Immortal Souls provides as ambitious and complete a defense of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical anthropology as is currently in print. Among the many topics covered are the reality and unity of the self, the immateriality of the intellect, the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, the critique of artificial intelligence, and the refutation of both Cartesian and materialist conceptions of human nature. Along the way, the main rival positions in contemporary philosophy and science are thoroughly engaged with and rebutted.
Tuesday, May 14, 2024
Immortal Souls
Friday, May 10, 2024
Let’s open it up
Saturday, May 4, 2024
Dignitas Infinita at The Catholic Thing
Monday, April 29, 2024
Plato and Aristotle on youth and politics
Friday, April 19, 2024
Daniel Dennett (1942-2024)
Saturday, April 13, 2024
Mansini on the development of doctrine
Thursday, April 11, 2024
Two problems with Dignitas Infinita
Wednesday, April 10, 2024
Western civilization's immunodeficiency disease
Tuesday, April 2, 2024
Ed Piskor (1982-2024)
The illusion of AI
Friday, March 29, 2024
Wishful thinking about Judas
Jesuit Britain?
Monday, March 25, 2024
Mind, matter, and malleability
Friday, March 15, 2024
The metaphysics of individualism
Traditionally, in Catholic philosophy, a person is understood to be a substance possessing intellect and will. Intellect and will, in turn, are understood to be immaterial. Hence, to be a person is ipso facto to be incorporeal – wholly so in the case of an angel, partially so in the case of a human being. And qua partially incorporeal, human beings are partially independent of the forces that govern the rest of the material world.
Tuesday, March 5, 2024
When do popes speak ex cathedra?
Sunday, February 25, 2024
What counts as magisterial teaching?
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 is that once a combox reaches 200 comments, the Blogger software will not show any new comments made after that unless you click “Load more…” at the bottom of the comments page. The trouble is that this is in small print and easily overlooked. In the screen cap above, I’ve circled in red what you should look for.
Saturday, February 17, 2024
Avicenna, Aquinas, and Leibniz on the argument from contingency
Wednesday, February 7, 2024
The heresy with a thousand faces
Saturday, January 27, 2024
Immortal souls at West Point
Monday, January 22, 2024
Voluntarism in The Vanishing
Wednesday, January 17, 2024
Avicenna’s flying man
Wednesday, January 10, 2024
Jesuit Britain?
Tuesday, January 2, 2024
New Year’s open thread
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 blessings for “couples” of a same-sex or other “irregular” kind. First, the document is not consistent with the Vatican’s 2021 statement on the subject, which prohibited such blessings, nor consistent even with itself. Second, its incoherence makes abuses of its permission inevitable, despite the qualifications. Third, the implicature carried by the act of issuing this permission “sends the message” that the Church in some way approves of such couples, even if this message was not intended. In an interview with The Pillar, Cardinal Fernández addresses the controversy, but unfortunately, his remarks exacerbate rather than resolve the problems.
Friday, December 22, 2023
The scandal of Fiducia Supplicans
Sunday, December 17, 2023
The Aristotelian proof on Within Reason
Tuesday, December 12, 2023
On Vallier, Vermeule, and straw men (Updated)
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
Saturday, November 18, 2023
What is free speech for?
Thursday, November 9, 2023
All One in Christ at Public Discourse
In Feser’s book, Catholics, other
Christians, and even non-Christians will find much to help them confront CRT
and the perennial challenges of living in a racially diverse society…
Critical race theorists routinely use
confusing, tough-to-pin-down logical fallacies. Feser does us the service of laying these
fallacies out methodically and succinctly…
For anyone who knows nothing about CRT, All One in Christ is an excellent place to start. It has a decidedly negative perspective on the movement, but Feser takes pains to be fair to his opponents.
Saturday, November 4, 2023
The Thomist's middle ground in natural theology
Two crucial components of this picture of human knowledge are the theses that concepts are irreducible to sensations and mental images, but can nevertheless be abstracted from imagery by the intellect. As I have discussed before, a key difference between the Aristotelian-Thomistic position on the one hand and early modern forms of rationalism and empiricism on the other is that each of the latter kept one of these Aristotelian-Thomistic theses while rejecting the other. Rationalism maintained the thesis that concepts are irreducible to sensations and mental images, but concluded that many or all concepts therefore could not in any way be derived from them. Hence, rationalists concluded, many or all concepts must be innate. Modern empiricism held on to the thesis that concepts derive from mental imagery, but concluded that they must not really be distinct from them. Hence the modern empiricist tendency toward “imagism,” the view that a concept just is an image (or an image together with a general term).
Tuesday, October 24, 2023
Cartwright on reductionism in science
Reductionism does not have quite the same hold in philosophy of science that it once did, having been subjected to powerful attack not only from Cartwright, but from Paul Feyerabend, John Dupré, and many others. (I discuss the anti-reductionist literature in detail in Aristotle’s Revenge.) Still, the idea that whatever is real is somehow ultimately nothing more than what can in principle be described in the language of a completed physics exerts a powerful hold on many. Cartwright cites James Ladyman and Don Ross as adherents of this view, and Alex Rosenberg is another prominent advocate. As Cartwright notes, in contemporary writing about science, the lure of reductionism is especially evident in discussions of the purported implications of neuroscience for topics like free will.
Thursday, October 12, 2023
Thomism and the Nouvelle Théologie
My review of Jon Kirwan and Matthew Minerd’s important new anthology The Thomistic Response to the Nouvelle Théologie appears in the November 2023 issue of First Things.
Tuesday, October 10, 2023
A little logic is a dangerous thing
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Think of the person who has read one book on a subject and suddenly thinks he knows everything. Or the beginning student of philosophy whose superficial encounter with skeptical arguments leads him to deny that we can know anything. A deeper inquiry, if only it were pursued, would in each case yield a more balanced judgement.
Monday, October 2, 2023
Michael F. Flynn (1947-2023)
That Mike will be remembered for his work in science fiction goes without saying. But it is worth emphasizing too that he was an irreplaceable presence in the blogosphere, who showed the potential of the medium for work of substance and lasting value. I doubt he ever posted anything that didn’t reward his readers’ attention, with writing that wore lightly Mike’s learning not only in the sciences but also in philosophy, theology, and history. He was for many years a regular and welcome contributor to the comments section of this blog, raising the tone simply by virtue of his presence. One of the things I most admired about him was the calm and patient manner with which he would respond to even the most obnoxious and ignorant interlocutors. He never had to say that he knew what he was talking about, while his opponent didn’t. He simply showed it by typing up a few sentences.
Wednesday, September 27, 2023
Aquinas on the will’s fixity after death
Aquinas holds that after death, the human soul can no longer change its basic orientation either toward God or away from him. He takes this to be knowable not only from divine revelation but by purely philosophical reasoning. The heart of his position is that the basic orientation of an angelic will is fixed immediately after its creation, and that the human soul after death is relevantly like an angel. This article expounds and defends Aquinas's position, paying special attention to the action theory underlying it.