Thursday, February 27, 2020

Agere sequitur esse and the First Way

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Aquinas’s First Way is also known as the argument from motion to an Unmoved Mover.  The most natural way to read it is as an argument to...
116 comments:
Friday, February 21, 2020

Morgan on Aristotle’s Revenge

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At The Imaginative Conservative , Prof. Jason Morgan kindly reviews my book Aristotle’s Revenge .  From the review: In 456 very wel...
95 comments:
Saturday, February 15, 2020

The socialist state as an occasionalist god

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Hobbes famously characterized his Leviathan state as a mortal god.  Here’s another theological analogy, or set of analogies, which m...
113 comments:
Saturday, February 8, 2020

Sandstad and Jansen on Aristotle’s Revenge

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At the Bryn Mawr Classical Review , philosophers Petter Sandstad and Ludger Jansen review my book Aristotle’s Revenge .  From the revie...
168 comments:
Thursday, February 6, 2020

Discussion with Graham Oppy

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Earlier today on Cameron Bertuzzi’s  Capturing Christianity  program, I had a very pleasant and fruitful live exchange with Graham Oppy....
166 comments:
Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Review of Kerr

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My review of Gaven Kerr’s excellent book Aquinas's Way to God: The Proof in De Ente et Essentia appears in the current issue o...
7 comments:
Friday, January 31, 2020

Preternatural theology

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Natural theology is traditionally distinguished from revealed theology .   Natural theology is concerned with knowledge about God’s exi...
147 comments:
Thursday, January 23, 2020

Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part IV: Marx

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I have never been remotely attracted to Marxism.  Its economic reductionism, vision of human life as a struggle of antagonistic classe...
171 comments:
Tuesday, January 21, 2020

Aquinas 101

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The Thomistic Institute has added to the great work it is already doing by introducing Aquinas 101 , “a series of free video co...
49 comments:
Monday, January 20, 2020

Upcoming talks, etc.

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On February 6 on Cameron Bertuzzi’s Capturing Christianity , Graham Oppy and I will resume the debate on the existence of God that we b...
32 comments:
Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Johnson on Aristotle’s Revenge

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At Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews , Monte Ransome Johnson reviews my book Aristotle’s Revenge .  Prof. Johnson is an Aristotle schola...
40 comments:
Sunday, January 12, 2020

Scruton’s virtues

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The Guardian reports that conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton has died .   I vividly recall the first time I became aware of Scr...
19 comments:
Saturday, January 11, 2020

Review of Swinburne

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My review of Richard Swinburne’s recent book Are We Bodies or Souls? appears in the February 2020 issue of First Things .  ...
205 comments:
Thursday, January 9, 2020

The rationalist/empiricist false choice

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I’ve often argued that contemporary philosophers too often think only within the box of alternative positions inherited from their early...
59 comments:
Friday, January 3, 2020

Links for a new year

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Joseph Bessette on criminal sentencing laws and retributive justice , at Public Discourse . The Catholic Thing on the late, great M...
83 comments:
Saturday, December 28, 2019

Overestimating human responsibility

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One of the many pernicious aspects of modern political life is the tendency, every time something bad happens, to look for someone to bl...
93 comments:
Friday, December 20, 2019

Cundy on relativity and the A-theory of time

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One of the many topics treated in Aristotle’s Revenge is the relationship between Aristotelian philosophy of nature and contemporary de...
77 comments:
Tuesday, December 17, 2019

New from Oderberg

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Fans of David S. Oderberg have long been looking forward to a new book from him, and now it is here – just in time to fill Christmas sto...
36 comments:

Science et Esprit on Aristotle’s Revenge

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In the latest issue of the journal Science et Esprit (Vol. 72, Nos. 1-2), René Ardell Fehr kindly reviews my book Aristotle’s Revenge ....
9 comments:
Friday, December 13, 2019

Brungardt on Aristotle’s Revenge

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At Thomistica , philosopher John Brungardt reviews Aristotle’s Revenge .  He provides a fairly detailed overview of its methods and cont...
104 comments:
Thursday, December 12, 2019

Word to the Wise

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Eric Wise takes to Facebook to express shock that an author would be annoyed with a book reviewer who doesn’t have anything to say abo...
18 comments:
Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Unwise book reviewing

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Honestly, what runs through editors’ minds when they assign book reviewers?  The Claremont Review of Books has just run a review of Ar...
22 comments:
Wednesday, December 4, 2019

The thread about nothing

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It’s open thread time.  There is no topic, which means everything is on topic.  Now is the time finally to raise that issue that you kee...
283 comments:
Friday, November 29, 2019

Was Aquinas a property dualist?

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One must always be cautious when trying to relate Aquinas’s position on some philosophical issue to the options familiar to contemporary...
35 comments:

Time-sensitive Turkey Day tweets (Updated)

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UPDATE 12/10: I'm told that the Gordon-Carrier debate has been cancelled and may be rescheduled for another date. Palgrave Macmill...
11 comments:
Monday, November 25, 2019

The Last Superstition in French

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My book The Last Superstition: A Refutation of the New Atheism is now available in a French translation .  The book is also available i...
46 comments:
Thursday, November 21, 2019

Against candy-ass Christianity

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The Mr. Rogers biopic , with Tom Hanks in the starring role, comes out this week and has been getting a lot of positive attention – in s...
181 comments:
Friday, November 15, 2019

Join the Ur-Platonist alliance!

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What’s in a name?  I’m an unreconstructed Thomist, but I would be the last to deny that it is a mistake to think that one ma...
48 comments:
Thursday, November 14, 2019

Oppy and Lim on Five Proofs

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Graham Oppy’s article “On stage one of Feser’s ‘Aristotelian proof’”, which responds to some of the arguments I give in Five Proofs ...
22 comments:
Sunday, November 10, 2019

Two popes and idolatry

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How bad can a bad pope get?  Pretty bad.  Here are two further examples from history.  Marcellinus was pope from c. 296 – 304.  During h...
90 comments:
Thursday, November 7, 2019

Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethics

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My article “Natural Law Ethics and the Revival of Aristotelian Metaphysics” appears in The Cambridge Companion to Natural Law Ethi...
12 comments:
Monday, November 4, 2019

The strange case of Pope Vigilius

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The increasingly strange pontificate of Pope Francis is leading many Catholics into increasingly strange behavior.  Some, like the emper...
65 comments:
Wednesday, October 30, 2019

New from Editiones Scholasticae

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Editiones Scholasticae, the publisher of my books Scholastic Metaphysics and Aristotle’s Revenge , informs me that both of them will wi...
21 comments:
Saturday, October 26, 2019

John Paul II in defense of the nation and patriotism

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In chapters 11-15 of his last book Memory and Identity , Pope St. John Paul II provides a lucid exposition of the idea of the nation as ...
86 comments:
Saturday, October 19, 2019

Masculinity and the Marvel movies

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Some time back, John Haldane gave a Thomistic Institute talk here in Los Angeles on the theme of evil in the movies and in the movie ind...
52 comments:
Friday, October 11, 2019

Around the web

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At The Catholic Thing , Fr. Thomas Weinandy on the studied ambiguity of Pope Francis.   In his new book Conciliar Octet , Fr. Aidan ...
64 comments:
Wednesday, October 9, 2019

Transubstantiation and hylemorphism

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One of the key themes of the early modern philosophers’ revolt against Scholasticism was a move away from an Aristotelian hylemorphist c...
78 comments:
Monday, September 30, 2019

Harvard talk (Updated)

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This Friday, October 4, I will be giving a talk at Harvard University, sponsored by the Abigail Adams Institute.  The topic will be “The...
14 comments:
Thursday, September 26, 2019

Aristotle’s Revenge and naïve color realism

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The American Catholic Philosophical Association meeting in Minneapolis this November 21-24 will be devoted to the theme of the philosop...
80 comments:
Friday, September 20, 2019

Fastiggi on the revision to the Catechism (Updated)

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UPDATE: The conversation continues.  Prof. Fastiggi has responded to this post in the comments section over at Catholic World Report . I...
198 comments: