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.

Final Causal Hypocrisy

"Compared to the way in which final causality has maintained its grip on biological thinking in actual practice, the Darwinian revolution is a trivial blip on the continued silent and unacknowledged hegemony of Aristotle. The unhealthy fixation of Dawkins, Dennett, and Co. on the relatively insignificant Paley has kept them from seeing this fatal difficulty with their position. They have been frantically shooting their flit guns at a gnat even while an elephant grinds them into paste under its feet."

--Edward Feser, The Last Superstition, page 130.

Hidden Ghosts of Materialism 2

If thought is merely the motion of physical components in the brain (or anywhere else in the organism for that matter), how can I remember a previous experience? Once a motion becomes a past motion, it never recurs as the same motion. How could one know or even be aware of generic similarities between two motions? To classify two entities within the same genus, I must observe some similarity between them. But materialism claims that the thought "This motion and that motion are similar" would also itself be merely a motion. And before the motion of predicating that similarity occurs, the motion of the original experience and the motion of the alleged memory experience would be in the past, and no longer exist. And no motion could connect two motions that no longer exist. Consequently, for it to be even possible for me to think generically similar thoughts, which is necessary to remember anything, I must assume that materialism is false.