Present perfect

Dale Tuggy has replied to my remarks about his criticism of the classical theist position that God is not merely “a being” alongside other beings but rather Being Itself.   Dale had alleged that “this is not a Christian view of God” and even amounts to “a kind of atheism.”  In response I pointed out that in fact this conception of God is, historically, the majority position among theistic philosophers in general and Christian philosophers in particular.  Dale replies:

Three comments. First, some of [Feser’s] examples are ambiguous cases. Perfect Being theology goes back to Plato, and some, while repeating Platonic standards about God being “beyond being” and so on, seem to think of God as a great self. No surprise there, of course, in the case of Bible readers. What’s interesting is how they held – or thought they held – these beliefs consistently together. Second, who cares who’s in the majority? Truth, I’m sure he’ll agree, is what matters. Third, it is telling that Feser starts with Plato and ends with Scotus and “a gazillion” Scholastics. Conspicuous by their absence are most of the Greats from early modern philosophy. Convenient, because most of them hold, with Descartes, that our concept of God is the “…idea of a Being who is omniscient, omnipotent and absolutely perfect… which is absolutely necessary and eternal.” (Principles of Philosophy 14)

Back from Cologne

Back today from an excellent conference on the theme “New Scholastic Meets Analytic Philosophy” hosted by the Lindenthal Institut, with cooperation from the publisher Editiones Scholasticae, in Cologne, Germany.  (Since the best return flight option required staying an extra day, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to visit Cologne Cathedral and the tombs of Albertus Magnus and Duns Scotus.)  An impressive group of students from KU Leuven attended the conference.  David Oderberg and I are pictured with them above.   

Dude, where’s my Being?

It must be Kick-a-Neo-Scholastic week.  Thomas Cothran calls us Nietzscheans and now my old grad school buddy Dale Tuggy implicitly labels us atheists.  More precisely, commenting on the view that “God is not a being, one among others… [but rather] Being Itself,” Dale opines that “this is not a Christian view of God, and isn’t even any sort of monotheism.  In fact, this type of view has always competed with the monotheisms.”  Indeed, he indicates that “this type of view – and I say this not to abuse, but only to describe – is a kind of atheism.”  (Emphasis in the original.) 

Atheism?  Really?  What is this, The Twilight Zone?  No, it’s a bad Ashton Kutcher movie (if you’ll pardon the redundancy), with metaphysical amnesia replacing the drug-induced kind -- Heidegger’s “forgetfulness of Being” meets Dude, Where’s My Car? 

Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics

My article “Being, the Good, and the Guise of the Good” appears in the volume Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, edited by Daniel D. Novotný and Lukáš Novák and forthcoming from Routledge.  The other contributors to the volume are Jorge J. E. Gracia, William F. Vallicella, E. Jonathan Lowe, Gyula Klima, Michael Gorman, Michael J. Loux, David S. Oderberg, Edmund Runggaldier, Uwe Meixner, James Franklin, Robert Koons, William Lane Craig, and Nicholas Rescher.

Nietzschean natural law?

Some years ago, at an initially friendly dinner after a conference, I sat next to a fellow Catholic academic, to whom I mildly expressed the opinion that it had been a mistake for Catholic theologians to move away from the arguments of natural theology that had been so vigorously championed by Neo-Scholastic writers.  He responded in something like a paroxysm of fury, sputtering bromides of the sort familiar from personalist and nouvelle theologie criticisms of Neo-Scholasticism.  Taken aback by this sudden change in the tone of our conversation, I tried to reassure him that I was not denying that the approaches he preferred had their place, and reminded him that belief in the philosophical demonstrability of God’s existence was, after all, just part of Catholic doctrine.  But it was no use.  Nothing I said in response could mollify him.  It was like he’d seen a ghost he thought had been exorcised long ago, and couldn’t pull out of the subsequent panic attack.

Averroism and cloud computing

The Latin followers of the medieval Islamic philosopher Ibn Rushd or Averroes (1126 - 1198), such as Siger of Brabant, famously taught the doctrine of the unity of the human intellect.  The basic idea is this: The intellect, Averroists (like other Aristotelians) argue, is immaterial.  But in that case, they conclude (as not all Aristotelians would), it cannot be regarded as the form of a material body.  It is instead a substance entirely separated from matter.  But matter, the Aristotelian holds, is the principle by which one instance of the form of some species is distinguished from another.  Hence there is no way in which one human intellect could be distinguished from another, so that there must be only a single intellect shared by all human beings.

FORTHCOMING: Scholastic Metaphysics

I’ve had a number of book projects in the works for a while, one of which, my edited volume Aristotle on Method and Metaphysics, appeared last summer.  Next on the schedule is Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction, which will be out next year from Editiones Scholasticae/Transaction Publishers.  You can read a little about it here.  More information to come.

Aquinas’s Fifth Way in Nova et Vetera

My article “Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way” appears in the latest issue (Vol. 11, No. 3) of Nova et Vetera.  The article is fairly long and is by far the most detailed exposition and defense of the Fifth Way I’ve yet given, going well beyond what I say about it in The Last Superstition and Aquinas. 

Some questions on the soul, Part III

In some recent posts I’ve been answering readers’ questions about the Aristotelian-Thomistic (A-T) understanding of the soul.  One more for the road, from a reader who is unclear about why mind-body interaction, which is notoriously problematic for Cartesian dualism, is not also problematic for A-T.  The reader writes:

[U]nless something like dualist interactionism is true, I don't see how… immaterial thoughts and - in particular - the will - could possibly cause me to do something as simple as typing this e-mail…

Science would seem to say that the efficient cause of this was certain electrochemical reactions in my body.  The material cause would be the physical events happening in my body.  It seems that A-T philosophy would hold that the final cause was getting an answer to a philosophical question, and I agree.  My soul would then be the formal cause, but I guess that notion is incoherent to me… And, unless the immaterial mind somehow interacts with my body (through quantum physics, maybe?), I don't see how my thinking about something in my immaterial intellect could cause my body to do anything.

Bloggers in arms (Updated)

Back today from the “Thomas Aquinas and Philosophical Realism” symposium in NYC.  While there I had the great pleasure of meeting blogger and statistician to the stars Matt Briggs and blogger and science-fiction scribe Mike Flynn -- names which will be known to many longtime readers of this blog.  The three of us are pictured above.

Oerter is a mensch

Physicist Robert Oerter and I have been having an exchange over James Ross’s argument for the immateriality of the intellect.  In response to my most recent post, Oerter has posted a brief comment.  Give it a read.  I have nothing to say in reply other than that Oerter is a good, honest, decent guy and that if we’re ever in the same town I owe him a beer.

Around the web

Was the twentieth-century Thomist Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange unduly influenced by Leibnizian rationalism, as followers of Etienne Gilson often allege?  No, argues Steven Long, over at Thomistica.net.  (Be sure to read the discussion in the comments section as well as the original post.)

The debate over Thomas Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos never ends.  Raymond Tallis reviews the book in The New Atlantis, and Jim Slagle reviews it for Philosophy in Review.

You’ve read Sean Howe’s Marvel Comics: The Untold Story and checked in regularly at its companion blog.  Now brace yourself for Blake Bell and Michael J. Vassallo’s The Secret History of Marvel Comics, which has a blog of its own.  It’s a look at the seamier, pulp magazine side of the company’s early history.

Upcoming speaking engagements

This Saturday, November 9, I’ll be speaking at a symposium on “Thomas Aquinas and Philosophical Realism” which will be held at the Catholic Center at New York University.   The other speakers are James Brent, Candace Vogler, J. David Velleman, Thomas Joseph White, John Haldane, and William Jaworski.  More information here.

On Saturday, November 23, I’ll be speaking at a Catholic Apologetics Academy event at the Sacred Heart Retreat House in Alhambra, CA.  More details here.

On Saturday, December 7, I’ll be speaking at a colloquium on the theme “New Scholastic Meets Analytic Philosophy” at the Lindenthal-Institut, Cologne, Germany.  The other speakers are David Oderberg, Edmund Runggaldier, Erwin Tegtmeier, Stephen Mumford, and Uwe Meixner.  More information here. 

On Friday, January 31, I’ll be giving the Aquinas Lecture at Ave Maria University in Florida.  More information here.

Can machines beg the question?

I thank Robert Oerter for his further reply to my recent comments (here, here, and here) on his critique of James Ross’s argument for the immateriality of the intellect.  You will recall that, greatly oversimplified, Ross’s argument is: (A) All formal thinking is determinate, but (B) No physical process is determinate, so (C) No formal thinking is a physical process.  You will also recall that Ross makes use of thought experiments like Kripke’s “quus” example to argue that given only the physical properties of a system, there can be no fact of the matter about whether the system is applying modus ponens, squaring, adding, or computing any other function.  That is what he means by saying that “no physical process is determinate.”  Finally, you’ll recall that among Oerter’s criticisms is that he thinks Ross is being inconsistent.  If we consider Hilda, a human being who can add -- or, as Oerter puts it in his latest post, who can ETPFOA (“execute the ‘pure function’ of addition”) -- then Ross’s argument would, Oerter says, apply to Hilda just as much as to a machine.  Yet Ross, Oerter claims, applies it to the machine but not to Hilda.  Hence the alleged inconsistency.

Some varieties of bullsh*t

Harry Frankfurt’s famous essay “On Bullshit” first appeared back in 1986 and was republished a few years ago in book form.  Though it has surely attracted too much attention from people who get an adolescent thrill out of the idea that they can do philosophy in a way that involves repeatedly saying the word “bullshit,” Frankfurt’s thesis is serious and important.  Bullshitting, Frankfurt argues, is not the same thing as lying.  The liar, like the truth-teller, cares about what is true.  The difference is that the truth-teller conveys it while the liar wants to cover it up.  The bullshitter, by contrast, doesn’t really care one way or the other about the truth.  He isn’t using his communicative faculties for the sake of conveying either truth or falsehood, but rather for some other end, such as promoting himself.

Do machines compute functions?

Robert Oerter has now replied to my most recent post about his criticisms of James Ross’s argument for the immateriality of the intellect.  Let me begin my rejoinder with a parable.  Suppose you presented someone with the argument: All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal.  He says he is unconvinced.  Puzzled, you ask him why.  He replies that he is surprised that you think Socrates is mortal, given that you believe in the immortality of the soul.  He adds that all you’ve done in any case is to make an epistemological point about what we know about Socrates, and not really given any reason to think that Socrates is mortal.  For though the conclusion does, he concedes, follow from the premises, and the premises are supported by the evidence, maybe for all we know there is still somehow more to men than what the premises tell us.

Oerter on indeterminacy and the unknown

I thank Robert Oerter for his reply to my recent comments on his criticism of James Ross’s argument for the immateriality of the intellect.  Please do go read his reply -- and never fear, he is a much less long-winded fellow than I am -- as well as my own previous post (If you haven’t done so already), before reading the following response.

Oerter repeats his claim that “Ross's argument never gets him beyond epistemological indeterminacy.”  Oddly, Oerter writes: “Oddly, Feser doesn't specifically respond to my criticism.”  What is odd about this is that I did respond quite specifically, and at length, to that criticism, though it appears Oerter has missed the point of what I wrote.  He seems to think that my entire response to the objection in question consists in my calling attention to the fact that Ross, and Kripke (whose work Ross makes use of), explicitly present their arguments as metaphysical rather than epistemological. 

Some questions on the soul, Part II

In a recent post I responded to a reader’s question about the Aristotelian-Thomistic understanding of the soul.  Another reader asks another question.  Let me set out some background before addressing it.  From the Aristotelian-Thomistic point of view, strictly intellectual activity -- as opposed, say, to sensation or imagination -- is not corporeal.  This is the key to the soul’s immortality.  A human being is the sort of thing that carries out both non-corporeal and corporeal activities.  Though less than an angel, he is more than an ape, having a metaphysical foot, as it were, in both the immaterial and material camps.  That means that when his corporeal operations go, as they do upon death, it doesn’t follow that he goes.  He limps along, as it were, reduced to the non-corporeal side of his nature.  This reduction is drastic, for a great deal of what we do -- not only walking, talking, breathing, and eating, but seeing, hearing, smelling, and so forth -- depends on the body.