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)

Wednesday, August 30, 2023

Fastiggi on Capital Punishment and the Change to the Catechism, Part II

In 2018, Pope Francis authorized a revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church , which now states that “the death penalty is inadmissib...

Saturday, August 26, 2023

Fastiggi on Capital Punishment and the Change to the Catechism, Part I

In 2018, Pope Francis revised the section of the Catechism of the Catholic Church dealing with the topic of capital punishment, so that it ...

Wednesday, August 23, 2023

Aquinas and Nietzsche on the politics of envy

Recently, I joined Postliberal Order as a regular contributor. Today, my essay “Against the Politics of Envy” appears at the site. It di...

Monday, August 21, 2023

All One in Christ on EWTN Bookmark

Some time back I was interviewed about my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory for EWTN Bookmark ...

Sunday, August 13, 2023

Haugeland on hylomorphism

In his essay “Ontological Supervenience” (in his anthology Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind ), John Haugeland puts forward ...

Friday, August 4, 2023

Open-minded open thread

It’s time for an open thread. So dust off those otherwise off-topic comments you’ve been aching to post. Because from M.C. Escher to MC Ha...

Friday, July 28, 2023

Stove and Searle on the rhetorical subversion of common sense

One of the stranger aspects of contemporary political and intellectual life is the frequency with which commentators put forward extremely d...

Monday, July 24, 2023

A comment on the Lofton affair

For any readers of my recent reply to Michael Lofton who have not been following events at Twitter and YouTube, Lofton has, over the course...

Friday, July 21, 2023

Lofton’s YouTube straw man (Updated)

There’s a popular mode of online intellectual discourse that I rather dislike, which might be labeled “the extended YouTube hot take.” It i...

Wednesday, July 19, 2023

What is classical theism?

Recently, I was interviewed by John DeRosa for the Classical Theism Podcast. The focus of our discussion is my essay “What is Classical The...

Tuesday, July 18, 2023

Archbishop Fernandez’s clarification

Recently, it was announced that Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernandez would become the new prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Fai...

Friday, July 14, 2023

Cardinal Newman, Archbishop Fernandez, and the “suspended Magisterium” thesis

St. John Henry Newman famously noted that during the Arian crisis, “the governing body of the Church came short” in fighting the heresy, an...

Friday, July 7, 2023

The vice of insensibility

Temperance or moderation is the virtue governing the enjoyment of sensory pleasures. In particular, and as Aquinas says , “temperance is pr...

Wednesday, June 28, 2023

Pilkington responds

Philip Pilkington sent me a response to my reply to his American Postliberal article . I thank him for it and am happy to post it here: F...

Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Postliberalism, economics, and culture

I commend to you economist Philip Pilkington’s fine essay “Towards a Postliberal Political Economy,” at The American Postliberal . It is i...

Tuesday, June 20, 2023

In defense of culture war

From Marxists on the left to former House Speaker Paul Ryan on the right, many voices in the political discussion assure us that the “cultur...

Monday, June 12, 2023

The associationist mindset

When Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers say that human beings are by nature rational animals, they don’t mean that human beings always reas...

Friday, June 2, 2023

Reconsidering corporal punishment

Debates about crime and punishment today typically concern disagreements about the death penalty, or about the length, and in some cases the...

Tuesday, May 23, 2023

Hell and conditional prophecy

In a recent talk at the Angelicum (which can be viewed at YouTube ), Fr. Simon Gaine addresses the question of whether scripture teaches tha...

Wednesday, May 17, 2023

Capital punishment and the law of nations

What is the nature of Pope Francis’s 2018 change to the Catechism’s teaching on capital punishment? Does it amount to a reversal of traditi...

Monday, May 8, 2023

Substance, teleology, and intentionality

There is an illuminating parallel between the traditional Aristotelian distinction between substances , artifacts , and aggregates , and the...

Tuesday, May 2, 2023

A Festschrift for Gyula Klima

My essay “Truth as a Transcendental” appears in the Festschrift Metaphysics Through Semantics: The Philosophical Recovery of the Medieval Mi...

Saturday, April 29, 2023

The Catechism and Capital Punishment: A Reply to Annett

Some years back, in my article “Three questions for Catholic opponents of capital punishment,” I argued that Pope Francis’s statements on t...

Thursday, April 20, 2023

Hazony and Gottfried on wokeism and Marxism

Right-wingers often characterize wokeism as a kind of Marxism, and left-wingers routinely dismiss the characterization as a cheap smear that...

Thursday, April 13, 2023

What is a Law of Nature?

Some time back I gave a lecture at Fermilab on the topic “What is a Law of Nature?” I’ve posted the text of the lecture at my main website ...

Wednesday, April 12, 2023

All One in Christ on EWTN Live

Recently I recorded an interview about my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory for the televisio...

Thursday, April 6, 2023

Talking philosophy and natural theology

Recently, on the Thomistic Institute’s Off-Campus Conversations program, Fr. Gregory Pine and I had a discussion about Aquinas’s Five Ways, ...

Wednesday, April 5, 2023

Strawson on free will and interpersonal relationships

In his classic paper “Freedom and Resentment,” P. F. Strawson addresses the question of what difference the widespread acceptance of determ...

Saturday, April 1, 2023

All One in Christ on Bookmark Brief

Recently I recorded interviews about my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory for the television p...

Tuesday, March 28, 2023

McCaig and Reilly on All One in Christ

At Twitter, Bishop Scott McCaig kindly recommends my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory . He w...

The philosophy of capital punishment

My essay “The Justice of Capital Punishment” appears in The Palgrave Handbook on the Philosophy of Punishment , edited by Matthew C. Altman....

Saturday, March 25, 2023

Putnam on reason, reductionism, and relativism

Naturalism holds that what is real is what can be accounted for in terms acceptable to science. More or less the orthodoxy in contemporary ...

Saturday, March 18, 2023

How to define “wokeness”

A common talking point among the woke is the claim that “woke” is just a term of abuse that has no clear meaning. Whether many of them real...

Friday, March 10, 2023

This month at First Things

My review of Thomas Ward’s superb new book Ordered by Love: An Introduction to John Duns Scotus appears in the current issue of First Thin...

Friday, March 3, 2023

Naturalism versus Katz’s Platonism

Naturalism holds that there is nothing more to reality than the world of concrete entities causally related to one another within space and ...

Sunday, February 26, 2023

Open thread combox

Here’s the latest open thread, by popular demand. Actually, it was one guy, but I’ll bet there at least twice as many as that who are inter...

Friday, February 24, 2023

Catholicism, CRT, and the spirit of the age

Recently I was interviewed by the Catholic Herald ’s Katherine Bennett about Critical Race Theory and the need for Catholics not to let them...

Saturday, February 18, 2023

Pope Francis contra life imprisonment

The white supremacist Buffalo shooter who murdered ten people has been sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. A...

Friday, February 10, 2023

The Faith Once for All Delivered

Coming soon, the important new anthology The Faith Once for All Delivered: Doctrinal Authority in Catholic Theology , edited by Fr. Kevin Fl...

Talking about All One in Christ

The latest on my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory : Recently I was interviewed for the EDIFY ...

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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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