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, June 29, 2024

Hobbes and Kant on capital punishment

Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant both had an enormous formative influence on modern moral and political philosophy, and on liberalism in part...

Friday, June 21, 2024

Immortal Souls in eBook format

The paperback version of my new book Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature sold out on Amazon within a day of being listed there. No ...

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

Scruton on tradition

Roger Scruton’s essay “Rousseau and the Origins of Liberalism” first appeared in The New Criterion in 1998, and was reprinted in The Betra...

Friday, June 7, 2024

Immortal Souls now available for pre-order

My new book Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature is now available for pre-order in the U.S. at Amazon.com . Here again are the back ...

Wednesday, June 5, 2024

Postliberalism is not despotism

In a new article at Postliberal Order , I explain why, contrary to a common straw man, postliberalism does not entail despotism.

Saturday, June 1, 2024

Multiverses and falsifiability

Adam Becker’s 2018 book What is Real? The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics is an excellent account of the longstanding a...

Thursday, May 30, 2024

Update on Immortal Souls

Immortal Souls has at last been reduced from potency to act. The official publication dates are in June for Europe and July in the United ...

Wednesday, May 22, 2024

New video course at Word on Fire

Recently I recorded a six-part video course titled Six Arguments for the Existence of God for the Word on Fire Institute . You can find an...

Tuesday, May 14, 2024

Immortal Souls

My book Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature will be published this summer by Editiones Scholasticae. At well over 500 pages, it...

Friday, May 10, 2024

Let’s open it up

If we had a new open thread post, what would you talk about? Current events? That off-topic philosophical or theological question you vain...

Saturday, May 4, 2024

Dignitas Infinita at The Catholic Thing

At The Catholic Thing , Diane Montagna interviews me about the Vatican’s recent Declaration Dignitas Infinita .

Monday, April 29, 2024

Plato and Aristotle on youth and politics

As faculty, including even philosophy professors, aid and abet student bad behavior on campus, it is worth considering what the most serious...

Friday, April 19, 2024

Daniel Dennett (1942-2024)

Prominent philosopher of mind, apostle of Darwinism, and New Atheist writer Daniel Dennett has died . I have been very critical of Dennett ...

Saturday, April 13, 2024

Mansini on the development of doctrine

My review of Guy Mansini’s excellent new book The Development of Dogma: A Systematic Account appears in the May 2024 issue of First Things...

Thursday, April 11, 2024

Two problems with Dignitas Infinita

This week the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF) published the Declaration Dignitas Infinita , on the topic of human dignity. I ...

Wednesday, April 10, 2024

Western civilization's immunodeficiency disease

Liberalism is to the social order what AIDS is to the body. By relegating the truths of natural law and divine revelation to the private sp...

Tuesday, April 2, 2024

Ed Piskor (1982-2024)

This week, cartoonist Ed Piskor committed suicide in the wake of the relentless online pillorying and overnight destruction of his career th...

The illusion of AI

My essay “The Illusion of Artificial Intelligence” appears in the latest issue of the Word on Fire Institute’s journal Evangelization &...

Friday, March 29, 2024

Wishful thinking about Judas

In a recent article at Catholic Answers titled “Hope for Judas?” Jimmy Akin tells us that though he used to find convincing the traditiona...

Jesuit Britain?

Did Spanish Scholastic thinkers influence British liberalism? You can now access my Religion and Liberty review of Projections of Spanish ...

Monday, March 25, 2024

Mind, matter, and malleability

Continuing our look at Jacques Maritain’s Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau , let’s consider some arresting passages on the conc...

Friday, March 15, 2024

The metaphysics of individualism

Modern moral discourse often refers to “persons” and to “individuals” as if the notions were more or less interchangeable. But that is not ...

Tuesday, March 5, 2024

When do popes speak ex cathedra?

Consider four groups that, one might think, couldn’t be more different: Pope Francis’s most zealous defenders; sedevacantists; Protestants; ...

Sunday, February 25, 2024

What counts as magisterial teaching?

Popes speak infallibly when they either proclaim some doctrine ex cathedra , or reiterate some doctrine that has already been taught infalli...

Monday, February 19, 2024

A comment on comments

Dear reader, if it seems your comment has not been approved, sometimes it actually has been approved even if you don’t see it. The reason ...

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Avicenna, Aquinas, and Leibniz on the argument from contingency

Avicenna, Aquinas, and Leibniz all present versions of what would today be called the argument from contingency for the existence of a divi...

Wednesday, February 7, 2024

The heresy with a thousand faces

In a new article at Postliberal Order , I discuss the disturbing parallels between the woke phenomenon and the medieval Catharist or Albigen...

Saturday, January 27, 2024

Immortal souls at West Point

Had a great time visiting the United States Military Academy at West Point this week for a Thomistic Institute talk on the theme “Do You Hav...

Monday, January 22, 2024

Voluntarism in The Vanishing

The reputation of 1993’s The Vanishing has suffered because critics judge it inferior to the 1988 Dutch movie of which it was a remake. Bu...

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Avicenna’s flying man

Peter Adamson’s new book Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna): A Very Short Introduction is an excellent primer on the great medieval Islamic philosopher. ...

Wednesday, January 10, 2024

Progress report

My friends, it exists. More news later.

Jesuit Britain?

My review of the anthology Projections of Spanish Jesuit Scholasticism on British Thought: New Horizons in Politics, Law, and Rights , edite...

Tuesday, January 2, 2024

New Year’s open thread

Let’s open the New Year with an open thread. Now’s the time at last to bring up that otherwise off-topic comment that keeps getting deleted...

Friday, December 29, 2023

What is a “couple”?

In my recent article on the controversy over Fiducia Supplicans , I noted three problems with the document’s qualified permission of blessi...

Friday, December 22, 2023

The scandal of Fiducia Supplicans

By now many readers of this blog will likely have heard about Fiducia Supplicans and the worldwide controversy it has generated, which may ...

Sunday, December 17, 2023

The Aristotelian proof on Within Reason

Some time back, Alex O’Connor and I recorded a discussion of the Aristotelian argument from motion for the existence of God, for his Within ...

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

On Vallier, Vermeule, and straw men (Updated)

Over at his Substack, Kevin Vallier responds to my recent review at The Josias of his book All the Kingdoms of the World . Vallier claim...

Friday, December 8, 2023

Contra Vallier on integralism

Over at The Josias , I critique Kevin Vallier’s new book All the Kingdoms of the World: On Radical Religious Alternatives to Liberalism .

Sunday, November 26, 2023

Ryle on microphysics and the everyday world

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

Saturday, November 18, 2023

What is free speech for?

In a new article at Postliberal Order , I discuss the teleological foundations of, and limitations on, the right to free speech, as these ar...

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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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