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)

Monday, May 23, 2022

The hollow universe of modern physics

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To say that the material world alone exists is not terribly informative unless we have some account of what matter is.  Those who are most ...
37 comments:
Saturday, May 14, 2022

Nietzsche and Christ on suffering

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Over and over we are taught in scripture and tradition that suffering is the lot not only of mankind in general, but of the Christian in par...
55 comments:
Monday, May 9, 2022

End of semester open thread

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Let’s start the summer break off right, with an open thread.  Now’s the time to get that otherwise off-topic obsession of yours off your che...
230 comments:
Thursday, May 5, 2022

Benedict is not the pope: A reply to some critics

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Patrick Coffin has posted an open letter by Italian writer Andrea Cionci , replying to my recent article criticizing Benevacantism .  What f...
53 comments:
Saturday, April 30, 2022

Socratic loyalty

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Socrates was so critical of his country that he was put to death by it.  Yet he could have escaped execution had he wanted to.  The reason h...
96 comments:
Monday, April 25, 2022

Fr. Gregory Pine on prudence

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Modern moral philosophers typically have much to say about abstract principles, but are not of much help for the average person seeking conc...
21 comments:
Friday, April 22, 2022

Whose pantheism? Which dualism? A Reply to David Bentley Hart

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Over at Substack, David Bentley Hart has written an open letter in reply to my recent review , at Public Discourse , of his book You Are ...
90 comments:
Monday, April 18, 2022

Tales from the Coffin

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In my recent post criticizing Benevacantism , I deliberately avoided naming specific individuals, in the hope of preventing the debate from ...
74 comments:
Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Benevacantism is scandalous and pointless

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In his book The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies , David Stove observes that an argument once given by philosopher of science Imré...
101 comments:
Tuesday, April 5, 2022

Two Harts beaten as one

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At the blog Jesus and the Ancient Paths , PhD student Seth Hart defends his namesake David Bentley Hart against the objections I raised in ...
113 comments:
Sunday, April 3, 2022

Touring the fifth circle

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For readers who are wondering, yes, I’m on Twitter now.  (I’m not referring to the fan account that has been there for some time, but to my ...
30 comments:
Thursday, March 31, 2022

Hart’s post-Christian pantheism

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Well, kids, it’s that time again.  David Bentley Hart’s new book You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature is now out.  So is my review, “Dav...
125 comments:
Sunday, March 27, 2022

Unjust war and false masculinity

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I commend to you three excellent articles by traditionalist Catholic scholars on the grave injustice of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: histor...
137 comments:
Monday, March 21, 2022

Conspiracy theories, spontaneous order, and the hermeneutics of suspicion

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Nobody denies that conspiracies occur.  They happen every time two or more people collude in order to secure some malign end.  When people c...
51 comments:
Monday, March 14, 2022

Chomsky’s “propaganda model” of mass media

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A common mistake people make when evaluating a theory is to fail to keep in mind the distinction between the theory itself, its application ...
63 comments:
Friday, March 4, 2022

Just war theory and the Russo-Ukrainian war

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One of the striking features of the catastrophe in Ukraine is how unambiguously the principles of just war doctrine seem to apply.  On the o...
209 comments:
Friday, February 25, 2022

Taylor on cognition, teleology, and God

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In his book Metaphysics , a classic brief and lucid introduction to the subject, Richard Taylor devotes a chapter to the topic of God.  Most...
193 comments:
Monday, February 21, 2022

Sex and metaphysics

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My essay “The Metaphysical Foundations of Sexual Morality” appears in The Palgrave Handbook of Sexual Ethics , edited by David Boonin.  You...
74 comments:
Friday, February 18, 2022

The failure of Johnson’s critique of natural theology

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At the Reformed Baptist Blog, Jeffrey Johnson has responded to my  First Things review of his book The Failure of Natural Theology: A Crit...
160 comments:
Friday, February 11, 2022

Johnson contra Aquinas

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My review of Jeffrey D. Johnson’s book The Failure of Natural Theology: A Critical Appraisal of the Philosophical Theology of Thomas Aquinas...
51 comments:
Wednesday, February 9, 2022

McDowell’s Aristotelian near miss

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John McDowell’s paper “Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space” made a big impression on me in graduate school, around the same time...
86 comments:
Wednesday, February 2, 2022

If you’ve been missing links

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David S. Oderberg asks “Is Prime Matter Energy?” in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy .  Also, Oderberg on the “Principle of Sufficien...
101 comments:
Thursday, January 27, 2022

Hell is not empty

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We’ve been talking about Balthasar’s view that we may at least hope that all human beings are saved.  Now, Balthasar was a Catholic theolo...
257 comments:
Friday, January 21, 2022

A fallacy in Balthasar (Updated)

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In his influential book Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved?” , theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar gives the following argument: If it is s...
205 comments:
Saturday, January 15, 2022

Barron on “diversity, equity, and inclusion”

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In a recent Word on Fire video , Bishop Robert Barron comments on the currently fashionable chatter about “diversity, equity, and inclusion...
78 comments:
Sunday, January 9, 2022

Geach on authority and consistency

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If the reader will indulge me, here is one more post inspired by Peter Geach – specifically, this time, by some themes in his book Truth and...
161 comments:
Saturday, January 1, 2022

New Year’s open thread

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Dear reader, let’s open up the discussion this year by letting you open it up.  It’s time to get that otherwise off-topic comment of yours ...
266 comments:
Wednesday, December 29, 2021

Geach on Hell

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Let’s take another trip into the philosophical and theological gold mine that is Peter Geach’s book Providence and Evil , and this time cons...
102 comments:
Saturday, December 25, 2021

The still, small voice of Christmas

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A great and strong wind rent the mountains, and broke in pieces the rocks before the Lord, but the Lord was not in the wind; and after the w...
45 comments:
Sunday, December 19, 2021

The Catholic middle ground on Covid-19 vaccination

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I commend to you Catholic philosopher Josh Hochschild’s recent EDIFY video addressing the question “Are Vaccine Mandates Ethical?”   His po...
133 comments:
Monday, December 13, 2021

Western cultural suicide as apostasy (Updated)

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In his classic book Suicide of the West , James Burnham famously characterized liberalism as “the ideology of Western suicide.”  I’ve been m...
201 comments:
Tuesday, December 7, 2021

Dissident Philosophers

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Rowman and Littlefield has just published the anthology Dissident Philosophers: Voices Against the Political Current of the Academy , edited...
16 comments:
Thursday, December 2, 2021

Geach on original sin

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Recently we dipped into Peter Geach’s book Providence and Evil .  Let’s do so again, looking this time at what he has to say about the doct...
102 comments:
Tuesday, November 23, 2021

MacIntyre on human dignity

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Recently, Alasdair MacIntyre presented a talk on the theme “Human Dignity: A Puzzling and Possibly Dangerous Idea?” at the Fall Conference o...
84 comments:
Sunday, November 21, 2021

The Feast of Christ the King

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Today Catholics celebrate the Feast of Christ the King, which makes it an appropriate time to remind ourselves of what the Church teaches th...
117 comments:
Thursday, November 18, 2021

Geach’s argument against modernism

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Catholic philosopher Peter Geach’s book Providence and Evil is interesting not only for what it says about the topics referred to in the ti...
89 comments:
Saturday, November 13, 2021

Aquinas on the relative importance of pastors and theologians

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In his book Thomas Aquinas: His Personality and Thought , Martin Grabmann notes: In a passage of his… [Aquinas] touches upon the question,...
30 comments:
Thursday, November 4, 2021

The politics of chastity

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Chastity is the virtue governing the proper use of sexuality.  My article “The Politics of Chastity” appears in the Fall 2021 issue of Nov...
123 comments:
Tuesday, November 2, 2021

Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics and the Theology of Nature

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Routledge has just published the new anthology Neo-Aristotelian Metaphysics and the Theology of Nature , edited By William M. R. Simpson, Ro...
44 comments:
Friday, October 29, 2021

Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part VI: Schopenhauer

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Our series has examined how atheists of earlier generations often exhibited a higher degree of moral and/or metaphysical gravitas than the s...
75 comments:
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About Me

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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.
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