Can philosophy be polemical?

A reader asked me to reprint the following essay, first published at the now defunct Conservative Philosopher group blog in February of 2005. Those who object to the polemical tone of The Last Superstition should give it a read. I have also addressed this topic here.

Recently I was reading two very interesting posts made by Bill Vallicella over on his personal blog. One of them dealt with Paul Edwards’ well-known critique of Heidegger, the other with David Stove. Anyone familiar with Edwards’ essay or with virtually anything written by Stove knows that both writers are capable of being fiercely polemical – often to hilarious effect in the case of Stove, who was in my view one of the greatest stylists in recent philosophy. Bill argues with great elegance and cogency that Edwards’ critique is worthless, whatever one thinks of Heidegger, both because it too uncritically assumes the truth of Russell’s doctrine of existence-as-instantiation, and because of its needlessly polemical tone. He also argues that whatever interest and value Stove’s work has, Stove was not really a philosopher at all, and that the polemical nature of his work kept him from seriously appreciating the nature and depth of philosophical problems. In general, Bill seems to hold that polemical arguments, while definitely having a place in other contexts (e.g. politics) ought for the most part to be kept out of philosophical debate.

I think there is obviously something right about this. Gratuitous personal insults, resorting to rhetorical flourishes in place of arguments, or presenting simplistic distortions of an opponent’s views, are unacceptable in the context of professional philosophical discourse. Indeed, all of this should go without saying. At the same time, I’m not sure whether there sometimes isn’t in fact a place in philosophical argument, if not for polemics, then at least for something very similar. (In fairness to Bill, let me note that I realize he was not necessarily presenting a general view about how philosophical argument ought to be conducted in either of the posts I referred to – what I say here is intended not as a criticism of anything Bill wrote, but rather as some reflections inspired by what he wrote.)

G. E. M. Anscombe famously held that there are some positions in ethics that are so odious that in many cases the proper way to respond to someone who holds them is, not to discuss his error with him, but rather to refuse to discuss it. Her example was someone who proposes, in all seriousness, to kill an innocent person for the sake of some allegedly greater good. In Anscombe’s view, the person who makes such a proposal manifests a “corrupt mind,” even if he is sincerely open to debating its merits; we might even say that his corruption is all the greater precisely because he sincerely wants to debate it. One way to understand the reasoning behind her view is in terms of the Aristotelian idea that moral understanding is more a matter of having the right sensibilities and dispositions than it is the having of a correct theoretical understanding. Indeed, it is on this view difficult for someone even to have a correct theoretical understanding in the first place if he does not to some extent already have the right traits of character. This seems to me an eminently conservative view to take, insofar as it reflects the insight that much of our knowledge is tacit rather than articulate, embodied in habit and tradition rather than in the explicitly formulated propositions of a philosophical theory. It is a paradigmatically anti-rationalistic conception of ethics (which, of course, does not mean that it is anti-reason).

Now Anscombe’s claim, I think, is not that to debate the question of whether to kill an innocent man would be a waste of one’s time insofar as one would almost certainly be arguing with an unreasonable person. It is rather that even to treat a proposal to commit such an act as a live option that is “on the table” and worthy of debate cannot fail to corrupt us morally by desensitizing us to wickedness and altering our intuitive sense of the boundaries of decent conduct. The point isn’t that some debates cannot be won; the point is that some debates should never get started, and that if they ever do get started, the moral battle is already halfway lost.

Of course, sometimes we might have to engage in such debates anyway, at least to cut our moral losses and hopefully stem the tide of widespread moral corruption, if not to turn it back completely. If Anscombe is correct, though, then it is very difficult to see how a thorough and effective critique of the views of a philosopher who entertained an intrinsically immoral position of the sort Anscombe had in mind could fail to constitute, at least implicitly, a critique of that philosopher himself. To imply such a critique would not be to engage in a gratuitous personal attack on a philosophical opponent. It would rather be to give a straightforwardly objective description of the state of a person’s moral character.

Suppose, then, that a philosopher proposes to debate the question of whether an adult ought to be allowed under certain circumstances to engage in sexual contact with a three year old child, or wants to discuss the “issue” of whether bestiality and necrophilia are always immoral. Suppose he even suggests with a straight face that there are some very good arguments in favor of these practices that we ought to take at least as seriously as any arguments that might be put forward against him. Does it suffice patiently to point out to such a philosopher that he has made several serious mistakes in argumentation? Surely not, at least if Anscombe is right. For to fail to see that “sex” with a three year old child, or with a corpse or a chicken, is simply and unarguably morally depraved, is not merely to make an intellectual mistake; it is of itself to be, to some extent, depraved in one’s moral sensibilities. Similarly, if a National Socialist philosopher (if such a thing exists) tried earnestly to defend the view that the extermination of certain races is morally required of us, such a philosopher would surely already have exhibited a certain degree of moral depravity even by making such a suggestion, whether or not he could “defend” it with arguments and whether or not he ever acted in accordance with it. (Obviously he would be worthy of even greater moral condemnation if he were to act on it.)

Any philosopher who seriously proposed such things for discussion would manifest thereby a kind of moral blindness, an inability to perceive basic moral facts. Arguing with him might well be a waste of time, like arguing with a blind man who insists that colors do not exist, and who accuses you of dogmatism because you continue to believe in them yourself despite your inability to convince him. But the deeper point is that merely to argue with him, with as respectful and genteel a tone as one uses when arguing with one’s accountant, would be inadvertently to reinforce his moral blindness, and even help spread it to others. For to fail to point out that the very act of putting forward for discussion such inherently indecent proposals is itself indecent would arguably make one complicit in lending credibility to the making of such proposals. It would constitute a failure to tell the whole philosophical story, and might even contribute to a general decrease in moral understanding.

Now, would this entail, in some cases and to some extent, the incorporation of a polemical element into one’s philosophical argumentation? Arguably it would. At the very least it would seem to entail incorporating into one’s argumentation a common aspect of polemic, namely personal criticism, or at least implied personal criticism, of one’s opponent. Of course, this raises all sorts of questions and practical problems, both about matters of principle and about matters of prudence. It is one thing to critique an immoral point of view in the context of a society which is generally morally healthy; it is another thing altogether to try to critique it in the context of a society that has to a considerable extent gone to the dogs already. The latter situation clearly entails that a certain measure of tact would be well advised (though, on the other hand, it might also entail that polemical arguments are all the more required, in order to shake people out of a complacent decadence). Furthermore, there is an obvious difference between a sincere person who entertains an inherently immoral position merely because he is naïve, muddle-headed, or immature, and a cynic or demagogue who takes it because he is generally of a corrupt character. The former sort of person may be far less morally culpable for the defects in his moral understanding, and thus far less worthy of polemical criticism.

The extent to which one’s critique of a philosopher’s moral views entails criticism of the philosopher himself, and the manner of that criticism, will of course depend on the moral theory from which one is operating. A natural law theorist and a Kantian, say, might have significantly different views about what is beyond the pale and indicative of a “corrupt mind”; other moral theories would entail even more radically different sensibilities. Indeed, I think that the points I have been raising might account for the fierceness of the debates that often occur between even the most intelligent and well-meaning left-wing and right-wing philosophers, a fierceness one might at first think incompatible with the commitment of all philosophers to rational debate. Even the most rationalistic moral theorist surely recognizes deep down the truth of the Aristotelian insight that our moral sensibilities reflect our moral character as much as they reflect our intellect. Left-wing philosophers and right-wing philosophers will thus inevitably, to some extent anyway, regard each other with moral suspicion and even hostility. This is not necessarily a failure of rationality; it reflects the very nature of moral disagreement. To see someone as committed, even sincerely, to a view one regards as seriously immoral is inevitably to see him as to some extent morally, and not just intellectually, deficient.

Obviously, this makes fruitful debate all the more difficult to achieve. Charity, tact, and prudence are therefore called for even in the context of polemical criticism – indeed, especially in the context of polemical criticism.

Besong on Scholastic Metaphysics

In the December issue of New Oxford Review, philosopher Brian Besong kindly reviews my book Scholastic Metaphysics.  From the review:

Philosopher Edward Feser has earned significant fanfare in recent years for his lucid presentations and defenses of Thomism… The fanfare is well deserved, for in addition to a witty polemical style, Feser has a mostly unrivaled ability to present faithfully the views of Aquinas in a deep and systematic way…

What is an ad hominem fallacy?

As students of logic know, not every appeal to authority is a fallacious appeal to authority.  A fallacy is committed only when the purported authority appealed to either does not in fact possess expertise on the subject at hand, or can reasonably be supposed to be less than objective.  Hence if you believed that PCs are better than Macs entirely on the say-so of either your technophobic orthodontist or the local PC dealer who has some overstock to get rid of, you would be committing a fallacy of appeal to authority -- in the first case because your orthodontist, smart guy though he is, presumably hasn’t much knowledge of computers, in the second case because while the salesman might have such knowledge, there is reasonable doubt about whether he is giving you an unbiased opinion.  But if you believed that PCs are better than Macs because your computer science professor told you so, there would be no fallacy, because he presumably both has expertise on the matter and lacks any special reason to push PCs on you.  (That doesn’t necessarily mean he’d be correct, of course; an argument can be mistaken even if it is non-fallacious.)

Similarly, not every ad hominem attack -- an attack “against the man” or person -- involves a fallacious ad hominem.  “Attacking the man” can be entirely legitimate and sometimes even called for, even in an argumentative context, when it is precisely the man himself who is the problem.

Briggs on TLS and tone

Statistician William M. Briggs is beginning a series of posts on my book The Last Superstition.  In the first installment he considers the polemical tone of the book and tells his readers to get any remarks on that subject out of their systems now so that he can move on to more substantive matters in future posts.  Briggs writes:

Feser gives us a manly Christianity, in muscular language.  His words oft have the tone of a teacher who is exasperated by students who have, yet again, not done their homework.  The exasperation is justifiable…

Feser… does not suffer (arrogant) fools well—or at all.  This perplexes some readers who undoubtedly expect theists to be soft-spoken, meek, and humble to the point of willing to concede miles to gain an inch.  Feser is more of a theological Patton: he is advancing, always advancing, and is not interested in holding on to anything except the enemy’s territory.  This stance has startled some reviewers.  Typical is [one reviewer] who ignores the meat of the book and whines about “ad hominems.”

Philosophy and polemics

Readers of The Last Superstition will find that it is as polemical as it is philosophical. But shouldn't philosophy be non-polemical? No, not always, as I argued in a post at the now defunct Conservative Philosopher group blog which Bill Vallicella kindly archived at his own (highly recommended) site some time back. In light of the publication of TLS it seemed to me a good time to call attention to that post once again, since if anyone has been crying out for a simultaneously polemical and philosophically rigorous response, it is the "New Atheists."

Gage on Five Proofs

I’ve been getting some strange book reviews lately.  First up is Logan Paul Gage’s review of my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God in the latest issue of Philosophia Christi.  Gage says some very complimentary things about the book, for which I thank him.  He also raises a couple of important points of criticism, for which I also thank him.  But he says some odd and false things too. 

Monton on ID

In response to those who’ve criticized the polemical tone of The Last Superstition, I have emphasized that while the arguments are directed at secularists in general, the polemics are directed only at those who, like Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, and Hitchens, have themselves already taken an arrogantly polemical and condescending tone with defenders of religious belief. As with physical violence, ideological aggression justly can and sometimes should be met with equal and opposite force.

But I have also emphasized that there are honorable and formidable atheists with whom I would never take such a tone. (I was a convinced atheist for a long stretch of my own life, after all.) J. L. Mackie, Quentin Smith, and J. J. C. Smart are three examples. Another is Bradley Monton, who has just published Seeking God in Science: An Atheist Defends Intelligent Design. Monton rejects ID, but regards it as worthy of serious consideration and eschews the usual straw men and ad hominem attacks. I have not yet read the book – I just ordered it – but I look forward to doing so.

