
Monday, May 10, 2021

Grisez on balancing health against other considerations

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Now that millions have been vaccinated, bogeyman Donald Trump has departed, and life is starting to get back to normal, some people are gett...
125 comments:
Monday, May 3, 2021

The idols of the mind

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Thomas Harper is one of the great forgotten Neo-Scholastic writers of the nineteenth century.  I discussed his wonderful little book The Im...
285 comments:
Wednesday, April 28, 2021

Social media’s fifth circle

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Marshall McLuhan’s famous remark that “the medium is the message” was never more true than in the case of Twitter.  And the message is malig...
312 comments:
Friday, April 23, 2021

Corporate persons

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A neglected insight of Scholastic political philosophy and traditional conservatism is that institutions can have a personal nature.  The C...
146 comments:
Sunday, April 18, 2021

Voila! An open thread! (Updated)

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UPDATE 4/20: Lately the comments sections have been filling up quickly.  Some readers seem unaware that after the count reaches 200 comments...
470 comments:
Tuesday, April 13, 2021

Aquinas and the problem of evil

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My article “The Thomistic Dissolution of the Logical Problem of Evil” has just been published in the journal Religions , and is available o...
325 comments:
Friday, April 9, 2021

What is mathematics about?

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I commend to you James Franklin’s latest article “Mathematics as a Science of Non ‑ abstract Reality: Aristotelian Realist Philosophies of M...
202 comments:
Friday, April 2, 2021

Frege on objectivity

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It can be an interesting exercise every now and then to reread something that had a profound effect on you earlier in life.  In my case, Got...
246 comments:
Friday, March 26, 2021

Tennant on Aquinas’s Second Way

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Every now and then I point out examples of professional academic philosophers badly misinterpreting some traditional argument for God’s exis...
227 comments:
Saturday, March 20, 2021

Meta-abstraction in the physical and social sciences

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One of the themes of Aristotle’s Revenge is the centrality of mathematical abstraction to modern scientific method, and the ways that it bo...
76 comments:
Friday, March 12, 2021

Lacordaire on the existence of God

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Preaching on theological topics is a tricky business.  The more substantive and rigorous a sermon, the greater the danger of its being inacc...
249 comments:
Tuesday, March 9, 2021

Aquinas on video

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Many readers will be familiar already with the Thomistic Institute’s outstanding Aquinas 101 series of videos , which provide brief introduc...
141 comments:
Thursday, March 4, 2021

Preventive war and quarantining the healthy

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A “preventive war” is a war undertaken proactively against a merely potential enemy, who has neither initiated hostilities nor shown any si...
147 comments:
Thursday, February 25, 2021

Smith and divine eternity

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Quentin Smith, one of the most formidable of contemporary atheist philosophers, died late last year .  One of the reasons he was formidable ...
198 comments:
Sunday, February 21, 2021

Tales from the links

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An interview with philosopher William Simpson about Aristotle and quantum mechanics, at the Wolfson College Cambridge website. Fr. John N...
60 comments:
Friday, February 12, 2021

Can a Thomist reason to God a priori?

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A priori knowledge, as modern philosophers use the term, is knowledge that can be gained independently of sensory experience.  Knowledge of...
154 comments:
Saturday, February 6, 2021

What is religion?

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The question is notoriously controversial.  Consider a definition like the following, from Bernard Wuellner’s Dictionary of Scholastic Philo...
185 comments:
Sunday, January 31, 2021

Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia on soul-body interaction

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The letters exchanged between Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia – especially their 1643 exchange on the interaction problem – are ...
60 comments:
Monday, January 25, 2021

Koons on time and relative actuality

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Rob Koons has reactivated his AnalyticThomist blog , which you must check out if you are interested in metaphysics done in a way that bring...
124 comments:
Thursday, January 21, 2021

Narrative thinking and conspiracy theories

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“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you” is one of the most famous lines from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 ...
54 comments:
Friday, January 15, 2021

McGinn on the question of being

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Colin McGinn is a philosopher whose work I always find interesting even when I disagree with it, which is often.  His book Philosophical Pro...
60 comments:
Friday, January 8, 2021

The Gnostic heresy’s political successors

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The Western world is the creation of the Church, and the crisis of the West is always at bottom the crisis of the Church.  This is especiall...
137 comments:
Wednesday, January 6, 2021

Lawlessness begets lawlessness

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As someone who is on record condemning lawlessness and sedition , I am appalled and horrified by what happened today in Washington, D.C.   ...
197 comments:
Wednesday, December 30, 2020

Year-end open thread

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Let’s bring this annus horribilis to an end with an open thread.  That annoyingly off-topic comment of yours I keep deleting?  It’s now on-...
299 comments:
Saturday, December 26, 2020

The access problem for mathematical Platonism

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Mathematical Platonism takes numbers and other mathematical objects to exist in a third realm distinct from the material and mental worlds, ...
38 comments:
Sunday, December 20, 2020

District Attorney Michel Foucault

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In the diabolical new disorder of things metastasizing around us, churchmen subvert doctrine rather than teaching it, and public authoritie...
78 comments:
Saturday, December 12, 2020

What was the Holy Roman Empire?

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According to Aristotelian-Thomistic political philosophy, the state is a natural institution.  It has as its natural end the provision of go...
111 comments:
Friday, December 4, 2020

Augustine on divine illumination

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Plato held that the Form of the Good makes other Forms intelligible to us in a way comparable to how the sun makes physical objects visible ...
111 comments:
Thursday, November 26, 2020

Links for Thanksgiving

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What the hell happened to the Drudge Report?  The Tablet   investigates . The rediscovery of hell.  At First Things , Cardinal Pell abandon...
144 comments:
Monday, November 23, 2020

Church and Culture radio interview

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Last week I was interviewed by Deal Hudson for his show Church and Culture on Ave Maria Radio.  The interview lasts an hour and ranges over...
75 comments:
Saturday, November 21, 2020

Tyranny of the sovereign individual

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The individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing;  and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole.  But he who is  unable to l...
125 comments:
Thursday, November 12, 2020

Means, motive, and opportunity

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Did Joe Biden win the election fair and square?  Or was there voter fraud sufficient to tip it in his direction?  I won’t be addressing thos...
357 comments:
Thursday, November 5, 2020

Pink on Aristotle’s Revenge

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In this week’s issue of the Times Literary Supplement , philosopher Thomas Pink kindly reviews my book Aristotle’s Revenge .  From the revi...
168 comments:
Monday, November 2, 2020

Perfect love casts out fear

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Months of lawlessness have left people on edge and anxious, and their anxiety is unlikely to be much abated by the outcome of the election....
88 comments:
Friday, October 30, 2020

“Pastoral” and other weasel words

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If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.  If language be not in accordance with the truth of things,...
124 comments:
Thursday, October 22, 2020

Dupré on the ideologizing of science

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Philosopher of science John Dupré, like Nancy Cartwright, Paul Feyerabend, and others, has developed powerful and influential criticisms of ...
124 comments:
Thursday, October 15, 2020

Lockdowns versus social justice

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The phrase “social justice” has a long and honorable history in Catholic social thought going back to the nineteenth century, but is now typ...
142 comments:
Monday, October 12, 2020

The Church embraces Columbus

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We saw in a recent post how the Scholastic theologian Bartolomé de Las Casas vigorously defended the rights and dignity of the American Ind...
35 comments:
Saturday, October 10, 2020

Joe Biden versus “democratic norms”

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No one who claims to favor Biden over Trump on the grounds of protecting “democratic norms” can, at this point, be speaking in good faith.  ...
218 comments: