Metaphysical middle man

As I’ve noted many times (e.g. here), when a thinker like Aquinas describes God as the First Cause, what is meant is not merely “first” in a temporal sense, and not “first” in the sense of the cause that happens to come before the second, third, fourth, fifth, etc. causes, but rather “first” in the sense of having absolutely primal and underived causal power, of being that from which all other causes derive their efficacy.  Second causes are, accordingly, “second” not in the sense of coming later in time or merely happening to come next in a sequence, but rather in the sense of having causal power only in a secondary or derivative way.  They are like the moon, which gives light only insofar as it receives it from the sun.

The moon really does give light, though, and secondary causes really do have causal power.  To affirm God as First Cause is not to embrace the occasionalist position that only God ever really causes anything to happen.  Alfred Freddoso helpfully distinguishes between occasionalism, mere conservationism, and concurrentism.  Whereas the occasionalist attributes all causality to God, mere conservationism goes to the opposite extreme of holding that although God maintains things and their causal powers in being, they bring about their effects all by themselves.  Concurrentists like Aquinas take a middle ground position according to which secondary causes really have (contra occasionalism) genuine causal power, but in producing their effects still only ever act together with God as a “concurring” cause (contra mere conservationism).  To borrow an example from Freddoso, if you draw a square on a chalkboard with blue chalk, both you as primary cause and the chalk as secondary cause are joint causes of the effect -- you of there being any square there at all, the chalk of the square’s being blue.  God’s concurrence with the secondary, natural causes he sustains in being is analogous to that.

God and man at HuffPo

Over at The Huffington Post, Rabbi Adam Jacobs defends the cosmological argument for the existence of God, kindly citing yours truly and The Last Superstition.  Give it a read, then sit back and watch as the tsunami of clueless objections rolls into the combox.

Mumford on metaphysics

In another in a series of excellent interviews with contemporary philosophers, 3:AM Magazine’s witty and well-informed Richard Marshall talks to analytic metaphysician Stephen Mumford.  Mumford is an important and influential contributor to the current revival of interest in powers and dispositions as essential to understanding what science reveals to us about the natural world.  The notion of a power or disposition is closely related to what the Scholastics called a potency, and Mumford cites Aristotle and Aquinas as predecessors of the sort of view he defends.  Mumford’s notion of the “metaphysics of science” is also more or less identical to what modern Scholastic writers call the philosophy of nature.  But Mumford’s interest is motivated by issues in philosophy of science and metaphysics rather than natural theology.  The interview provides a useful basic, brief introduction to some of the issues that have arisen in the contemporary debate about powers.

Schliesser on the Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism

I commented recently on the remarks about Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos made by Eric Schliesser over at the New APPS blog.  Schliesser has now posted an interesting set of objections to Alvin Plantinga’s “Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism” (EAAN), which features in Nagel’s book.  Schliesser’s latest comments illustrate, I think, how very far one must move away from what Wilfred Sellars called the “manifest image” in order to try to respond to the most powerful objections to naturalism -- and how the result threatens naturalism with incoherence (as it does with Alex Rosenberg’s more extreme position).

Around the web

Still busy trying to meet a looming deadline and prepare for a conference next week, so expect posting to be light for a few more days.  In the meantime here some things worth checking out elsewhere.

Over at Forbes, science writer John Farrell, longtime friend of this blog, hails the “return of teleology” evident in Terrence Deacon’s recent book Incomplete Nature.  

3:AM Magazine interviews Cambridge philosopher Tim Crane, an atheist who discusses the positive role his Catholic upbringing had on his becoming a philosopher; the need for atheists to tolerate, try to understand, and even give special privileges to religion; the difficulties with physicalism; the Aristotelian notion of substance; the work of Jerry Fodor; Burkean conservatism; Stephen Hawking, physics, and philosophy; and lots of other interesting stuff.

Oerter on inertial motion and angels

Last week I linked to my paper “The Medieval Principle of Motion and the Modern Principle of Inertia,” which appears in Volume 10 of the Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics.  The paper addresses the familiar claim that Newton’s law of inertia has undermined the argument of Aquinas’s First Way, which rests on the principle that whatever is in motion is moved by another -- or, to state it more precisely, the principle that any actualized potency is actualized by something already actual.  I argue that when Newton’s principle and Aquinas’s are properly understood, it is clear that the objection has no force and that those who raise it have not even managed to explain exactly what the conflict between Newton and Aquinas is supposed to be.

Blackfriars Aquinas Seminar

Readers in England might be interested to know that on February 14 I will be speaking at Blackfriars, Oxford University, as part of the Blackfriars Aquinas Seminar.  The title of the talk is “Aquinas and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought.”  Information about the Seminar can be found here.

Aquinas versus Newton?

Does Newton’s law of inertia undermine Aquinas’s First Way?  The short answer is No.  I gave a longer answer at pp. 76-79 of Aquinas.  I give a much longer answer still in my paper “The Medieval Principle of Motion and the Modern Principle of Inertia,” which I presented last year at the American Catholic Philosophical Association meeting in St. Louis and which is now available online in Volume 10 of the Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics.  Follow the link to read the paper, which is followed by a response from Michael Rota and my rejoinder to Mike.

Trabbic on TLS

Philosopher Joseph Trabbic kindly reviews The Last Superstition in the latest issue of the Saint Austin Review.  From the review:

[This] is no ordinary book of apologetics.  Edward Feser is a professional philosopher of an analytic bent whose main body of work is in the fields of philosophy of mind, moral and political philosophy, philosophy of religion, and economic theory.  Thus, alongside a number of scholarly articles, Feser has published introductory volumes to contemporary philosophy of mind, John Locke, Robert Nozick, and, most recently, Thomas Aquinas.  He has edited the Cambridge Companion to Hayek (the Austro-British economist and philosopher) as well.  Feser’s qualifications allow him to prosecute his case with a philosophical sophistication that is not found in many apologetic treatises.  One might say that as a Christian apologist Feser is overqualified…

Nagel and his critics, Part VI

We’ve been looking at the critics of Thomas Nagel’s recent book Mind and Cosmos.  Having examined the objections raised by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg, Elliott Sober, Alva Noë, and John Dupré, I want to turn now to some interesting remarks made by Eric Schliesser in a series of posts on Nagel over at the New APPS blog.  Schliesser’s comments concern, first, the way the scientific revolution is portrayed by Nagel’s critics, and second, the role the Principle of Sufficient Reason plays in Nagel’s book.  Most recently, in response to my own series of posts, Schliesser has also commented on the status of naturalism in contemporary philosophy.  Let’s look at each of these sets of remarks in turn.

Claremont Christmas Reading

The Claremont Institute has posted its annual recommended Christmas reading list, to which I’ve contributed.  You can read my recommendations here.

Nagel and his critics, Part V

Our look at the critics of Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos brings us now to philosopher of science John Dupré, whose review of the book appeared in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.  The review is pretty harsh.  At his kindest Dupré says he found the book “frustrating and unconvincing.”  Less kind is the remark that “as far as an attack that might concern evolutionists, they will feel, to borrow the fine phrase of former British minister, Dennis Healey, as if they had been savaged by a sheep.”

The remark is not only unkind but unjust.  At the beginning of his review, Dupré gives the impression that Nagel is attacking neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology per se.  Dupré writes: 

Darwinism, neo- or otherwise, is an account of the relations between living things past and present and of their ultimate origins, full of fascinating problems in detail, but beyond any serious doubt in general outline.  This lack of doubt derives not, as Nagel sometimes insinuates, from a prior commitment to a metaphysical view -- there are theistic Darwinists as well as atheistic, naturalists and supernaturalists -- but from overwhelming evidence from a variety of sources: biogeography, the fossil record, comparative physiology and genomics, and so on.  Nagel offers no arguments against any of this, and indeed states explicitly that he is not competent to do so.  His complaint is that there are some explanatory tasks that he thinks evolution should perform that he thinks it can't.

Review of Gazzaniga

My review of Michael Gazzaniga’s recent book Who’s In Charge? Free Will and the Science of the Brain appears in the Fall 2012 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.

Haldane on Aquinas, Anscombe, and much else

3:AM Magazine has posted a long and highly substantive interview with Analytical Thomist philosopher John Haldane.  Lots of interesting stuff in it, so give it a read.  (The discussion of idealism in the second part of the interview recapitulates some important points Haldane has made about Berkeley elsewhere, and which I commented on in the course of my talk at Franciscan University of Steubenville last year.)

The interviewer characterizes John as "the P Daddy of the philosophy of religion" -- and here we all thought he was a Madness fan! 

Gonzaga lectures online

Back in February of 2011, I gave a pair of lectures at the Faith and Reason Institute at Gonzaga University in Spokane, WA.  I had no idea until just the other day that the lectures are available on YouTube and apparently have been for some time.  (I thank the anonymous reader who called this to my attention.)  You can view them here:

“From Natural Science to Philosophy of Nature”

“From Philosophy of Nature to Natural Theology”

Nagel and his critics, Part IV

Continuing our look at the critics of Thomas Nagel’s recent book Mind and Cosmos, we turn to philosopher Alva Noë’s very interesting remarks over at NPR’s 13.7: Cosmos & Culture blog.  Noë’s initial comments might seem broadly sympathetic to Nagel’s position.  He writes:

Science has produced no standard account of the origins of life.

We have a superb understanding of how we get biological variety from simple, living starting points. We can thank Darwin for that. And we know that life in its simplest forms is built up out of inorganic stuff. But we don't have any account of how life springs forth from the supposed primordial soup. This is an explanatory gap we have no idea how to bridge.

Science also lacks even a back-of-the-envelop [sic] concept explaining the emergence of consciousness from the behavior of mere matter. We have an elaborate understanding of the ways in which experience depends on neurobiology. But how consciousness arises out of the action of neurons, or how low-level chemical or atomic processes might explain why we are conscious — we haven't a clue.

We aren't even really sure what questions we should be asking.

These two explanatory gaps are strikingly similar… In both cases we have large-scale phenomena in view (life, consciousness) and an exquisitely detailed understanding of the low-level processes that sustain these phenomena (biochemistry, neuroscience, etc). But we lack any way of making sense of the idea that the higher-level phenomena just come down to, or consist of, what is going on at the lower level.

Cardinal virtues and counterfeit virtues

The cardinal virtues are wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice.  They are so called because they are traditionally regarded as the “hinge” (cardo) on which the rest of morality turns.  We find them discussed in Plato’s Republic and given a more given systematic exposition in Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae.  

For Plato, these virtues are related to the three main parts of the soul and the corresponding three main classes in his ideal city.  Wisdom is the characteristic virtue of the highest part of the soul -- the rational part -- and of the highest class within the city, the ruling philosopher-kings.  Courage is the characteristic virtue of the middle, spirited part of the soul, and of the soldiers who constitute the second main class in the city.  Moderation is the characteristic attribute of the lowest, desiring part of the soul and of the lowest, productive class of the city.  Justice in turn is the proper ordering of the three parts of the soul and the city, each doing its part.

Nagel and his critics, Part III

In the previous installment in this series of posts on Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, I looked at some objections to Nagel raised by Brian Leiter and Michael Weisberg.  I want now to turn to Elliot Sober’s review in Boston Review.  To his credit, and unlike Leiter and Weisberg, Sober is careful to acknowledge that:

Nagel’s main goal in this book is not to argue against materialistic reductionism, but to explore the consequences of its being false.  He has argued against the -ism elsewhere, and those who know their Nagel will be able to fill in the details.

Sober then goes on to offer a brief summary of the relevant positions Nagel has defended in earlier works like his articles “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” and “The Psychophysical Nexus.”  As I emphasized in my previous post, keeping these earlier arguments in mind is crucial to giving the position Nagel develops in Mind and Cosmos a fair reading.  Unfortunately, however, having reminded his readers of these earlier arguments of Nagel’s, Sober immediately goes on to ignore them.

Letters, I get letters

It’s time, I think, to repeat something I’ve said before.  I get lots of reader feedback -- in the form of emails, combox remarks, letters, and so forth -- and (apart from the scribblings of the occasional nasty crackpot) I appreciate all of it.  But I’m afraid that I am able to respond to very little of it.  I get long and detailed emails asking various philosophical and theological questions, people requesting that I read manuscripts or help them get something published, people raising detailed criticisms of my work and asking for a response, people asking for advice about which books to read or which academic programs to consider entering, people requesting spiritual or other personal advice.  In one case a got a request for help in getting a movie made; in another I had a reader turn up in my classroom out of the blue wanting me to sign a book.  I also get people in the blog combox asking me to answer various questions or to respond to various objections.  Sometimes I feel like Harry Tuttle.  It is simply humanly impossible for me to respond, in detail or even at all, to most of these requests.  I’m sorry, I wish I could, but I simply cannot.

Review of Plantinga

My review of Alvin Plantinga’s recent book Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism appears in the latest (December) issue of First Things.  Also in the issue are articles by John Haldane on Thomas Nagel and Thomas Aquinas, Stephen Barr on chance and design, and lots of other interesting stuff.