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 ...
116 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...
58 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...
184 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 ...
59 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 ...
53 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...
134 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 ...
123 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:
Thursday, October 8, 2020

Weigel’s terrible arguments

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In his article “Truman’s Terrible Choice” at First Things , George Weigel defends the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  I respond at Cat...
126 comments:
Wednesday, September 30, 2020

Aquinas contra sedition and factional tyranny

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As Aquinas teaches, “the chief concern of the ruler of a multitude… is to procure the unity of peace” ( De Regno , Book I, Chapter 3 ).  All...
156 comments:
Friday, September 18, 2020

Aquinas contra globalism

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In Book Two, Chapter 3 of his little work De Regno (or On Kingship ), Thomas Aquinas addresses matters of trade and its effect on the mate...
98 comments:
Saturday, September 12, 2020

The rule of lawlessness

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As Aristotle and Aquinas teach us, human beings are by nature rational social animals .  Because we are a kind of animal , we need to be saf...
280 comments:
Saturday, September 5, 2020

Scholastics contra racism

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Condemning racism (or “racialist prejudice,” as he referred to it), Pope St. Paul VI affirmed that: The members of mankind share the same ...
235 comments:
Saturday, August 29, 2020

Open thread (and a comment on trolling)

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We’re long overdue for another open thread.  Now is the time for you to post that otherwise off-topic comment I’ve had to delete.  From Bein...
319 comments:
Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Separating scientism and state

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Scientism transforms science into an intolerant and all-encompassing ideology.  Bad as it is when it issues in crackpot philosophy, it can b...
91 comments:
Thursday, August 20, 2020

The particle collection that fancied itself a physicist

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I haven’t done a “Physicists say the darndest things” post in a while.  People usually ask me to write one up every time a Lawrence Krauss, ...
305 comments:
Saturday, August 15, 2020

Let’s play Jeopardy

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ANSWER: They all claim that 2 and 2 can sometimes equal 5. QUESTION: Who are Fr. Antonio Spadaro , Critical Social Justice ideologues ...
138 comments:
Thursday, August 13, 2020

Russell’s No Man’s Land

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In his History of Western Philosophy , Bertrand Russell famously characterized philosophy as follows: Philosophy, as I shall understand th...
95 comments:
Saturday, August 8, 2020

The links you’ve been longing for

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At Medium , David Oderberg on the prophets Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury . 3:16 interviews Thomist philosopher Gaven Kerr . At Notre Dam...
82 comments:
Thursday, August 6, 2020

Popes, creeds, councils, and catechisms contra universalism

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One more post on the topic of universalism before we give it a rest for a while.  Whatever other Christians might think, for the Catholic Ch...
69 comments:
Sunday, August 2, 2020

A statement from David Bentley Hart

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NOTE: David Bentley Hart and I have had some very heated exchanges over the years, but I have always found him to be at bottom a decent fell...
200 comments:
Friday, July 31, 2020

Scripture and the Fathers contra universalism

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A rhetorical game that universalists like to play is to suggest that in the early Church there was from the beginning a robust universalist ...
278 comments: