Whose nature? Which law?

You’ve got your natural law.  You’ve got your natural rights.  You’ve got the state of nature.  Then there’s naturalism.  And laws of nature.  And the supernatural.  There’s St. Paul’s natural man and the Scholastics’ natura pura.  There’s nature and nature’s God.  There’s natural science, natural history, natural selection, natural theology, natural philosophy, and the philosophy of nature.  There’s the Baconian scientist putting nature on the rack, and Galileo telling us that the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics.  And let’s not forget the literal books, like Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature, Richard Rorty’s Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, and Edward O. Wilson’s On Human Nature.  There’s Emerson’s essay “Nature.”  For fans of underground comics, there’s Mr. Natural; for fans of obscure superheroes too preposterous ever to get their own billion-dollar-grossing film adaptations, there’s Nature Boy.  There’s Oliver Stone’s movie Natural Born Killers and Robert Redford in The Natural.   There’s Ringo Starr singing “Act Naturally,”  Aretha Franklin’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” the Steely Dan album Two Against Nature, and that stupid Gilbert O’Sullivan tune.  

There are natural disasters, natural resources, natural gas, and dying of natural causes.  There’s natural beauty, but also freaks of nature.  There’s going back to nature and getting a natural high.  There are Mother Nature, nature hikes, all natural foods, natural family planning and natural childbirth.  There’s the natural order, and second nature.  There are natural numbers.  There are all the examples I didn’t think of.  There are blog posts that are starting to sound like George Carlin routines.

Who wants to be an atheist?

Suppose something like Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods? hypothesis turned out to be true, and the God of the Bible was really an extraterrestrial who had impressed the Israelites with some high tech.  Would you conclude: “A ha!  Those atheists sure have egg on their faces now!  Turns out the Bible was right!  Well, basically right, anyway.  True, God’s nature isn’t exactly what we thought it was, but He does exist after all!”  Presumably not, no more than if the God of Exodus turned out to be Moses with an amplifier and some red fizzies he’d dumped into the Nile.  The correct conclusion to draw in either case would not be “God exists, but He wasn’t what He seemed” but rather “God does not exist, He only seemed to.”

Or suppose something like Frank Tipler’s Omega Point theory turned out to be correct and the universe is destined to evolve into a vastly powerful supercomputer (to which Tipler ascribes a kind of divinity).  If you had been inclined toward atheism, do you think you would now conclude: “Wow, turns out God does exist, or at least will exist someday!”  Or rather only: “Wow, so this really weird gigantic supercomputer will exist someday!  Cool.  But what does that have to do with God?”

The Avengers and classical theism

Watched The Avengers again on Blu-ray the other night.  In a movie full of good lines, a few stand out for (of all things) their theological significance.  Take the exchange between Black Widow and Captain America after the Norse god Thor forcibly removes his brother Loki from S.H.I.E.L.D.’s custody, Iron Man gives chase, and Captain America prepares to follow:

Black Widow: I’d sit this one out, Cap.  

Captain America: I don’t see how I can.

Black Widow: These guys come from legend, they’re basically gods.

Captain America: There’s only one God, ma’am.  And I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that.

Was Aquinas a dualist?

At the start of chapter 4 of Aquinas (the chapter on “Psychology”), I wrote:

As I have emphasized throughout this book, understanding Aquinas requires “thinking outside the box” of the basic metaphysical assumptions (concerning cause, effect, substance, essence, etc.) that contemporary philosophers tend to take for granted.  This is nowhere more true than where Aquinas’s philosophy of mind is concerned.  Indeed, to speak of Aquinas’s “philosophy of mind” is already misleading.  For Aquinas does not approach the issues dealt with in this modern philosophical sub-discipline in terms of their relevance to solving the so-called “mind-body problem.”  No such problem existed in Aquinas’s day, and for him the important distinction was in any case not between mind and body, but rather between soul and body.  Even that is potentially misleading, however, for Aquinas does not mean by “soul” what contemporary philosophers tend to mean by it, i.e. an immaterial substance of the sort affirmed by Descartes.  Furthermore, while contemporary philosophers of mind tend to obsess over the questions of whether and how science can explain consciousness and the “qualia” that define it, Aquinas instead takes what is now called “intentionality” to be the distinctive feature of the mind, and the one that it is in principle impossible to explain in materialistic terms.  At the same time, he does not think of intentionality in quite the way contemporary philosophers do.  Moreover, while he is not a materialist, he is not a Cartesian dualist either, his view being in some respects a middle position between these options.  But neither is this middle position the standard one discussed by contemporary philosophers under the label “property dualism.”  And so forth.

New Scholastic Meets Analytic Philosophy

Lindenthal-Institut in cooperation with the publisher Ontos Verlag announces an international colloquium on the theme “New Scholastic Meets Analytic Philosophy,” to be held in Cologne, Germany on December 7 - 8, 2013.  The invited speakers are E. J. Lowe, Uwe Meixner, David S. Oderberg, Edmund Runggaldier, Erwin Tegtmeier, and Edward Feser.  Details can be found here.

Justice or revenge?

I have, in various places (e.g. here, here, here, here, here, and here), defended capital punishment on grounds of retributive justice.  And I’ve noted (following the late Ralph McInerny) that what many people who object to capital punishment really seem to find off-putting is the idea of punishment itself (capital or otherwise), smacking as it does of retribution.  A reader asks what the difference is between retributive justice and revenge.  It seems, he says, that there is no difference.  But if there isn’t, then it is understandable why many people object to capital punishment, and even to punishment itself.

I think the reader is correct to suggest that the perception of a link between retributive justice and revenge is the source of much opposition to capital punishment, and of suspicion of the notion of punishment itself.  The thinking seems to go something like this:

1. Revenge is bad.

2. But retribution is a kind of revenge.

3. So retribution is bad.

4. But punishment involves retribution.

5. So punishment is bad.

The trouble with this argument, some defenders of punishment might think, is with premise (2).  But while I would certainly want to qualify premise (2), the main problem in my view is actually with premise (1).  “Revenge” (and related terms like “vengeance” and “vindictiveness”) have come to have almost entirely negative connotations.  But that is an artifact of modern sensibilities, and does not reflect traditional Christian morality.  For there is a sense in which revenge is not bad, at least not intrinsically.  Indeed, there is a sense in traditional Christian morality in which revenge is a virtue.  What is bad are certain things that are often, but only contingently, associated with revenge.  Hence those who reject punishment on the grounds just summarized are not wrong to see a link between retribution and revenge.  Rather, they are wrong to assume that revenge is inherently bad.

Let me explain.  Or rather, let me allow Thomas Aquinas to explain:

The divine intellect

A reader asks:

[I] was curious, given your work in philosophy of mind, what you would say is the most plausible notion we have of God's mental content… [T]he popular theories (functionalism, phenomenology, holism, etc) all seem to violate the doctrine of divine simplicity… I have a hard time conceiving of any conception of minds on which the mind is not, in some sense of the word, modular, or complex.  Minds have got to have thoughts at the very least on the most basic, primitivist conceptions, and that seems to require that minds have parts.

Objective and subjective

One of the barriers to understanding Scholastic writers like Aquinas is their technical terminology, which was once the common coin of Western thought but is alien to most contemporary academic philosophers.  Sometimes the wording is unfamiliar even though the concepts are not.  For example, few contemporary analytic philosophers speak of act and potency, but you will find quite a few recent metaphysicians making a distinction between categorical and dispositional features of reality, which is at least similar to the former, Scholastic distinction.  Sometimes the wording is familiar but the associated concept is significantly different.  For example, contemporary philosophers generally use “property” as synonymous with “attribute,” “feature,” or “characteristic,” whereas Scholastics use it in a much more restricted sense, to refer to what is “proper” to a thing insofar as it flows from the thing’s essence (as the capacity for having a sense of humor flows from our being rational animals and is thus one of our “properties,” but having red hair does not and so is not a “property”).  Other terms too which are familiar to contemporary philosophers have shades of meaning in Scholastic writers which differ significantly from those associated with contemporary usage -- “intentionality,” “necessary,” “causation,” “essential,” and “teleology” are examples I have discussed in various places.

And then there are “objective” and “subjective,” which are sometimes used by Scholastic writers to convey more or less the opposite of what contemporary philosophers mean by these terms.

Brain hacking and mind reading

Over the last week or so several news stories have appeared (e.g. here and here) suggesting that it is technologically possible to “hack” the brain and extract from it PIN numbers, credit card data, and the like.  This naturally raises the question whether such a possibility vindicates materialism.  The short answer is that it does not.  I’ve commented on claims of this sort before (here and here) but it is worth revisiting the issue in light of what I’ve said in recent posts about how the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) philosopher understands the relationship between thought and brain activity.

Animals are conscious! In other news, sky is blue, water wet

A reader calls my attention to a Discovery News story which breathlessly declares: 

A prominent group of scientists signs a document stating that animals are just as “conscious and aware” as humans are.  This is a big deal.

Actually, it is not a big deal, nor in any way news, and the really interesting thing about this story is how completely uninteresting it is.  Animals are conscious?  Anyone who has ever owned a pet, or been to the zoo, or indeed just knows what an animal is, knows that.  

OK, almost anyone.  Descartes notoriously denied it, for reasons tied to his brand of dualism.  And perhaps that is one reason someone might think animal consciousness remarkable.  It might be supposed that if you regard the human mind as something immaterial, you have to regard animals as devoid of consciousness, so that evidence of animal consciousness is evidence against the immateriality of the mind and thus a “big deal.”  This is not what the article says, mind you, but it is one way to make sense of why it presents the evidence of animal consciousness as if it were noteworthy.

Think, McFly, think!

As Aristotelians and Thomists use the term, intellect is that faculty by which we grasp abstract concepts (like the concepts man and mortal), put them together into judgments (like the judgment that all men are mortal), and reason logically from one judgment to another (as when we reason from all men are mortal and Socrates is a man to the conclusion that Socrates is mortal).  It is to be distinguished from imagination, the faculty by which we form mental images (such as a visual mental image of what your mother looks like, an auditory mental image of what your favorite song sounds like, a gustatory mental image of what pizza tastes like, and so forth); and from sensation, the faculty by which we perceive the goings on in the external material world and the internal world of the body (such as a visual experience of the computer in front of you, the auditory experience of the cars passing by on the street outside your window, the awareness you have of the position of your legs, etc.).

The metaphysics of bionic implants

Take a look at the classic title sequence of The Six Million Dollar Man.  Oscar Goldman (the bionic man’s superior in the Office of Scientific Intelligence) says the following in the famous voiceover:

Gentlemen, we can rebuild him.  We have the technology.  We have the capability to make the world's first bionic man.  Steve Austin will be that man.  Better than he was before.  Better, stronger, faster.

Now that raises an interesting philosophical question.  Aquinas holds that:

[T]here exists in everything the natural desire of preserving its own nature; which would not be preserved were it to be changed into another nature.  Consequently, no creature of a lower order can ever covet the grade of a higher nature; just as an ass does not desire to be a horse: for were it to be so upraised, it would cease to be itself. (Summa Theologiae I.63.3)

Now, Steve Austin loses an arm, an eye, and his legs.  They are replaced with artificial parts which allow him to surpass his previous levels of strength, speed, and visual distance perception.  Still, they are artificial.  His normal human organs are not restored; instead, he becomes a cyborg.   We might even suppose that he likes being one -- certainly to every teenage boy, and to some of us middle-aged types, the idea sure seems pretty cool.  So, is the bionic man a counterexample to Aquinas’s claim?  For isn’t a cyborg -- being “stronger, faster” than an ordinary human being -- also “better” than an ordinary human being?  And doesn’t the fact that someone might plausibly desire to be a cyborg show that a thing could desire to be another kind of thing?

Rediscovering Human Beings

My article “Rediscovering Human Beings” will appear in two parts over at The BioLogos Forum.  Today you can read Part I.  Part II will be posted tomorrow.  

UPDATE: Part II has now been posted.

Philosophy on radio (UPDATED)

I’ll be appearing once again on Catholic Answers Live this coming Monday, August 20^th, at 4:00 pm (Pacific time).  Links to some previous radio interviews can be found here.

UPDATE: The podcast of the show is now available here.

The road from libertarianism

I have pretty much always been conservative.  For about a decade -- from the early 90s to the early 00s -- I was also a libertarian.  That is to say, I was a “fusionist”: someone who combines a conservative moral and social philosophy with a libertarian political philosophy.  Occasionally I am asked how I came to abandon libertarianism.  Having said something recently about how I came to reject atheism, I might as well say something about the other transition.

Disching it out

One of the hazards of hagiography is that it virtually begs for debunking.  Pile the honors on too thick and too uncritically, and eventually someone’s going to come along and try to blast them off.  (That’s why the word “hagiography” is seldom used these days except ironically.  Good hagiography shouldn’t be too hagiographical.)  

Consider the praise heaped upon Ray Bradbury after his recent death -- I provided a little of it myself -- or indeed, that heaped upon him during his life.  Was there anyone who didn’t like Bradbury’s work?  Turns out there was, as I find on dipping into the late Thomas M. Disch’s essay collection On SF.

Briggs on TLS and tone

Statistician William M. Briggs is beginning a series of posts on my book The Last Superstition.  In the first installment he considers the polemical tone of the book and tells his readers to get any remarks on that subject out of their systems now so that he can move on to more substantive matters in future posts.  Briggs writes:

Feser gives us a manly Christianity, in muscular language.  His words oft have the tone of a teacher who is exasperated by students who have, yet again, not done their homework.  The exasperation is justifiable…

Feser… does not suffer (arrogant) fools well—or at all.  This perplexes some readers who undoubtedly expect theists to be soft-spoken, meek, and humble to the point of willing to concede miles to gain an inch.  Feser is more of a theological Patton: he is advancing, always advancing, and is not interested in holding on to anything except the enemy’s territory.  This stance has startled some reviewers.  Typical is [one reviewer] who ignores the meat of the book and whines about “ad hominems.”

Concretizing the abstract

Eric Voegelin famously (if obscurely) characterized utopian political projects as attempts to “immanentize the eschaton.”   A related error -- and one that underlies not only political utopianism but scientism and its offspring -- might be called the tendency to “concretize the abstract.”  Treating abstractions as if they were concrete realities is something Alfred North Whitehead, in Science and the Modern World, labeled the “Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness,” and what has also been called the “Reification Fallacy.”  It has been an occupational hazard of philosophy and science since the time of the Pre-Socratics.  The Aristotelian strain in Western thought formed a counterpoint to this “concretizing” tendency within the context of ancient philosophy, and also more or less inoculated Scholasticism against the tendency.  But it came roaring back with a vengeance with Galileo, Descartes, and their modern successors, and has dominated Western thought ever since.  Wittgenstein tried to put an end to it, but failed; for bad metaphysics can effectively be counteracted only by good metaphysics, not by no metaphysics.  And Aristotelianism is par excellence a metaphysics which keeps abstractions in their place.

Back from Sydney

And quite tired from a very busy week (and very long flight!)  I want to thank my new friends at the Catholic Adult Education Centre and all the other fine people who treated me so well during the trip.  Regular blogging will resume this week.

Philosophy of Mind on audio

A couple of months ago I called attention to the recently released audio version of my book Aquinas.  My book Philosophy of Mind is now also available in an audio version of its own.

See you in Sydney

I’ll be in Australia next week for the CAEC speaking tour I announced recently.  Blog activity will be sporadic at best until I return.  You can find information about the tour here, and a YouTube promo here.  The Catholic Weekly of Sydney has run an interview with me that you can read here, and a separate radio interview can be heard here.

The Aquinas Institute

The Aquinas Institute in Wyoming will, over time, be publishing the works of Thomas Aquinas in an affordable hardcover format, both in Latin and whenever possible in bilingual Latin/English editions.  Their initial offerings are the complete Commentaries on Paul’s Letters, the Summa theologiae, the Commentary on John, and the Commentary on Matthew.  The pre-order period has been extended to August 8^th.

The road from atheism

As most of my readers probably know, I was an atheist for about a decade -- roughly the 1990s, give or take.  Occasionally I am asked how I came to reject atheism.  I briefly addressed this in The Last Superstition.  A longer answer, which I offer here, requires an account of the atheism I came to reject.

I was brought up Catholic, but lost whatever I had of the Faith by the time I was about 13 or 14.  Hearing, from a non-Catholic relative, some of the stock anti-Catholic arguments for the first time -- “That isn’t in the Bible!”, “This came from paganism!”, “Here’s what they did to people in the Middle Ages!”, etc. -- I was mesmerized, and convinced, seemingly for good.  Sola scriptura-based arguments are extremely impressive, until you come to realize that their basic premise -- sola scriptura itself -- has absolutely nothing to be said for it.  Unfortunately it takes some people, like my younger self, a long time to see that.  Such arguments can survive even the complete loss of religious belief, the anti-Catholic ghost that carries on beyond the death of the Protestant body, haunting the atheist who finds himself sounding like Martin Luther when debating his papist friends. 

Cosmological argument roundup

A year ago today I put up a post with the title “So you think you understand the cosmological argument?”  It generated quite a bit of discussion, and has since gotten more page views than any other post in the history of this blog.  To celebrate its first anniversary -- and because the argument, rightly understood (as it usually isn’t), is the most important and compelling of arguments for classical theism -- I thought a roundup of various posts relevant to the subject might be in order.

Classical theism roundup

Classical theism is the conception of God that has prevailed historically within Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Western philosophical theism generally.  Its religious roots are biblical, and its philosophical roots are to be found in the Neoplatonic and Aristotelian traditions.  Among philosophers it is represented by the likes of Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Avicenna.  I have emphasized many times that you cannot properly understand the arguments for God’s existence put forward by classical theists, or their conception of the relationship between God and the world and between religion and morality, without an understanding of how radically classical theism differs from the “theistic personalism” or “neo-theism” that prevails among some prominent contemporary philosophers of religion.  (Brian Davies classifies Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, and Charles Hartshorne as theistic personalists.  “Open theism” would be another species of the genus, and I have argued that Paley-style “design arguments” have at least a tendency in the theistic personalist direction.)   

Oderberg updated

David Oderberg has revamped his website and given it a new location.  Update your bookmarks accordingly.  Take note also of his new Metaphysica article, “Hume, the Occult, and the Substance of the School.”  Here’s the abstract:

I have not been able to locate any critique of Hume on substance by a Schoolman, at least in English, dating from Hume's period or shortly thereafter.  I have, therefore, constructed my own critique as an exercise in ‘post facto history’.  This is what a late eighteenth-century/early nineteenth-century Scholastic could, would, and should have said in response to Hume's attack on substance should they have been minded to do so.  That no one did is somewhat mysterious.  My critique is precisely in the language of the period, using solely the conceptual resources available to a Schoolman at that time.  The arguments, however, are as sound now as they were then, and in this sense the paper performs a dual role—contributing to the defence of substance contra Hume, and filling, albeit two hundred years or so too late, a gap in the historical record.

Barr on quantum mechanics

Over at Big Questions Online, physicist Stephen Barr addresses the question of the relationship between quantum physics and theology.  Take note of the discussion board attached to the article, to which Barr has contributed.  (And if you haven’t watched Barr’s lecture on “Physics, the Nature of Time, and Theology” from the Science and Faith Conference at Franciscan University of Steubenville last December, you should.)

Atheistic teleology?

There has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere and elsewhere about former atheist blogger Leah Libresco’s recent conversion to Catholicism.  It seems that among the reasons for her conversion is the conviction that the possibility of objective moral truth presupposes that there is teleology in the natural order, ends toward which things are naturally directed.  That there is such teleology is a thesis traditionally defended by Catholic philosophers, and this is evidently one of the things that attracted Libresco to Catholicism.  A reader calls my attention to this post by atheist philosopher and blogger Daniel Fincke.  Fincke takes issue with those among his fellow atheists willing to concede to Libresco that an atheist has to reject teleology.  Like Libresco, he would ground morality in teleology, but he denies that teleology requires a theological foundation.

Answering Atheism in Australia

The Catholic Adult Education Centre of the Archdiocese of Sydney is kindly hosting me for a week-long speaking tour from July 23 - 29.  You can find more information here and a YouTube promo here.

Reply to Steve Fuller

As I noted in a recent post, the Spring 2012 issue of Theoretical and Applied Ethics contains a symposium on Ethics, Atheism, and Religion, with a lead essay by atheist philosopher Colin McGinn.  I wrote one of the responses to McGinn’s piece, and one of the other contributors, Steve Fuller, wrote an essay with the title “Defending Theism as if Science Mattered: Against Both McGinn and Feser.”  What follows is a reply to Fuller.  (Readers who have not already done so are advised to read McGinn's essay, mine, and Fuller’s before proceeding.  They're all fairly brief.)

Sentient plants? Part II

Gene Callahan responds to my recent criticisms of his view that plants are sentient.  (Some plants or all?  Gene seems to think all of them are, though the evidence he appeals to would show at most only that some of them are.)  Recall that I had noted three reasons Aristotelians deny that any plants possess conscious awareness.  The first is that plants lack the specialized sense organs we find in animals.  The second is that plants lack the variability of response to stimuli that animals possess.  And the third is that sensation together with appetite and locomotion form a natural package of capacities, so that since plants lack locomotion they must lack sentience as well.

Sentient plants?

Economist Gene Callahan (a friend of this blog) calls my attention to this article, which claims that plants are capable of “sensory” responses to their environments, and even that they “talk and listen to one another.”  Gene concludes that “contrary to Aristotle, plants are active and communicate to each other, with sounds among other methods” so that “neo-Aristotelians ought to drop the idea that plants lack sensations.”  And while Gene allows that “this certainly does not invalidate all of Aristotle's metaphysics,” it does in his view show that Aristotelians should be wary of once again “ma[king] the mistake of tying Aristotelian metaphysics to Aristotelian natural science.”

But (no disrespect to Gene intended) as usual with these breathless journalistic “Science has shown that…!” stories, the actual facts are far less exciting than the sensationalistic packaging would suggest.

McGinn on atheism

The Spring 2012 issue of Theoretical and Applied Ethics contains a symposium on Ethics, Atheism, and Religion.  The lead essay is by Colin McGinn and is followed by responses from me, Steve Fuller, Ted Peters, and Robert Sinclair.  All the essays can be read online, so go take a look.

Philosophy of nature and philosophy of [fill in the blank]

A reader of my recent post on the philosophy of nature asks some excellent questions:

I wonder, where does the philosophy of physics and in general the philosophy of science fall in between the scheme of metaphysics and philosophy of nature?...

Also, where does the discussion on the topic of the laws of nature belong?  Is that also philosophy of nature? 

Let’s start with the question of how the philosophy of science is related to the philosophy of nature.  Recall from my recent post that as the middle ground field of the philosophy of nature gradually disappeared off the radar screen of modern philosophy, the disciplines on either side of it -- on the one hand, metaphysics and on the other, empirical science (in the modern rather than Aristotelian sense of “science”) -- came to seem the only possible avenues of investigation of reality.  Recall also that the methodology of metaphysics came to seem a matter of “conceptual analysis,” while any study with empirical content came to be identified as part of natural science.  The very notion that there could be a middle ground field of study with empirical foundations but arriving at necessary truths, thus transcending the contingent world described by physics, chemistry, etc. and pointing the way to metaphysics -- as Aristotelian philosophy of nature claims to do -- was largely forgotten.

Ray Bradbury (1920 - 2012)

When Ray Bradbury was twelve years old, he went to a carnival and encountered Mr. Electrico, a performer who sat in an electric chair with current running through him so that his hair stood up and an electrical sword he held would glow.  Touching the sword to the young Bradbury’s head, Mr. Electrico exclaimed: “Live forever!”  Alas, Mr. Electrico’s command has gone unheeded, for Bradbury died last Tuesday at 91 -- long-lived, to be sure, but well short of forever.

Oerter on motion and the First Mover

George Mason University physicist Robert Oerter has completed his series of critical posts on my book The Last Superstition.  I responded to some of his remarks in some earlier posts of my own (here and here, with some further relevant comments here and here).  In this post I want to reply to what he says in his most recent remarks about the Aristotelian argument from motion to an Unmoved Mover of the world.

Color holds and quantum theory

When figuring out how many human beings of average weight can be carried on an airplane, engineers deal with abstractions.  For one thing, they ignore every aspect of actual, concrete human beings except their weight; for another, they ignore even their actual weight, since it could in principle turn out that there is no specific human being who has exactly whatever the average weight turns out to be.  This is perfectly fine for the specific purposes at hand, though of course it would be ludicrous for those responsible for planning the flight entertainment or meals to rely solely on the considerations the engineers are concerned with.  It would be even more ludicrous for them to insist that unless evidence of meal and movie preferences can be gleaned from the engineers’ data, there just is no fact of the matter about what meals and movies actual human beings would prefer.

Natural theology, natural science, and the philosophy of nature

Physicist Robert Oerter has added some further installments to his series of posts on my book The Last Superstition, including a reply to some of my criticisms of his criticisms of the book.  I will respond to his latest remarks in a forthcoming post, but before doing so it seemed to me that it would be useful to make some general remarks about certain misunderstandings that have not only cropped up in my exchange with Oerter and in the combox discussions it has generated, but which frequently arise in disputes about natural theology (and, for that matter, in disputes about natural law ethics and about the immateriality and immortality of the soul).  In particular, they tend to arise in disputes about what we might call classical natural theology -- natural theology grounded in philosophical premises deriving from the Aristotelian, Neo-Platonic, and/or Scholastic traditions.

Cinematic representation

What makes it the case that a picture of Grandma represents Grandma?  That it looks like her, you might say.  But that can’t be the right answer, or at least not the whole answer.  The picture might look like any of several people; still, it represents only Grandma.  Or it might not look much like her at all -- consider a bad drawing, or even a photograph taken at an odd angle or in unusual lighting or while the subject is wearing a very unusual expression -- yet still represent her.  Indeed, that resemblance of any sort is neither sufficient nor necessary for representation is about as settled a philosophical thesis as there is.  (The reasons are many.  An object might resemble all sorts of things without representing them.  Resemblance is a symmetrical relationship, but representation is not: If a certain picture resembles Grandma, Grandma also resembles the picture; but while the picture might represent Grandma, Grandma does not represent the picture.  There are many things we can represent in thought or language -- the absence of something, a certain point in time, conditional statements, disjunctions, conjunctions, etc. -- without these representations resembling their objects, either pictorially or in any other way.  And so forth.  Chapter 1 of Tim Crane’s The Mechanical Mind provides a useful discussion of the issue.)

John Paul the Great Academy

John Paul the Great Academy in Lafayette, Louisiana is a fine Catholic college preparatory institution promoting the classical curriculum, the Thomistic intellectual tradition, and fidelity to the teaching of the Church.  Unfortunately, the Academy is suddenly facing the prospect of closure and is urgently in need of the prayers and financial assistance of those sympathetic to its mission.  Take a look at the school’s website to find out more about the Academy, and please consider making a contribution.