In TLS and in a long WWWtW combox exchange some months ago, I have been critical of ID from an Aristotelian-Thomistic perspective. But I have always deplored the thuggish, dishonest treatment ID theorists have received from most of their secularist critics. Monton hopes to move the debate to a more serious and fruitful level.

Monton is an honorable and courageous man. Go buy his book.

Spiering on Neo-Scholastic Essays

In the March 2016 issue of The Review of Metaphysics, philosopher Jamie Spiering reviews my book Neo-Scholastic Essays.  From the review:

Feser has found that Aristotelian-Thomistic teaching is a strong, coherent system that can provide clarity and answers in vexing contemporary debates… Feser writes admirably, with a clear, direct style that is polemical but not uncharitable or contentious… These would make excellent texts to offer to students... The clarity may also be appreciated by professional readers as a refreshing change from the sometimes fusty level of detail in recent work on natural theology -- instead, Feser allows us to refocus on perennial issues…

Feser has a gift for seeing the heart of a problem, as well as a gift for clear expression and high-quality, fair polemic -- these factors, together, offer the best reasons to read anything written by him, and this work is no exception.

Oerter on universals and causality

George Mason University physicist (and author of The Theory of Almost Everything) Robert Oerter is writing up a series of posts on my book The Last Superstition over at his blog.  Oerter is critical but he engages the book seriously and in good faith.  He’s presented a couple of objections so far, and they merit a response.  So, here’s a response.

Walters on TLS

JD Walters of the blog Unnatural Theology kindly reviews The Last Superstition. (The review is cross-posted at CADRE Comments.) He says some very nice things about it, and puts forward some thoughtful criticisms. I thank him for the compliments, and want to offer here some replies to his objections.

First, Walters takes exception to what he describes as the “very, very abrasive” tone I take in the book toward my opponents, and implies that it would be more appropriate for a Christian to take a softer touch. I concede that the book is often just as abrasive as he says. But while I do describe certain opinions and practices, and even certain specific individuals, in very harsh terms, it is not fair to say that I direct this abuse to people I disagree with in general. (To be sure, Walters does not explicitly say that I do this, but he does seem to me to give that impression.) On the contrary, I make it very clear several times in the book that I am happy to acknowledge that there are secularists and atheists of good will and for whom I have respect. The polemics are directed only at specific people who have themselves either taken an unjustifiably obnoxious and unfair tone toward religious believers, or have defended views so extreme and despicable that no one who is sane and/or morally decent could put them forward. In other words, I aim my fire only at people who have been “asking for it.”

Of course, many readers will object: “Shouldn’t we always separate the opinion from the character of the person advancing it? Couldn’t any view, however outrageous, nevertheless be defended by someone who, because he sincerely holds it, might still be morally admirable, or at least morally blameless?” The answer to both questions is a firm No, and each question is based on a false understanding of moral psychology that flows from the same bad modern philosophical assumptions I attack in the book. I maintain that there are some views that are so evil that no one who is morally upright could possibly uphold them. To take just one, particularly disgusting, example, it is precisely because Peter Singer sincerely believes that bestiality is morally justifiable that we can know that he has a corrupt moral character. For given the correct (classical natural law) approach to morality and moral psychology, no one whose sensibilities are such that he could seriously entertain such an idea could possibly fail to be morally corrupt.

Hence, I maintain that there are certain ideas that cannot be described accurately and objectively unless they, and sometimes even the people who hold them, are described in language that might seem abusive and polemical. (E.g. not to see that someone even seriously considering whether bestiality might be permissible is morally corrupt is not to understand what moral corruption objectively is.) The assumptions that lead modern people to assume otherwise (the so-called “fact/value distinction,” the cult of “authenticity,” etc.) are just false, and themselves morally corrupting. I have said a little more about this elsewhere, and though the topic is not explicitly discussed in The Last Superstition, readers of that book will get a pretty clear idea of why this view follows from a classical natural law approach to morality. Suffice it to say that, from an Aristotelian point of view, moral character is more a matter of having the right dispositions, habits, and sensibilities than it is a matter of having the right opinions.

