Edward Feser

Read Along: The Last Superstition Part 5

I finally got some motivation to finish up doing the Read Along for Feser’s The Last Superstition. That motivation is the fact that I started reading another book that I really wanted to share commentary on. So, I’m going to do what I should have done a long, long time ago: finish up with Feser’s book. In the last post, I covered his chapter “Scholastic Aptitude.” Now, we’re moving on to chapter 5 “The Descent of the Modernists.”

In this chapte, Feser gives us a brief tour of modern philosophy and he highlights some of the problems that came out of the modern period of philosophy. Feser’s first stop is a discussion of John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. Feser claims that while these two would be classified more as medieval writers, they led to “the undoing of the Scholastic tradition” (167). Feser comments on Ockhams razor, his nominalism, and his conception of God and how they rejected how we could come to know God the way Aquinas postulated.

There was one thing that did catch my attention though. Feser notes the following, “Ockham’s pulverization of all reality into a collection of unrelated individuals also has a tendency to turn God into merely one individual among others (albeit a grand and remote one)” (170). God, in other words, is made more anthropomorphic and thus we see the beginnings of what today is called Theistic Personalism (This is one topic that I really want to discuss in the new book I’m reading!).

Feser now turns to discussing the relationship between modern philosophy and modern science. One point he makes is that many modern scientists will say that science has utterly done away with Aristotelianism since his science was shown to be proven wrong. Thus, his metaphysics was wrong too. I’ve heard this in countless classes and it’s no wonder a lot of people in philosophy classes today just end up ignoring Aristotle and all the other ancients, while they gravitate towards Hume and all the other modern dolts. But what Feser notes is that Aristotle’s metaphysical views are independent of his scientific theories. As a case in point, Feser lists “the distinction between actuality and potentiality, the doctrine of the four causes, [and] hylomorphism” (172). These metaphysical ideas are still as relevant today as ever before.

One of the trademarks of modern science is that it’s based on the modern philosophical assumption that the world is mechanical. Feser points out that the denial of final and formal causes comes with this territory. There are a few “famous” objections that Feser covers in this little section. One is a joke that makes fun of the explanatory power of final and formal causes. Basically, the joke is that a doctor explains that opium causes sleep because it has “dormitive power” that is, it has the power to cause sleep. The objection is basically that the explanation if tautologous since all the doctor was saying is “opium causes sleep because it has the power to cause sleep” (180). But this isn’t a tautology, as Feser points out, whereas to say “opium causes sleep because it causes sleep” would be one (180).

The statement that “opium causes sleep because it has the power to cause sleep” actually does say a lot. Feser articulates the point that this statement is saying that the ability to cause sleep is inherent in the nature of the opium and is not just some accidental feature that this opium just happened to have as opposed to some other pile of opium over there (180). This is just one example of the few objections by moderns that Feser deals with.

The next section “Inventing the mind-body problem” is probably one of my favorites. Feser notes that much of modern philosophy’s views started with Descartes. The first big modern “tendency”, as Feser likes to call it, started with the intro of subjectivism as postulated by Descartes, which is the idea that “all that we can know directly and with certainty are the contents of our own minds” (Feser’s emphasis 186). Another distinction that adds to this is the idea of primary and secondary qualities. These ideas contribute to a mind-body dualism in which the body is part of the mechanical world, and all these qualities of redness, hotness, etc. exist in the mind of the observer in some immaterial sense.

But at the same time, modern science has been trying to reduce everything, even the mind, to simply materialistic terms. The biggest problem, however, is that the denial of final causes is surely a problem for this project. As Feser notes, “The human mind manifests final causality more obviously than anything else. It intends or plans actions and outcomes that do not yet exist and may never exist, but remain directed towards those actions and outcomes all the same” (194). Moreover, because Descartes denies aristotelian-thomistic metaphysics and thus the form-matter relationship of the soul, the problem of the mind interacting with the body emerges since the interaction is no longer described as formal causation but efficient causation (196). Hand in hand with this is that given Descartes’ view of the mind/soul and the mechanistic conception of the world, Feser also contends that this opens up the problem of the gap between the mind and the external world.

But those are but a few of the problems opened up by the modernist philosophy. Feser goes on to list some more of this “universal acid.” One is the problem of skepticism, which the A-T conception of the soul helps by way of how the intellect grasps the forms of objects and the same form is abstracted in the mind. The problem of induction which comes from the denial of formal and final causes. The issue of personal identity also comes from the abandonment of formal causes, i.e., a man being a composite of form and matter (soul + body). With the discussion on free-will, Feser discusses how the intellect and will operate as “parts of the realm of formal and final causes” (209). Thus, when formal and final causes are denied, as we see in modern philosophy with the mechanistic view of the world, free-will becomes an even greater problem. Natural rights is another problem that Feser highlights as having arisen out of the denial of formal and final causality. Closely tied with natural rights is the idea of property, and Feser analyzes Locke’s view of property and how a denial of teleology in nature makes his conception harder to accept. Lastly, Feser discusses morality and spends his time criticizing Hume, Hobbes, and Kant. “The bottom line,” Feser writes, “is that by abandoning formal and final causes, modern philosophy necessarily denied itself any objective basis for morality. If nothing is objectively for anything — if nothing has any inherent goal, end, or purpose — then reason is not objectively “for” anything either, including the pursuit of the good. Hence there cannot possibly be any way of grounding morality rationally” (219-220). Feser blames much of the degradation of morality on this very denial of final and formal causes.

Feser does go into detail about how the problem came as a result of abandoning A-T metaphysics, and he explains how A-T solves it. My aim here was not to give a comprehensive summary, but a brief sketch of the topics he touches on. This chapter was a very fine treatment of how Modern philosophy is the cause of so many of the philosophical “problems” we see today. I did my best to just highlight the main sections of the chapter so you can get an idea of what he spoke about. The final chapter of the book will be covered in my next post, and that chapter is “Aristotle’s Revenge.” From what it looks like, Feser will be giving one last defense of the A-T model and we’ll see it in action in the last chapter.

Read Along: The Last Superstition Part 4

It’s been quite a while since I did my last post of a read along for Feser’s book. As promised, here is the next post on his next chapter “Scholastic Aptitude.” In this chapter, Feser introduces the scholastic views of the soul and natural, and he uses these concepts to talk about the fetus, same-sex marriage, and the purpose of sex. Lastly, he briefly discusses faith, reason, and evil.

When it comes to the soul, Aquinas took Aristotle’s view that everything in our experience is made up of form and matter. The soul just so happens to be the form of “or essence of a living thing” (121). But from that it follows that every living thing has a type of soul. Moreover, there is a type of hierarchy with these souls. At the bottom of that list is the vegetative soul or “nutritive soul” that has the powers of “taking in nutrients, growing, and reproducing itself” (121). Next, the animal soul has the powers of sense experience and locomotion (movement). Lastly, there’s the rational soul, which has the powers to “grasp abstract concepts [...] and to reason on the basis of them” and the ability to have free will. Now, the hierarchy works in the following way: the highest type of soul is the rational soul and it contains its own powers in addition to the powers of the animal and vegetative soul. So, for example, when we look at humans who have the rational soul, we see that humans can reason (rational soul), can move around and interact with other objects via the senses (animal soul), and humans can take in nutrients by eating food and it can reproduce through *gasp* sex.

Feser reminds readers not to forget how final and efficient causality works. Feser writes,

As we have seen, a thing’s having a certain form goes hand in hand with its having a certain final cause or natural end, or a hierarchically ordered set of final causes or natural ends. A plant is ordered toward taking in nutrients, growing, and reproducing itself; those are the ends nature has given it. An animal has these ends too, along with the ends entailed by its distinctive powers of sensation and locomotion. (122)

Feser goes into much more detail about the soul and responds to some of the ridiculous objections brought by Dennett and Dawkins about how neuroscience is making free-will and the soul a thing of the past. Essentially, Feser briefly demonstrates that neuroscience doesn’t harm Aquinas and Aristotle’s view of the soul at all. Rather, neuroscience is going to be consistent with it! Eventually a discussion on the soul will lead us to ask when a human being gets his rational soul. So, when does he or she get one?!

At conception. For a soul just is the form–the essence, nature, structure, organizational pattern–of a living thing, an organism. And the human organism, as we know form modern biology, begins at conception. [...] Once you add Aquinas’s metaphysics to modern biology, there can be no doubt that the soul is present from conception, and thus that a human being exists from conception. (128)

On the section of natural law, Feser does a wonderful job of breaking down the view of final causality and essence,  while applying it to same-sex marriage and sexual ethics. I’m going to forgo discussing this section simply because I’m planning a future post on sexual ethics and contraception from a natural law perspective that will use a lot of material from this section of Feser’s book. So, I’d rather not have to repeat myself again. So, if you’re just itching to read this chapter, sorry! Either buy the book, or wait for my future post ;)

Now, about faith, Feser describes it as this:

faith is from the point of view of traditional Christian theology: belief in what God has revealed because if God has revealed it it cannot be in error; but where the claim where He had revealed it is itself something that is known on the basis of reason. Faith doesn’t conflict with reason, then; it is founded on reason and completes reason.” (157)

Another interesting point that Feser brings up is how not every Christian is going to sit and study all the arguments for God’s existence and the Bible’s reliability. Not every Christian is going to have their beliefs “intellectually” grounded, so to speak. Unless you’re an academic or intellectual, you aren’t going to plow through a metaphysics textbook and try to understand the nature of reality. So, are people’s reasons for believing in faith entirely blind? Not necessarily. Feser asks readers to think about Einstein’s E=MC^2 equation. The lay person on the street probably has no clue how this equation works, what it stands for, and all the calculations involved at reaching it. Yet, we hold that they’re justified in believing in its truth because the believe it “on the authority of those from whom they’ve learned it” (158). So, why, then, can’t this work for religion? In other words, “if this is legitimate in other aspects of life, there is nothing per se wrong with it in religion” (158).

After slapping the new atheists a bit, Feser talks just briefly on the problem of evil. If you thought the chapter “Getting Medieval” was good, wait until you read through this chapter. It’s rare that I find books that are real page turners and are funny and intellectually rigorous. Good thing Feser has a knack for being both.

Edward Feser on Natural Law, Natural Rights, and Private Property

I was going to do a blog post on the topic of natural law and natural rights, but Edward Feser was ahead of me and did a much better job than anything I could produce. Check out his post here. Also, sorry for not posting as much lately. I noticed WC has been a bit slower than usual lately. I’m working on a post where I share some thoughts on something from Aquinas’s Treatise on Law. Stay tuned ;)

Read Along: The Last Superstition Part 3

Maybe I’m being biased simply because I’m a fan of Feser or because I’m pretty much an Aristotelian-Thomist myself, but I’m definitely loving this book.

In the next chapter “Getting Medieval”, Feser turns to our favorite philosopher Thomas Aquinas (for a more in-depth treatment of Aquinas and Thomism, I highly urge you to check out Feser’s book Aquinas. I own it and I’ve read it, and it’s probably the best introductory book I’ve read so far on Aquinas. I did an extensive book review and summary of the book here for AP315). Simultanouesly, Feser unleashes and rips at the four horsemen of the New Atheists once again. I found myself chuckling and laughing once all over again. I mean, for those who are not already familiar with Feser and how he is on his blog, this book and his tone may bother some people, and it may annoy some.

Before turning to Aquinas and his arguments, Feser devotes a good amount of time to slapping the hands of the New Atheists for getting just about everything about Aquinas wrong. Things get pretty philosophical after this since Feser turns towards the existence of God. Feser did something really interesting that brought a lot of clarity and helped gauge people’s conception of God. He broke down the conceptions people have of God into 5 gradations:

1) The first is the kind of description you see village atheists have of God, namely, that God is some old dude up in the sky that’s sitting on a cloud and shooting thunderbolts at people.

2) The second gradation is that in which “God doesn’t really have a bodily form, and His thoughts and motivations are in many respects very different from ours. He is an immaterial object or substance which has existed forever, and (perhaps) pervades all space. Still, he is, somehow, a person like we are, only vastly more intelligent, powerful, and virtuous, and in particular without our physical and moral limitations” (87).

3) This one is really long, and I’m honestly too lazy to just quote the whole thing, but I feel like Feser does a better job of explaining it than I do…*sigh* decisions, decisions. Basically, God is not an object alongside other objects but God is existence itself. “The world is not an independent object in the sense of something that might carry on if God were to ‘go away’; it is more like the music produced by a musician, which exists only when he plays and vanishes the moment he stops” (88).

4) God understood by a mystical experience

5) God through which Aquinas knows Him through the “beatific vision attained by the blessed after death” (88).

The conception Feser takes as being the correct one and the one that Aquinas is true to is number 3. When discussing the Unmoved Mover argument, it’s important to have an understanding of the act and potency concepts mentioned earlier in the book (Feser also give an in-depth treatment of this in his book Aquinas). Feser goes into the whole technical philosophy and walks you through how Aquinas reaches his conclusions. I’m simply too lazy and tired right now to give you a summary of it (sorry!). He only discusses the Unmoved Mover and the First Cause arguments. He also demonstrates how the First Cause argument completely sidesteps the “issue” of the beginning of the universe and how Aquinas was not aiming to argue that the universe had a beginning. Whether or not the universe has a beginning, Aquinas’s argument for the First Cause still flows through nicely. Feser also criticizes Dawkin’s “argument” against the Fifth Way. With his sarcasm and colorful language, Feser remarks, “Well, if Dawkins really wants his consciousness raised, he should love this little revelation: Aquinas’s Fifth Way has nothing to do with Paley’s design argument or the creation/evolution debate. This is awful luck for a monomaniacal Dawkins afflicted with Dawkins’s strange intellectual variation on Narcissistic Personality Disorder, but there it is” (111). Feser sure does get Medieval and anyone wanting a good philosophical defense of a few of Aquinas’s arguments is going to love this chapter (Once again, if I haven’t stressed it enough already, if you want more of this, DEFINITELY get Feser’s other book Aquinas).

So far I have just one tiny complaint. I feel like Feser hasn’t given enough of a justification for formal and final causality. He does explain it a bit, but he doesn’t really talk much about it or defend it in depth. I’m hoping he will, but for the most part Feser disappointed me there. However, he does do a decent job of presenting the Aristotelian world view. Then again, this book isn’t really meant for much an in-depth analysis and defense of Aristotelian-Thomism.

I think what I’ll do now is just do a post on each chapter. I’m pretty much almost done with the book. I just have 60 pages left, but I’m behind on the blogging. So, I’ll just divide up the posts to doing a post for each chapter leaving just 3 posts left in total. The next post will be on chapter 4 which is titled “Scholastic Aptitude”.

 

Read Along: The Last Superstition Part 2

Feser’s book is definitely not letting me down. Not only is he cracking more sarcastic “jokes” and more rants about the New Atheists, but he’s getting pretty philosophical, and I likey.

So after his discussion of Plato and his theory of forms, Feser turns to the importance of Aristotle and his philosophical contributions. This is no minor issue. Feser has very strong feelings about the importance of Aristotelian philosophy and the consequences of abandoning such a philosophy. I found it funny how he wrote out his feelings about the abandonment of Aristotelianism. Funny because of the ironic manner in which he framed and answered the question, but I ultimately think he’s right. So Feser asks, ”How significant is Aristotle?”, and his lamenting answer is, “Well, I wouldn’t want to exaggerate, so let me put it this way: Abandoning Aristotelianism, as the founders of modern philosophy did, was the single greatest mistake ever made in the entire history of Western thought” (51 Feser’s emphasis).

His lament doesn’t end there. It just begins, and it continues for a whole page. From the “disintegration” of “rational justifiability of morality and religious belief”, evolution vs ID controversy, abortion, same-sex marriage, to the “mind body problem”, skepticism, and relativism, Feser suggests that our cultural decay has been in a steady and slow (now rampant) decline as a result of the abandonment of Aristotelianism, which “provided the most powerful and systematic intellectual foundation for traditional Western religion and morality [...] that has ever existed” (51-52).

No doubt these are very strong claims. He even anticipates how some of his readers might ask or think that he’s somehow joking. But he readily admits that he isn’t, and he adds a number of qualifiers. I really do look forward to how his responses play out and how he will weave them together to back up his claims. He goes as far as admitting that he is indebted to the reader by making these grand assertions. Luckily, he asserts that he will jump into the metaphysics and “pay off [his] debt to the reader” (52). Feser does seem very confident in the power behind Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy.

With this confidence, he launches off into discussions on potentiality and actuality, form and matter, and the four causes. All these are pertinent to understanding Aristotelianism and Feser makes sure his readers understand its importance and applicability. To illustrate the concept of potency and act, Feser uses his famous little bouncy ball example (which I’ve employed myself since this illustration is the best way for people to understand it). The ball’s potency is basically those ways in which the ball can be, e.g., green if you paint it, flat if you pound it down with a hammer or something, and/or “gooey” if you melt it. Actuality is the way the ball actually is: a blue bouncy ball is actually blue, bouncy, round, and hard.

A few more distinctions are needed. Something in act cannot potentially be just anything. The ball cannot potentially be a toothpick or a leather chair. Its potentialities are such that they are grounded in the nature of the thing in act. Furthermore, something goes from potential to act only if something else in actuality acts as an efficient cause on it. Feser explains that for a rubber ball to actualize its potential and become goo, it requires something external that’s in act (heat) to melt the ball.

As an aside, I really didn’t intend to go on and summarize all of the concepts that Feser explains. I’m only doing this because it helps me understand it better as I explain it to an audience.

Anyways, so Feser goes into great detail explaining these concepts and the rest of them. Feser does explain how some of modernistic philosophy has become crap when he criticizes Hume’s problem of cause and effect and demonstrates how these problems only arose as a result of abandoning the aristotelian notion of explaining things, i.e., the four causes. He uses an example of a breaking a window with a brick to demonstrate. The “problem” is that the break being thrown is one event and the window being shattered is another event (65). Who’s to say that the first event caused the second? Feser says that there is no problem and the problem only arises because of Hume’s wrongheaded position in the first place. Simply put, “things are causes, not events” (66). So with regards to the brick and the window, Feser explains that “the key point in the causal series would be something like the pushing of the brick into the glass and the glass’s giving way[...] these events are simultaneous” (66). There’s a lot more technical jargon involved in his explanation. So Feser doesn’t just trout out a simplistic answer like I’ve framed it, but he does go into detail at how this event is explained and why Hume got it wrong.

Next to the act/potency distinction, the four causes is the chief cornerstone to Aristotelianism. But Feser observes how modern science claims to have buried the hatchet and made formal and final causes obsolete and false. Feser’s response to this was…well, you can see for yourself:

Let me be very clear about something. However widely accepted, these claims are, each and every one of them, simply untrue. They are false. Wrong. Mistaken. Erroneous. Non-factual. Not the case. And this is putting it too mildly: If one were to use the proper technical jargon common in traditional Australian philosophy [...] one would characterize them as ‘bullshit.’ (71)

Fesers response is basically that modern science never came close to disproving the four causes. All they did was drop the usage of two of them and moved on. This hardly counts as a refutation. Because of this move, Feser continues, philosophical problems arose and things have just been getting worse and worse. Once again Feser makes the promise that these things will get fleshed out later on in the book (and I’m inclined that this is true since he does have a chapter that’s titled “Descent of the Modernists”). I certainly hope he doesn’t leave his readers with not enough to fill them up. But I have faith in the guy.

I’ve already started reading the third chapter, and the book is just getting better and better. I’ll save my thoughts and some discussion on it for another post.

 

Read Along: The Last Superstition

Since I finished God, Freedom, and Evil I figured I’d do another Read Along and post my thoughts on my current read, which is Edward Feser’s The Last Superstition. Feser is definitely one of my favorite philosophers and influences, and he shows why in this book. Feser is both rigorous and humorous, while also being a great writer that can write clearly, precisely and concretely (it’s hard to find a philosopher who can have all of these traits). I think in his own right, Feser is a cross between Aquinas in rigor and Christopher Hitchens in rhetorical skill, and he’s able to blend these perfectly when needed. This book is where Feser shows this blend.

First of all, I entirely agree with Feser’s approach in this book. Not only is he matching up to and surpassing the New Atheists in the intellectual war, but also in the rhetorical one. “It is essential,” Feser proclaims, “then, not only that its intellectual pretensions are exposed but that its rhetoric is met with equal and opposite force” (25). I entirely agree. Most of the village atheists (and I’m referring to a specific group of atheists since I know that not all atheists are like this, or that not all atheists like the way the New Atheists handle things) don’t listen to intellectual arguments, and most of their own arguments are simply rhetorically filled with demeaning attacks towards religion. I think it’s about time someone not only knocks them off their feet by intellectually challenging them (not that this hasn’t been happening), but by also burying them into the ground by demolishing them with some witty rhetoric.

Most of the introduction and first chapter is focused on pretty much calling out the New Atheists and just ripping them down. Feser admits that for the time being, most of what he’s saying are just assertions, but he promises to flesh them out with intellectual argumentation and rigor in the remaining parts of the book. One part that really cracked me up was when Feser basically called particular atheists–those who say that believing in God is on par with believing in the easter bunny–a “shallow and sophomoric jackass” (15).

Feser’s description of the typical village atheist or “skeptic” is another masterful product of his wit:

A copy of Skeptic magazine ostentatiously tucked under his arm, the Darwin fish on the bumper of his car proudly signals his group identification with other members of the herd of “independent thinkers.” He “knows” that there is no God, and he isn’t whether even the thoughts he thinks he’s having are real or not. But he is pretty sure that his “selfish genes” and/or his “memes” in some way manipulate his every action, and quite certain that there’s nothing questionable per se about ‘”marrying” another man, strangling an unwanted disabled infant, or sodomizing a goat or a corpse (if that’s “what you’re into”). Despite his hatred of religion, he thinks global warming a greater danger than Islamic terrorism, and whether “meat is murder” is a proposition he thinks eminently worth of consideration. (17)

I think his description is as true as it is funny (and I think it was pretty funny). Sadly, I come across a lot of atheists like this, even in the philosophy department at my school. It’s as if Dawkins personally trained all his little cronies himself. They all follow the ridiculous and irrational model laid out by people like Dawkins, and Feser points his finger at this as well. Feser also reiterates an observation that many Christian philosophers have been pointing out (not that they’re the only ones who point it out, but they’re the ones who do it more and more), namely that the issues between science and religion is a battle of philosophies and not of science and religion per se. Feser calls this a myth. Plain and simple. He tells us that the dichotomy is between two metaphysical systems: that of “Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas on the one hand, and modern naturalism on the other” (21).

Most of his first chapter is spent on ripping on the New Atheists and setting the groundwork for what’s to come. The second chapter is where things get interesting (and fun for you ancient philosophy junkies). Feser begins to briefly sketch the history of ancient philosophy starting with Thales. He enters into Plato’s theory of forms and up to now he is discussing realism, nominalism, and conceptualism. Feser hasn’t spent time making a case just yet. He’s still just tilling the ground and explaining the ancient philosophy and is directing the conversation mainly over universals and forms since later he will use a lot of these concepts when he turns to Aristotle and Aquinas. This is as far as I’ve gotten. I’m really loving it. The book is a light read, but not light enough to where you won’t get any substantial philosophy. The way it’s looking, I think Feser is going to take me for a good ride with his book. I’ll keep you all posted on my reading and thoughts as I continue reading through. Hopefully I don’t finish it fast enough to where I won’t post anymore and thus won’t have anymore to write on this!

 

Videos about Science & Faith

Here is a video of Edward Feser giving a talk on “Natural Theology Must Be Grounded in the Philosophy of Nature, Not in Natural Science.” I’m personally a fan of Feser’s work (Thank you to Gil Sanders and my other good friend Tim Hsiao for introducing me to his books), and I think Feser has a great deal to say about this. He is the author of Aquinas, Philosophy of Mind (Now in its second edition), and The Last Superstition–and I must say I own all these books and they are excellent!

Here is Alvin Plantinga giving a talk on his most recent book Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism. This is another great philosopher whose work I am a fan of. Sadly, I don’t own too many of his books! That will change in this coming week when I purchase a few of them including his tide turning book God, Freedom, and Evil. Enjoy!

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