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)

Friday, July 29, 2022

Confucian hylemorphism

The Neo-Confucian Chinese philosopher Zhu Xi or Chu Hsi (1130-1200) famously posited two metaphysical principles often compared to Aristotle...

Saturday, July 23, 2022

Mullins strikes out

My new Philosophy Compass article “The Neo-Classical Challenge to Classical Theism” responds to several criticisms of classical theism and...

Wednesday, July 20, 2022

The neo-classical challenge to classical theism

My article “The Neo-Classical Challenge to Classical Theism” has just been published at Philosophy Compass . The article is a response to ...

Thursday, July 14, 2022

Goff’s gaffes

Philip Goff has kindly replied to my recent post criticizing the panpsychism he defends in his book Galileo’s Error and elsewhere. Goff ...

Sunday, July 10, 2022

Cooperation with sins against prudence and chastity

Here’s another unpublished talk which I’ve posted at my main website . It’s titled “Cooperation with Sins against Prudence and Chastity,” ...

Sunday, July 3, 2022

Problems for Goff’s panpsychism

Panpsychism is the view that conscious awareness pervades the physical world, down to the level of basic particles. In recent years, philos...

Monday, June 27, 2022

Aristotle on the middle class

On CNN the other day , liberal commentator Van Jones complained that the Democrats are “becoming a party of the very high and the very low” ...

Sunday, June 19, 2022

What is conscience and when should we follow it?

I plan to post some unpublished material that’s been accumulating over the years, over at my main website . First up is a lecture on the th...

Sunday, June 12, 2022

Economic and linguistic inflation

F. A. Hayek’s classic paper “The Use of Knowledge in Society” famously argued that prices generated in a market economy function to transmi...

Friday, June 10, 2022

The New Apologetics

I contributed an essay on “New Challenges to Natural Theology” to Matthew Nelson’s new Word on Fire anthology The New Apologetics . It’s go...

Tuesday, June 7, 2022

COMING SOON: All One in Christ

My new book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory will be out this August from Ignatius Press. Some in...

Monday, June 6, 2022

Anti-reductionism in Nyāya-Vaiśesika atomism

Atomism takes all material objects to be composed of basic particles that are not themselves breakable into further components. In Western ...

Tuesday, May 31, 2022

Indeterminacy and Borges’ infinite library

Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Library of Babel” (from his collection Labyrinths ) famously describes an infinite library, comprising books which t...

Monday, May 23, 2022

The hollow universe of modern physics

To say that the material world alone exists is not terribly informative unless we have some account of what matter is. Those who are most ...

Saturday, May 14, 2022

Nietzsche and Christ on suffering

Over and over we are taught in scripture and tradition that suffering is the lot not only of mankind in general, but of the Christian in par...

Monday, May 9, 2022

End of semester open thread

Let’s start the summer break off right, with an open thread. Now’s the time to get that otherwise off-topic obsession of yours off your che...

Thursday, May 5, 2022

Benedict is not the pope: A reply to some critics

Patrick Coffin has posted an open letter by Italian writer Andrea Cionci , replying to my recent article criticizing Benevacantism . What f...

Saturday, April 30, 2022

Socratic loyalty

Socrates was so critical of his country that he was put to death by it. Yet he could have escaped execution had he wanted to. The reason h...

Monday, April 25, 2022

Fr. Gregory Pine on prudence

Modern moral philosophers typically have much to say about abstract principles, but are not of much help for the average person seeking conc...

Friday, April 22, 2022

Whose pantheism? Which dualism? A Reply to David Bentley Hart

Over at Substack, David Bentley Hart has written an open letter in reply to my recent review , at Public Discourse , of his book You Are ...

Monday, April 18, 2022

Tales from the Coffin

In my recent post criticizing Benevacantism , I deliberately avoided naming specific individuals, in the hope of preventing the debate from ...

Tuesday, April 12, 2022

Benevacantism is scandalous and pointless

In his book The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies , David Stove observes that an argument once given by philosopher of science Imré...

Tuesday, April 5, 2022

Two Harts beaten as one

At the blog Jesus and the Ancient Paths , PhD student Seth Hart defends his namesake David Bentley Hart against the objections I raised in ...

Sunday, April 3, 2022

Touring the fifth circle

For readers who are wondering, yes, I’m on Twitter now. (I’m not referring to the fan account that has been there for some time, but to my ...

Thursday, March 31, 2022

Hart’s post-Christian pantheism

Well, kids, it’s that time again. David Bentley Hart’s new book You Are Gods: On Nature and Supernature is now out. So is my review, “Dav...

Sunday, March 27, 2022

Unjust war and false masculinity

I commend to you three excellent articles by traditionalist Catholic scholars on the grave injustice of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: histor...

Monday, March 21, 2022

Conspiracy theories, spontaneous order, and the hermeneutics of suspicion

Nobody denies that conspiracies occur. They happen every time two or more people collude in order to secure some malign end. When people c...

Monday, March 14, 2022

Chomsky’s “propaganda model” of mass media

A common mistake people make when evaluating a theory is to fail to keep in mind the distinction between the theory itself, its application ...

Friday, March 4, 2022

Just war theory and the Russo-Ukrainian war

One of the striking features of the catastrophe in Ukraine is how unambiguously the principles of just war doctrine seem to apply. On the o...

Friday, February 25, 2022

Taylor on cognition, teleology, and God

In his book Metaphysics , a classic brief and lucid introduction to the subject, Richard Taylor devotes a chapter to the topic of God. Most...

Monday, February 21, 2022

Sex and metaphysics

My essay “The Metaphysical Foundations of Sexual Morality” appears in The Palgrave Handbook of Sexual Ethics , edited by David Boonin. You...

Friday, February 18, 2022

The failure of Johnson’s critique of natural theology

At the Reformed Baptist Blog, Jeffrey Johnson has responded to my First Things review of his book The Failure of Natural Theology: A Crit...

Friday, February 11, 2022

Johnson contra Aquinas

My review of Jeffrey D. Johnson’s book The Failure of Natural Theology: A Critical Appraisal of the Philosophical Theology of Thomas Aquinas...

Wednesday, February 9, 2022

McDowell’s Aristotelian near miss

John McDowell’s paper “Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space” made a big impression on me in graduate school, around the same time...

Wednesday, February 2, 2022

If you’ve been missing links

David S. Oderberg asks “Is Prime Matter Energy?” in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy . Also, Oderberg on the “Principle of Sufficien...

Thursday, January 27, 2022

Hell is not empty

We’ve been talking about Balthasar’s view that we may at least hope that all human beings are saved. Now, Balthasar was a Catholic theolo...

Friday, January 21, 2022

A fallacy in Balthasar (Updated)

In his influential book Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved?” , theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar gives the following argument: If it is s...

Saturday, January 15, 2022

Barron on “diversity, equity, and inclusion”

In a recent Word on Fire video , Bishop Robert Barron comments on the currently fashionable chatter about “diversity, equity, and inclusion...

Sunday, January 9, 2022

Geach on authority and consistency

If the reader will indulge me, here is one more post inspired by Peter Geach – specifically, this time, by some themes in his book Truth and...

Saturday, January 1, 2022

New Year’s open thread

Dear reader, let’s open up the discussion this year by letting you open it up. It’s time to get that otherwise off-topic comment of yours ...

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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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