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)

Saturday, August 29, 2020

Open thread (and a comment on trolling)

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...

Tuesday, August 25, 2020

Separating scientism and state

Scientism transforms science into an intolerant and all-encompassing ideology. Bad as it is when it issues in crackpot philosophy, it can b...

Thursday, August 20, 2020

The particle collection that fancied itself a physicist

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, ...

Saturday, August 15, 2020

Let’s play Jeopardy

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

Thursday, August 13, 2020

Russell’s No Man’s Land

In his History of Western Philosophy , Bertrand Russell famously characterized philosophy as follows: Philosophy, as I shall understand th...

Saturday, August 8, 2020

The links you’ve been longing for

At Medium , David Oderberg on the prophets Orwell, Huxley, and Bradbury . 3:16 interviews Thomist philosopher Gaven Kerr . At Notre Dam...

Thursday, August 6, 2020

Popes, creeds, councils, and catechisms contra universalism

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...

Sunday, August 2, 2020

A statement from David Bentley Hart

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...

Friday, July 31, 2020

Scripture and the Fathers contra universalism

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

Friday, July 24, 2020

No urgency without hell

A common argument in defense of the eternity of hell is that without it, there would be no urgency to repent or to convince others to repent...

Wednesday, July 22, 2020

Hart, hell, and heresy

Well, yikes, as the kids say. Hell hath no fury like David Bentley Hart with his pride hurt. At Eclectic Orthodoxy, he creates quite t...

Monday, July 20, 2020

The experts have no one to blame but themselves

The Week ’s Damon Linker frets about the state of the “American character,” citing an emergency physician’s wife he knows whose frien...

Computer campus

As you know, academic life has largely gone online this year. My own classes at Pasadena City College this fall will be entirely onl...

Friday, July 17, 2020

Plato predicted woke tyranny

What we are seeing around us today may well turn out to be a transition from decadent democratic egalitarianism to tyranny, as Pla...

Monday, July 13, 2020

Review of Hart

My review of David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell, and Universal Salvation appears in the latest issue of Catho...

Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Other minds and modern philosophy

The “problem of other minds” goes like this. I have direct access to my own thoughts and experiences, but not to yours. I can perceive...

Saturday, July 4, 2020

The virtue of patriotism

Patriotism involves a special love for and reverence toward one’s own country. These days it is often dismissed as sentimental, unsophi...

Tuesday, June 30, 2020

The popes against the revolution

The Church has consistently condemned doctrinaire laissez-faire forms of capitalism and insisted on just wages, moderate state interven...

Thursday, June 25, 2020

ACPQ symposium on Aristotle’s Revenge

The American Catholic Philosophical Association meeting in Minneapolis last November hosted an Author Meets Critics session on my book A...

Monday, June 22, 2020

Envy cancels justice

Envy is often mistaken for anger at injustice, because both can issue in hatred. But the hatred that issues from a desire for justice i...

Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Apt pupil

Justice Neil Gorsuch was a student of John Finnis, foremost proponent of the “New Natural Law Theory” (NNLT). Is that relevant to under...

Saturday, June 13, 2020

Locke’s “transubstantiation” of the self

Locke’s agnosticism about substance led him to treat the self as essentially a bundle of attributes. Given his empiricism, he takes it ...

Friday, June 12, 2020

Great minds on wokeness

If you want to understand woke totalitarianism, I recommend reading Plato on democracy, Aristotle and Aquinas on envy, and Nietzsche on ...

Wednesday, June 10, 2020

Theology and the analytic a posteriori

Philosophers traditionally distinguish between analytic and synthetic propositions. An analytic proposition is one that is true or fa...

Saturday, June 6, 2020

Pod people

With woke fanatics suddenly overrunning The New York Times , the public health profession , peaceful protests , and even the knitting c...

Wednesday, June 3, 2020

What “the science” is saying this week (Updated)

Andrew Sullivan calls our attention to epidemiologist Tara C. Smith, who moves with that curious herd of “experts” suddenly not terribl...

Friday, May 29, 2020

Metaphysical taxidermy

I’ve often emphasized that the reason consciousness poses such a persistent problem for materialism has less to do with consciousness it...

Friday, May 22, 2020

The lockdown is no longer morally justifiable

As I have said before , I think that the lockdown that was put in place in the United States two months ago was morally justifiable give...

Thursday, May 21, 2020

Oderberg on the hierarchy of being

In February, David Oderberg gave a lecture in Oxford on the theme “Recovering the Hierarchy of Being.” You can now watch it on YouTube...

Friday, May 15, 2020

The lockdown and appeals to authority

Here are two things every serious student of logical fallacies understands. First, if what is at issue is the soundness of an argument ...

Friday, May 8, 2020

Presentism and analogical language

Terms are used univocally when they are used in the same sense, as the word “bat” is in both “The baseball player swung the bat” and “T...

Friday, May 1, 2020

Joe Biden Superstar

For something lighter as you go into the weekend, have a listen to songstress Hannah Hoffman’s “You Know the Thing,” a setting to m...

Thursday, April 30, 2020

The burden of proof is on those who impose burdens (Updated)

I have argued both that the lockdown was a justifiable initial reaction to the Covid-19 crisis, and that skeptics ought nevertheless to...

Thursday, April 23, 2020

Links for the lockdown

Thomas Osborne’s new book Aquinas’s Ethics , part of the Cambridge Elements series, is available online for free for a month . How s...

Sunday, April 19, 2020

Kremer on classical theism

At YouTube, philosopher Elmar Kremer provides a useful multi-part introduction to the dispute between classical theism and theistic pers...

Thursday, April 16, 2020

The lockdown’s loyal opposition

At First Things , Fr. Thomas Joseph White has defended the Covid-19 lockdown, whereas Rusty Reno has criticized it . As I said last we...

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Review of Scientism

My brief review of the anthology Scientism : Prospects and Problems , edited by Jeroen de Ridder, Rik Peels, and René van Woudenberg, a...

Sunday, April 12, 2020

The lesson of the Resurrection

The lesson of the Resurrection is that the significance of our bodily life and its sufferings should be neither overstated nor understat...

Friday, April 10, 2020

Some thoughts on the COVID-19 crisis

I commend to you Fr. Thomas Joseph White’s First Things essay on the COVID-19 situation and the bishops’ response to it . It...

Tuesday, April 7, 2020

Damnation denialism

Here’s a narrative we’re all by now familiar with. Call it Narrative A: Those who initially downplayed the dangers of COVID-19 were...

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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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