I also deny that a Christian should always take a softer touch. There is a time and place for that, of course, but there is also a time when a good Christian ought to take the bark off of an opponent, and indeed when it would be immoral not to do so. Everyone acknowledges that harm to, or a threat to, another person’s life, liberty, or possessions can merit harsh retaliation (e.g. imprisonment, and in extreme cases even death). Similarly, someone who spreads calumnies, or corrupts public morals, or in some other way harms others spiritually, can also merit harsh treatment of a verbal and moral sort. Now of course, that someone deserves some punishment or reproof does not always entail that it should be inflicted upon him; there are many cases where mercy is called for. But not always, especially where the public good or the safety of innocents is concerned, and where the offender is unrepentant. This is as true in the spiritual realm as in the material realm. Some ideas are so odious, and some purveyors of those ideas so dangerous and corrupt, that it can be justifiable to expose them to ridicule and contempt, so as to bring infamy upon them and counteract the bad effect they might have on others. And in some cases, I maintain, this might even be morally required of us.

(There is an old book called Liberalism is a Sin by Fr. Felix Sarda y Salvany which has a couple of useful chapters on this subject, showing, among other things, how polemical attacks, even against individuals, have always rightly been among the weapons in the arsenal of Christian apologists. See here and here. Be warned that this is not a book likely to cause anything but offense to modern progressive ears!)

Walters also laments my failure to say much in the book about why the God of the philosophers is identical to the God of Christianity (though he does seem to recognize that this was simply beyond the scope of the book, which is concerned almost entirely with natural theology). This is an issue that might be approached from two directions. On the one hand there are those who sympathize with the arguments of natural theology but who reject the move from these philosophical arguments to the God of divine revelation. On the other hand there are certain Christian theologians who are uncomfortable identifying the God of the Bible with the God whose existence is argued for in the classical theistic proofs. Walters’ concern seems to be of the latter sort, given that he emphasizes that “more than one great theologian has doubted whether the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle and God the Father of Abraham, Isaac and Jesus can be equated.” I have never understood this latter sort of worry. The classical theistic arguments either work or they do not work. I claim to show in my book that they do work, and thus that the God whose existence they argue for really exists. (Not that Aristotle himself personally got everything right, mind you, but only that the approach of the broad Aristotelian tradition gets you to a correct, if incomplete, account of God’s existence and nature.) Whether Walters agrees with me or not, he at least doesn’t dispute this claim in his review. But in that case, what’s the problem exactly? If the God of the philosophers really exists and if the God of Christianity exists, then it follows that they must be identical, since both the philosophical arguments and divine revelation entail that there is and can only be one God.

To be sure, Walters also appeals to the role “higher biblical criticism” has had in leading some theologians away from identifying the God of the Bible with the God of the philosophers, though he suspects that I “would probably see it as yet another symptom of the modern malaise.” Exactly right. I consider much of modern biblical “scholarship” totally worthless. Bad enough is the false methodological naturalism it simply takes for granted without any serious philosophical argumentation whatsoever. (Bultmann’s famously glib dismissal of supernaturalism as out of place in the “age of the wireless” has long been an object of ridicule among Christian philosophers, and the philosophical acumen of biblical scholars since his time hasn’t gotten any better.) But there is also the ludicrous methodology of boldly reconstructing hypothetical texts, indeed hypothetical texts within hypothetical texts, identifying hypothetical oral traditions and the like underlying these hypothetical texts, reconstructing the theology and ethos of the “communities” who allegedly produced these purported traditions and texts, and then confidently claiming to have discovered on the basis of this set of fantasies what e.g. the historical Jesus (and/or the original “Jesus movement”) “really” believed. What is amazing is not that traditional Christian belief has survived in the face of this “challenge”; what is amazing is that this preposterous pseudo-historical method ever survived the laugh test in the first place. To paraphrase Rowan Atkinson, I wouldn’t trust the average modernist biblical scholar to sit down the right way on a toilet seat.

Anyway, as I’m sure Walters would agree, merely pointing out that some theologians reject any identification of the God of the philosophers with the God of the Bible doesn’t by itself prove anything. The devil is in the details. What is needed is a specific argument showing there to be some incompatibility, and it had better not be an argument that begs the question against the case I make in the book for the existence of the God of the philosophers and the falsity of naturalism.

Regarding the ethics-related material in The Last Superstition, Walters says that he is “skeptical of natural law arguments because of the way they have been used throughout history to legitimize degrading, exploitative conditions for certain classes of people, such as slaves and women.” Two points must be made in response. First of all, and as I note in the book, one must be careful in accusing classical natural law theory of entailing the justifiability of slavery. In fact the sorts of things most people think of when they hear the word “slavery” – chattel slavery, racial slavery, kidnapping, breaking up families, the African slave trade, etc. – are not justifiable on classical natural law theory. Indeed, classical natural law theory condemns these things as immoral even in principle. What it does allow as justifiable in principle is the much less harsh form of servitude involving a prolonged obligation to labor for another as payment of a debt, punishment for a crime, and so forth. And even this has rightly been regarded by modern natural law theorists as too fraught with moral hazard to be justifiable in practice. The common charge that natural law theory would support slavery as it was known in the American context is therefore simply a slander.

Secondly, Walters’ complaint isn’t really an argument in the first place. He says, for example, that “great care is required in employing natural law arguments, to make sure that they do not simply reinforce or legitimize an unjust or corrupt status quo.” OK, but that just raises the question of how we know what counts as unjust or corrupt in the first place, if we don’t know it through natural law theory itself. And to assert that natural law theory must be wrong because it leads to such-and-such a conclusion that we don’t like is simply to beg this question. From a classical natural law point of view, it isn’t natural law theory that must be judged in terms of modern liberal attitudes about sexual morality, traditional sex roles, etc., but rather those attitudes which must be judged in terms of natural law theory. Simply pointing out that there is a conflict proves precisely nothing if one does not also independently prove (and not simply assume) that modern liberal attitudes are correct.

Walters takes issue with my criticism in the book of the “representationalist” approach to the mind that came to dominate modern philosophy after Descartes, and he cites various empirical considerations in support of the idea that representations of a sort do exist in the brain. But his objection is misplaced, because he fails to take note of the distinction between the objects of the intellect on the one hand (abstract concepts and propositions) and the objects of sensation and imagination on the other (such as mental images and the like). My criticisms of representationalism pertained to the former. Sensation and imagination, which from an Aristotelian point of view are (unlike the intellect) material in nature anyway, no doubt do involve processes in the brain that can be characterized as “representations” of a sort. (I have discussed this issue several times in earlier posts, most recently here.)

Finally, Walters complains that I fail to explain why the Aristotelian approach I favor is superior to “an interpretation of the world in terms of Atman, Brahman, Dharma and Samsara.” It is true that I don’t explicitly address this question, again for reasons of space. But it should be clear why I think the Aristotelian approach is superior. I claim to have shown in the book, through detailed arguments, that the Aristotelico-Thomistic metaphysical picture of the world is correct. If that is true, then since its key elements – classical theism, the existence of distinct individual immortal souls, etc. – are incompatible with the key ideas of Indian philosophy (such as pantheism), it follows that those latter ideas are false.

Some small points: It is Aquinas’s brief summary of the theistic proofs in the Summa Theologiae (rather than in the Summa contra Gentiles, as Walters says) that I say are all that most atheists have bothered to read. And while Walters is right that I have no truck with “Intelligent Design” theory, it is not quite right to claim, as he does, that I advocate an “undiluted evolutionary theory.” As I note in the book, while the standard Darwinian story no doubt contains much that is correct, I reject the view that it can explain every aspect of the biological realm, even in principle. For example (and again, as I make clear in the book) I maintain that it cannot possibly account for the origin of the human intellect, precisely because the intellect is immaterial. On general Aristotelian (not “Intelligent Design”) grounds, I also reject the claim that it can account for the transition from inorganic processes to organic ones, or from non-sentient life to sentient life. But that takes us into issues that go beyond anything I say much about in the book, and which need not be addressed in order to make the case I want to make in the book.

A final word on Eric MacDonald

That Eric MacDonald’s criticisms of my book The Last Superstition are devoid of any merit whatsoever is clear from the evidence adduced in the two posts I have devoted to him already (here and here).  If there is any lingering doubt, the present post will dispel it.  A slightly chastened MacDonald has now himself admitted (in what he says will be his final word on my book) that he “was not comfortable with [the] conclusions” he had drawn after his first attempt to deal with the substance of my arguments, that he has “misunderstood” at least some of those arguments, and that his contemptible Himmler comparison “was perhaps over the top.”  Yet he commends to us his final feeble effort to respond to my arguments, still appears to cling to for the most part to his earlier criticisms, and retracts none of the nastiness he has relentlessly directed towards me personally.  (To be sure, he thinks this nastiness is justified by the polemical tone of my book and by my aggressive response to his nastiness.  It is not, for reasons I will get to presently.) 

The ethics of invective

It’s often said that while sticks and stones can break our bones, words can never hurt us.  But it isn’t true.  Were we mere animals it would be true, but we’re not.  We are rational social animals.  Hence we can be harmed, not only in ways that injure the body, but also in ways that bring distress to the mind and damage our standing with our fellow human beings.  These harms are typically not as grave as those involving bodily trauma, but they are real harms all the same.  Indeed, mockery and the loss of one’s good name can even be felt by one who suffers them as worse than (at least some) bodily harms. 

Violence in word and action

Bernard Wuellner’s always-useful Dictionary of Scholastic Philosophy defines violence as “action contrary to the nature of a thing.”  Readers of Aristotle and Aquinas will be familiar with this usage, which is reflected in their distinction between natural and violent motion.  Some of their applications of this distinction presuppose obsolete science.  For example, we now know that physical objects do not have motion toward the center of the earth, specifically, as their natural end.  Hence projectile motion away from the earth is not, after all, violent.  But the distinction itself is not obsolete.  For example, trapping or killing an animal is obviously violent in the relevant sense.  It is acting contrary to the natural ends of the animal.

A low down dirty Shea

Not too long ago, Catholic writer Mark Shea and I had an exchange on the subject of capital punishment.  See this post, this one, and this one for my side of the exchange and for links to Shea’s side of it.  A friend emails to alert me that Shea has now made some remarks at Facebook about the forthcoming book on the subject that I have co-authored with Joe Bessette.  “Deranged” might seem an unkind description of Shea and his comments.  Sadly, it’s also a perfectly accurate description.  Here’s a sample:

Yes. This needs to be the #1 priority for conservative Christian “prolife” people to focus on: battling the Church for the right of a post-Christian state to join Communist and Bronze Age Islamic states in killing as many people as possible, even if 4% of them are completely innocent. Cuz, you know, stopping euthanasia is, like, a super duper core non-negotiable and stuff.  What a wise thing for “prolife” Christians to commit their time and energy to doing instead of defending the unborn or the teaching of the Magisterium. How prudent. How merciful. This and kicking 24 million people off health care are *clearly* what truly “prolife” Christians should be devoted to, in defiance of the Magisterium.  Good call!

Liberalism and Islam

Note: What follows is pretty long, especially if you think of it as a blog post.  So think of it instead as an article.  The topic does not, in any event, lend itself to brevity.  Nor do I think it ideal to break up the flow of the argument by dividing the piece into multiple posts.  So here it is in one lump.  It is something of a companion piece to my recent post about whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God.  Critics of that post will, I think, better understand it in light of this one.

Philip Kitcher, bait-and-switcher

Here’s a thumbnail history of philosophy and science since the early modern period, in three stages.  First, the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition had by the beginning of this period hammered out a conception of the natural world that is at the same time unified and radically anti-reductionist.  It is unified insofar as to all natural phenomena we can apply the theory of act and potency, the hylemorphic analysis of material substances, the doctrine of the four causes, and other components of Aristotelian philosophy of nature.  It is radically anti-reductionist insofar as it affirms that certain divisions in nature -- between the inorganic and the organic; between the merely “vegetative” or non-sentient forms of life and the sensory or animal forms; and between the merely sensory or animal forms of life and the distinctively rational or human form -- are nevertheless differences in kind rather than degree.

An exchange with Keith Parsons, Part I

Prof. Keith Parsons and I will be having an exchange to be moderated by Jeffery Jay Lowder of The Secular Outpost.  Prof. Parsons has initiated the exchange with a response to the first of four questions I put to him last week.  What follows is a brief reply.

Keith, thank you for your very gracious response.  Like Jeff Lowder, you raise the issue of the relative amounts of attention I and other theistic philosophers pay to “New Atheist” writers like Dawkins, Harris, et al. as opposed to the much more serious arguments of atheist philosophers like Graham Oppy, Jordan Howard Sobel, and many others.  Let me begin by reiterating what I said last week in response to Jeff, namely that I have nothing but respect for philosophers like the ones you cite and would never lump them in with Dawkins and Co.  And as I showed in my response to Jeff, I have in fact publicly praised many of these writers many times over the years for the intellectual seriousness of their work.

Capital punishment at Catholic World Report

UPDATE: The second installment of the article has now been posted at CWR. 

Over at Catholic World Report today you’ll find “Why the Church Cannot Reverse Past Teaching on Capital Punishment,” the first installment of a two-part article I have co-authored with Joseph M. Bessette, who teaches government and ethics at Claremont McKenna College.  Joe and I recently completed work on our book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of the Death Penalty, which is forthcoming from Ignatius Press.

Dupré on the ideologizing of science

Philosopher of science John Dupré, like Nancy Cartwright, Paul Feyerabend, and others, has developed powerful and influential criticisms of reductionism.  Whereas Cartwright is best known for her criticisms of reductionism in the context of physics, Dupré has tended to focus instead on biology (though both have addressed the other sciences as well).  Like Cartwright, his style is less mischievous and polemical than Feyerabend’s was.  Dupré’s essay “The Miracle of Monism” is a useful overview of his approach, and contains lessons especially relevant at a time when science (or at least the use to which it is put in public policy) has become ideologized.

Tone deaf

Bill Vallicella gets email from a reader who, to quote one of the Geico cavemen, is “not 100% in love with [my] tone” in The Last Superstition. According to this reader (who, to be sure, does say some kind things about the book), my polemical style, no less than Daniel Dennett’s, is depressing evidence that professional philosophers “can and will immediately sacrifice civility and courtesy if they think it will best serve to advance their metaphysical/social/political ideals.”

This is unjust. As I make clear in the book and have made clear in earlier posts here, I take the tone I do with the likes of Dawkins, Dennett, et al. because they have been “asking for it.” I would never take such a tone (“immediately” or otherwise) with a serious atheist like Quentin Smith, J. J. C. Smart, or the late J. L. Mackie – regardless of whether doing so would “advance [my] metaphysical/social/political ideals.” Perhaps the reader in question also believes that policemen returning fire toward armed bank robbers who are shooting at them contribute to the crime rate just as much as the latter do. If not, I would ask him to consider that sometimes it matters “who started it,” and that in issues of public controversy as much as in maintaining law and order, rough tactics must sometimes be used against thugs who would otherwise trample upon the innocent. (The “innocent” in the case at hand being unwary non-specialist readers who might be deceived into thinking that the New Atheists must, given their bravado and public stature, have at least something of interest to say.)

Anyway, I have addressed the issue of the occasional appropriateness of polemics in philosophy at length here and, most recently, here.

Check out the comments section of Bill’s post for a drive-by piece of lightweight New Atheist-style commentary from A. C. Grayling, whose volume Against All Gods has at least one advantage over the better-known works of the Big Four: it is as thin physically (64 pages) as it is intellectually.

UPDATE: The reader in question kindly clarifies his remarks in the comments section below.