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...
65 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...
92 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...
86 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...
122 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:
Sunday, October 24, 2021

Untangling the web

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David S. Oderberg and others on free speech, in the new anthology Having Your Say: Threats to Free Speech in the 21 st Century , edited by ...
69 comments:
Tuesday, October 19, 2021

Truth as a transcendental

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Last June, I presented a talk on the topic “Truth as a Transcendental” at the Aquinas Philosophy Workshop on the theme Aquinas on Knowledge,...
50 comments:
Wednesday, October 13, 2021

From Socrates to Stock

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Socrates is a model for all philosophers, not only because he pursued the truth through rational argumentation, but because he did so uncomp...
116 comments:
Monday, October 11, 2021

Covid-19 vaccination should not be mandatory

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In a recent post , I argued that a Catholic can in good conscience take one of the Covid-19 vaccines, but also that such vaccination should ...
59 comments:
Saturday, October 9, 2021

Covid-19 vaccines and Jeffrey Dahmer’s nail clippings

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Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was murdered in prison almost thirty years ago.  Suppose that, before his body was removed from the crime scene...
55 comments:
Friday, October 8, 2021

Covid-19 vaccination is not the hill to die on

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What should Catholics think about the Covid-19 vaccines and about vaccine mandates?  I keep getting asked about this, so a post devoted to t...
97 comments:
Wednesday, September 29, 2021

It’s the next thrilling open thread!

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Please keep in mind, dear reader, that if you’re inclined to begin a comment with “This is off-topic, but…” then you shouldn’t post it.  Cer...
267 comments:
Sunday, September 26, 2021

The “first world problem” of evil

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Suffering, atheists frequently assure us, is not what we would expect if God exists.  You might suppose, then, that where there is greater s...
107 comments:
Thursday, September 16, 2021

Lao Tzu’s negative theology

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Among the most interesting things about Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu (fl. 6 th century B.C.) is that he did not exist.  Or at least, that’s ...
77 comments:
Saturday, September 11, 2021

Ioannidis on the politicization of science

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Like other academics, I first became aware of John Ioannidis through his influential 2005 paper “Why Most Published Research Findings are Fa...
146 comments:
Sunday, September 5, 2021

Make-believe matter

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Materialism can at first blush seem to have a more commonsensical and empirical character than Cartesian dualism.  The latter asks you to be...
181 comments:
Tuesday, August 31, 2021

Aquinas on humor and social life

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In Summa Theologiae II-II.168.2-4 , Aquinas discusses the essential role that play and humor have in human life.  They are necessary for th...
25 comments:
Tuesday, August 24, 2021

Confucius on our times

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What is essential to a well-functioning society?  In a famous passage from The Great Learning traditionally attributed to Confucius (551-47...
71 comments:
Tuesday, August 17, 2021

Oppy and Feser after-party

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After the first exchange Graham Oppy and I had on Cameron Bertuzzi’s show Capturing Christianity two years ago, Cameron hosted an after-sho...
55 comments:
Friday, August 13, 2021

Sterba on the problem of evil

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Recently my article “The Thomistic Dissolution of the Logical Problem of Evil” appeared in the journal Religions .  It was part of a specia...
164 comments:
Saturday, August 7, 2021

Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part V: Woody Allen

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So far in this series we’ve considered Nietzsche , Sartre , Freud , and Marx .  None of them is exactly a laugh riot.  So let’s now take a l...
124 comments:
Friday, August 6, 2021

Oppy on Thomistic cosmological arguments

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My article “Oppy on Thomistic cosmological arguments” has just been published in the latest issue of the journal Religious Studies .  (It’...
47 comments:
Friday, July 30, 2021

Anaximander and natural theology

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The idea of natural theology is the idea of knowledge of God’s existence and nature that is attainable through purely philosophical argumen...
107 comments:
Friday, July 23, 2021

Pope Francis’s scarlet letter

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Consider two groups of Catholics:  First, divorced Catholics who disobey the Church’s teaching by forming a “new union” in which they are se...
240 comments:
Sunday, July 18, 2021

Pope Victor redux?

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The Quartodeciman controversy of the second century A.D. had to do with the date on which the resurrection of Christ ought to be observed. ...
147 comments:
Saturday, July 17, 2021

Aquinas on bad prelates

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What attitude should a Catholic take toward cruel and arbitrary prelates – for example, those who endlessly stir up division and then shamel...
131 comments:
Monday, July 12, 2021

The metaphysical presuppositions of formal logic

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By “logic” we might mean (a) the rules that determine the difference between good and bad reasoning, or (b) some formal system that codifies...
52 comments:
Tuesday, July 6, 2021

Schmid on existential inertia

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At his blog, Joseph Schmid has replied to my recent post about his criticisms of the Aristotelian proof.  The reply is extremely long.  N...
221 comments:
Friday, July 2, 2021

Schmid on the Aristotelian proof

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A fellow named Joseph Schmid has written a number of articles and blog posts critical of various ideas and arguments of mine, such as the Ar...
204 comments:
Saturday, June 26, 2021

A whole lotta links

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At Substack, philosopher Michael Robillard explains how he left academia, and how academia left him . Anna Krylov warns of the growing pol...
44 comments:
Monday, June 21, 2021

Curiosity damned the cat

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Aquinas tells us that curiosity is a vice .  Before you clutch your pearls, dear village atheist reader, know that Aquinas was not condemni...
74 comments:
Wednesday, June 16, 2021

Indeterminacy and the comics

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When I was seventeen, I wanted to be Al Williamson , the legendary science-fiction and adventure strip comic book artist.  Williamson is bes...
46 comments:

Five Proofs in Spanish

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My book Five Proofs of the Existence of God is now available in a Spanish translation .  It has for some time been available also in German...
43 comments:
Saturday, June 12, 2021

An exegetical principle from Fortescue

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In his book The Early Papacy: To the Synod of Chalcedon in 451 , Fr. Adrian Fortescue argues that the essential Catholic claims about the au...
125 comments:
Friday, June 4, 2021

Aquinas and Hayek on abstraction

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Common sense and Aristotelian philosophy alike take it that we first know particular individual things (this triangle, that dog, etc.) and o...
140 comments:
Thursday, June 3, 2021

Dave’s armstronging again

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Longtime readers might recall Dave Armstrong, a Catholic apologist who, to put it gently, has a tendency to stretch the truth in bizarre way...
170 comments:
Saturday, May 29, 2021

A reply to Dreher

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Rod Dreher has responded to my recent post about him and Steve Skojec.  What follows is a reply.  Let me start by saying that I appreciate...
284 comments:
Friday, May 28, 2021

Do not abandon your Mother

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In Catholic theology, the Church is not to be identified with a mere aggregate of her members, not even those members who happen to hold ecc...
230 comments: