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: