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)

Thursday, September 16, 2021

Lao Tzu’s negative theology

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 ...

Saturday, September 11, 2021

Ioannidis on the politicization of science

Like other academics, I first became aware of John Ioannidis through his influential 2005 paper “Why Most Published Research Findings are Fa...

Sunday, September 5, 2021

Make-believe matter

Materialism can at first blush seem to have a more commonsensical and empirical character than Cartesian dualism. The latter asks you to be...

Tuesday, August 31, 2021

Aquinas on humor and social life

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...

Tuesday, August 24, 2021

Confucius on our times

What is essential to a well-functioning society? In a famous passage from The Great Learning traditionally attributed to Confucius (551-47...

Tuesday, August 17, 2021

Oppy and Feser after-party

After the first exchange Graham Oppy and I had on Cameron Bertuzzi’s show Capturing Christianity two years ago, Cameron hosted an after-sho...

Friday, August 13, 2021

Sterba on the problem of evil

Recently my article “The Thomistic Dissolution of the Logical Problem of Evil” appeared in the journal Religions . It was part of a specia...

Saturday, August 7, 2021

Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part V: Woody Allen

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...

Friday, August 6, 2021

Oppy on Thomistic cosmological arguments

My article “Oppy on Thomistic cosmological arguments” has just been published in the latest issue of the journal Religious Studies . (It’...

Friday, July 30, 2021

Anaximander and natural theology

The idea of natural theology is the idea of knowledge of God’s existence and nature that is attainable through purely philosophical argumen...

Friday, July 23, 2021

Pope Francis’s scarlet letter

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

Sunday, July 18, 2021

Pope Victor redux?

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. ...

Saturday, July 17, 2021

Aquinas on bad prelates

What attitude should a Catholic take toward cruel and arbitrary prelates – for example, those who endlessly stir up division and then shamel...

Monday, July 12, 2021

The metaphysical presuppositions of formal logic

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

Tuesday, July 6, 2021

Schmid on existential inertia

At his blog, Joseph Schmid has replied to my recent post about his criticisms of the Aristotelian proof. The reply is extremely long. N...

Friday, July 2, 2021

Schmid on the Aristotelian proof

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...

Saturday, June 26, 2021

A whole lotta links

At Substack, philosopher Michael Robillard explains how he left academia, and how academia left him . Anna Krylov warns of the growing pol...

Monday, June 21, 2021

Curiosity damned the cat

Aquinas tells us that curiosity is a vice . Before you clutch your pearls, dear village atheist reader, know that Aquinas was not condemni...

Wednesday, June 16, 2021

Indeterminacy and the comics

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

Five Proofs in Spanish

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...

Saturday, June 12, 2021

An exegetical principle from Fortescue

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...

Friday, June 4, 2021

Aquinas and Hayek on abstraction

Common sense and Aristotelian philosophy alike take it that we first know particular individual things (this triangle, that dog, etc.) and o...

Thursday, June 3, 2021

Dave’s armstronging again

Longtime readers might recall Dave Armstrong, a Catholic apologist who, to put it gently, has a tendency to stretch the truth in bizarre way...

Saturday, May 29, 2021

A reply to Dreher

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...

Friday, May 28, 2021

Do not abandon your Mother

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...

Saturday, May 22, 2021

The trouble with capitalism

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God . (Matthew 19:24) For what wil...

Friday, May 14, 2021

Intellectuals in hell

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...

Monday, May 10, 2021

Grisez on balancing health against other considerations

Now that millions have been vaccinated, bogeyman Donald Trump has departed, and life is starting to get back to normal, some people are gett...

Monday, May 3, 2021

The idols of the mind

Thomas Harper is one of the great forgotten Neo-Scholastic writers of the nineteenth century. I discussed his wonderful little book The Im...

Wednesday, April 28, 2021

Social media’s fifth circle

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...

Friday, April 23, 2021

Corporate persons

A neglected insight of Scholastic political philosophy and traditional conservatism is that institutions can have a personal nature. The C...

Sunday, April 18, 2021

Voila! An open thread! (Updated)

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

Tuesday, April 13, 2021

Aquinas and the problem of evil

My article “The Thomistic Dissolution of the Logical Problem of Evil” has just been published in the journal Religions , and is available o...

Friday, April 9, 2021

What is mathematics about?

I commend to you James Franklin’s latest article “Mathematics as a Science of Non ‑ abstract Reality: Aristotelian Realist Philosophies of M...

Friday, April 2, 2021

Frege on objectivity

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...

Friday, March 26, 2021

Tennant on Aquinas’s Second Way

Every now and then I point out examples of professional academic philosophers badly misinterpreting some traditional argument for God’s exis...

Saturday, March 20, 2021

Meta-abstraction in the physical and social sciences

One of the themes of Aristotle’s Revenge is the centrality of mathematical abstraction to modern scientific method, and the ways that it bo...

Friday, March 12, 2021

Lacordaire on the existence of God

Preaching on theological topics is a tricky business. The more substantive and rigorous a sermon, the greater the danger of its being inacc...

Tuesday, March 9, 2021

Aquinas on video

Many readers will be familiar already with the Thomistic Institute’s outstanding Aquinas 101 series of videos , which provide brief introduc...

Thursday, March 4, 2021

Preventive war and quarantining the healthy

A “preventive war” is a war undertaken proactively against a merely potential enemy, who has neither initiated hostilities nor shown any si...

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About Me

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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