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, 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...

Thursday, February 25, 2021

Smith and divine eternity

Quentin Smith, one of the most formidable of contemporary atheist philosophers, died late last year . One of the reasons he was formidable ...

Sunday, February 21, 2021

Tales from the links

An interview with philosopher William Simpson about Aristotle and quantum mechanics, at the Wolfson College Cambridge website. Fr. John N...

Friday, February 12, 2021

Can a Thomist reason to God a priori?

A priori knowledge, as modern philosophers use the term, is knowledge that can be gained independently of sensory experience. Knowledge of...

Saturday, February 6, 2021

What is religion?

The question is notoriously controversial. Consider a definition like the following, from Bernard Wuellner’s Dictionary of Scholastic Philo...

Sunday, January 31, 2021

Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia on soul-body interaction

The letters exchanged between Descartes and Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia – especially their 1643 exchange on the interaction problem – are ...

Monday, January 25, 2021

Koons on time and relative actuality

Rob Koons has reactivated his AnalyticThomist blog , which you must check out if you are interested in metaphysics done in a way that bring...

Thursday, January 21, 2021

Narrative thinking and conspiracy theories

“Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you” is one of the most famous lines from Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 ...

Friday, January 15, 2021

McGinn on the question of being

Colin McGinn is a philosopher whose work I always find interesting even when I disagree with it, which is often. His book Philosophical Pro...

Friday, January 8, 2021

The Gnostic heresy’s political successors

The Western world is the creation of the Church, and the crisis of the West is always at bottom the crisis of the Church. This is especiall...

Wednesday, January 6, 2021

Lawlessness begets lawlessness

As someone who is on record condemning lawlessness and sedition , I am appalled and horrified by what happened today in Washington, D.C. ...

Wednesday, December 30, 2020

Year-end open thread

Let’s bring this annus horribilis to an end with an open thread. That annoyingly off-topic comment of yours I keep deleting? It’s now on-...

Saturday, December 26, 2020

The access problem for mathematical Platonism

Mathematical Platonism takes numbers and other mathematical objects to exist in a third realm distinct from the material and mental worlds, ...

Sunday, December 20, 2020

District Attorney Michel Foucault

In the diabolical new disorder of things metastasizing around us, churchmen subvert doctrine rather than teaching it, and public authoritie...

Saturday, December 12, 2020

What was the Holy Roman Empire?

According to Aristotelian-Thomistic political philosophy, the state is a natural institution. It has as its natural end the provision of go...

Friday, December 4, 2020

Augustine on divine illumination

Plato held that the Form of the Good makes other Forms intelligible to us in a way comparable to how the sun makes physical objects visible ...

Thursday, November 26, 2020

Links for Thanksgiving

What the hell happened to the Drudge Report? The Tablet investigates . The rediscovery of hell. At First Things , Cardinal Pell abandon...

Monday, November 23, 2020

Church and Culture radio interview

Last week I was interviewed by Deal Hudson for his show Church and Culture on Ave Maria Radio. The interview lasts an hour and ranges over...

Saturday, November 21, 2020

Tyranny of the sovereign individual

The individual, when isolated, is not self-sufficing; and therefore he is like a part in relation to the whole. But he who is unable to l...

Thursday, November 12, 2020

Means, motive, and opportunity

Did Joe Biden win the election fair and square? Or was there voter fraud sufficient to tip it in his direction? I won’t be addressing thos...

Thursday, November 5, 2020

Pink on Aristotle’s Revenge

In this week’s issue of the Times Literary Supplement , philosopher Thomas Pink kindly reviews my book Aristotle’s Revenge . From the revi...

Monday, November 2, 2020

Perfect love casts out fear

Months of lawlessness have left people on edge and anxious, and their anxiety is unlikely to be much abated by the outcome of the election....

Friday, October 30, 2020

“Pastoral” and other weasel words

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things,...

Thursday, October 22, 2020

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 ...

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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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