Another Magic Talisman

The moderns didn't reject belief in God for resting on blind faith. They falsely accused belief in God of resting on blind faith so that they could justify their rejection of God, and cooked up a new conception of what should count as rational, hoping that the accusation would stick.

--Highly redacted from Edward Feser, The Last Superstition, page 221

Sociopaths are Epistemologically Equal Too

It's very hard for liberals to maintain their smug pose of moral and rational superiority over traditional religious believers and other non-liberals if they admit that their own ideals are merely one more set of ungrounded prejudices among others.

--Redacted from Edward Feser, The Last Superstition, page 216

Prophetic Criminology

The legislative response is always---always---to crack down on the law-abiding. "

--Commenter john_ell over at the Washington Times

Feser's Ontological Parts Warehouse: You Name it, We've Got it!

The real world is as complex as the vocabulary required to describe it.

--Slightly redacted from Edward Feser, The Last Superstition, page 171. I deliberately don't quote his actual core arguments because I want people to read the book. These examples are either just great quotes *about* the issues, aphoristic provocations such as the above, or sheer intellectual-cultural commentary. Always keep in mind that I'm only interested in his strictly philosophical views and arguments, and may not even agree with his act-potency, causation, hylemorphism, or his argument for God. The jury's still out, although so far I suspect his metaphysics is correct.

Hitchens, Shave Thyself

Hitchens assures us that theists "have consistently failed to overcome [Ockham's] objection [to a First Cause]." In fact, as we have seen, it was overcome long before Ockham was born. What Hitchens should have written is: "I wouldn't know the difference between conceptualism and realism, essentially and accidentally ordered causal series, Aristotle and Hume, etc., *even* *if* I were intellectually honest; but then neither will the book reviewer at the New York Times, so who cares?"


--Edward Feser, The Last Superstition, pages 169-170.

The Usual Self-Exempting Suspects

"Hitchens is no scientist, but he did take a degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford forty years ago, where, presumably, he came upon Karl Popper's dictum that "a theory that is unfalsifiable is to that extent a weak one." It never occurs to him that by refusing to allow even one of the 100 million corpses produced by Communism to count as evidence against the moral claims of atheism, he makes his own position far more "unfalsifiable" than anything Paley ever said (since, after all, the latter did allow that it was at least *possible* that organisms could have arisen through impersonal process). But then, that is the Christopher Hitchens recipe for Serious Journalism: one part real knowledge, one part filibuster, one part sheer bluff."


---Edward Feser, The Last Superstition, page 160.

Left Out

Liberalism: The view that you're a bigot and I'm not.