Sunday, November 26, 2023

Ryle on microphysics and the everyday world

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Science, we’re often told, gives us a description of the world radically at odds with common sense.  Physicist Arthur Eddington’s famous “tw...
147 comments:
Saturday, November 18, 2023

What is free speech for?

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In a new article at Postliberal Order , I discuss the teleological foundations of, and limitations on, the right to free speech, as these ar...
50 comments:
Thursday, November 9, 2023

All One in Christ at Public Discourse

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At Public Discourse , John F. Doherty kindly reviews my book All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory .  F...
50 comments:
Saturday, November 4, 2023

The Thomist's middle ground in natural theology

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The Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition holds that knowledge must begin with sensory experience but that it can nevertheless go well beyond any...
108 comments:
Tuesday, October 24, 2023

Cartwright on reductionism in science

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In her superb recent book A Philosopher Looks at Science , Nancy Cartwright revisits some of the longstanding themes of her work in the phil...
119 comments:
Thursday, October 12, 2023

Thomism and the Nouvelle Théologie

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My review of Jon Kirwan and Matthew Minerd’s important new anthology The Thomistic Response to the Nouvelle Théologie appears in the Novem...
120 comments:
Tuesday, October 10, 2023

A little logic is a dangerous thing

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Some famous and lovely lines from Alexander Pope’s “An Essay on Criticism” observe: A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, ...
40 comments:
Monday, October 2, 2023

Michael F. Flynn (1947-2023)

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It is with much sadness that I report that Michael F. Flynn, well-known science fiction writer and longtime friend of this blog, has passed ...
32 comments:
Wednesday, September 27, 2023

Aquinas on the will’s fixity after death

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My essay “Aquinas on the Fixity of the Will After Death” appears in New Blackfriars .  (It’s behind a paywall, I’m afraid.)  Here’s the abs...
110 comments:
Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Augustine on false community

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In a new article at Postliberal Order , I discuss the perverse forms of human community identified and criticized by Augustine in the Confes...
13 comments:
Wednesday, September 20, 2023

The Death Penalty and Genesis 9:6: A Reply to Mastnjak (Guest article by Timothy Finlay)

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Genesis 9:6 famously states: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed; for God made man in his own image” (RSV). This...
74 comments:
Sunday, September 10, 2023

Hartshorne on the project of natural theology

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Process theism denies some of the key attributes ascribed to God by classical theism, such as immutability and impassibility.  Charles Hart...
145 comments:
Wednesday, August 30, 2023

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

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In 2018, Pope Francis authorized a revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church , which now states that “the death penalty is inadmissib...
145 comments:
Saturday, August 26, 2023

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

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In 2018, Pope Francis revised the section of the Catechism of the Catholic Church dealing with the topic of capital punishment, so that it ...
92 comments:
Wednesday, August 23, 2023

Aquinas and Nietzsche on the politics of envy

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Recently, I joined Postliberal Order as a regular contributor.  Today, my essay “Against the Politics of Envy” appears at the site.  It di...
51 comments:
Monday, August 21, 2023

All One in Christ on EWTN Bookmark

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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 ...
38 comments:
Sunday, August 13, 2023

Haugeland on hylomorphism

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In his essay “Ontological Supervenience” (in his anthology Having Thought: Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind ), John Haugeland puts forward ...
67 comments:
Friday, August 4, 2023

Open-minded open thread

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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...
329 comments:
Friday, July 28, 2023

Stove and Searle on the rhetorical subversion of common sense

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One of the stranger aspects of contemporary political and intellectual life is the frequency with which commentators put forward extremely d...
156 comments:
Monday, July 24, 2023

A comment on the Lofton affair

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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...
42 comments:
Friday, July 21, 2023

Lofton’s YouTube straw man (Updated)

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There’s a popular mode of online intellectual discourse that I rather dislike, which might be labeled “the extended YouTube hot take.”  It i...
74 comments:
Wednesday, July 19, 2023

What is classical theism?

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Recently, I was interviewed by John DeRosa for the Classical Theism Podcast.  The focus of our discussion is my essay “What is Classical The...
88 comments:
Tuesday, July 18, 2023

Archbishop Fernandez’s clarification

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Recently, it was announced that Archbishop Víctor Manuel Fernandez would become the new prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Fai...
30 comments:
Friday, July 14, 2023

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

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St. John Henry Newman famously noted that during the Arian crisis, “the governing body of the Church came short” in fighting the heresy, an...
48 comments:
Friday, July 7, 2023

The vice of insensibility

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Temperance or moderation is the virtue governing the enjoyment of sensory pleasures.  In particular, and as Aquinas says , “temperance is pr...
123 comments:
Wednesday, June 28, 2023

Pilkington responds

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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...
48 comments:
Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Postliberalism, economics, and culture

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I commend to you economist Philip Pilkington’s fine essay “Towards a Postliberal Political Economy,” at The American Postliberal .  It is i...
76 comments:
Tuesday, June 20, 2023

In defense of culture war

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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...
55 comments:
Monday, June 12, 2023

The associationist mindset

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When Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophers say that human beings are by nature rational animals, they don’t mean that human beings always reas...
52 comments:
Friday, June 2, 2023

Reconsidering corporal punishment

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Debates about crime and punishment today typically concern disagreements about the death penalty, or about the length, and in some cases the...
102 comments:
Tuesday, May 23, 2023

Hell and conditional prophecy

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In a recent talk at the Angelicum (which can be viewed at YouTube ), Fr. Simon Gaine addresses the question of whether scripture teaches tha...
113 comments:
Wednesday, May 17, 2023

Capital punishment and the law of nations

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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...
99 comments:
Monday, May 8, 2023

Substance, teleology, and intentionality

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There is an illuminating parallel between the traditional Aristotelian distinction between substances , artifacts , and aggregates , and the...
56 comments:
Tuesday, May 2, 2023

A Festschrift for Gyula Klima

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My essay “Truth as a Transcendental” appears in the Festschrift Metaphysics Through Semantics: The Philosophical Recovery of the Medieval Mi...
201 comments:
Saturday, April 29, 2023

The Catechism and Capital Punishment: A Reply to Annett

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Some years back, in my article “Three questions for Catholic opponents of capital punishment,” I argued that Pope Francis’s statements on t...
44 comments:
Thursday, April 20, 2023

Hazony and Gottfried on wokeism and Marxism

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Right-wingers often characterize wokeism as a kind of Marxism, and left-wingers routinely dismiss the characterization as a cheap smear that...
56 comments:
Thursday, April 13, 2023

What is a Law of Nature?

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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 ...
90 comments:
Wednesday, April 12, 2023

All One in Christ on EWTN Live

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Recently I recorded an interview about my book  All One in Christ: A Catholic Critique of Racism and Critical Race Theory  for the televisio...
13 comments:
Thursday, April 6, 2023

Talking philosophy and natural theology

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Recently, on the Thomistic Institute’s Off-Campus Conversations program, Fr. Gregory Pine and I had a discussion about Aquinas’s Five Ways, ...
202 comments:
Wednesday, April 5, 2023

Strawson on free will and interpersonal relationships

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