Edward Feser

The latest feedback on Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature.  At Twitter/X, theologian Ulrich Lehner writes: “A wonderful book. Sharply sharply argued, readable, and always illuminating.”  Szilvay Gergely kindly reviews the book in the Hungarian magazine Mandiner.  From the review: “Feser… can argue surprisingly effectively and convincingly… If you considered the immortality of the soul (and the whole person) to be an unsupported myth, then Feser shows that this is not the case.”

It’s often said that while sticks and stones can break our bones, words can never hurt us.  But it isn’t true.  Were we mere animals it would be true, but we’re not.  We are rational social animals.  Hence we can be harmed, not only in ways that injure the body, but also in ways that bring distress to the mind and damage our standing with our fellow human beings.  These harms are typically not as grave as those involving bodily trauma, but they are real harms all the same.  Indeed, mockery and the loss of one’s good name can even be felt by one who suffers them as worse than (at least some) bodily harms. 

Let’s close out 2024 and begin 2025 with a long overdue open thread.  Now’s your chance to get that otherwise off-topic comment posted at last.  From plate tectonics to Hooked on Phonics, from substance abuse to substance dualism, from Thomism to Tom Tom Club, everything is on-topic.  Trolls still not welcome, though, so keep it sane and civil.

Previous open threads archived here.

At The Review of Metaphysics, philosopher Jack Boczar kindly reviews my book Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature.  From the review:

“The book's title is an homage to David Hume, and Feser has certainly taken Hume to task, giving cogent arguments for the reality of the self (chapter 2), freedom of the will (chapter 4), immateriality of the intellect (chapter 8), and more…

It is with contemporary developments in the philosophy of mind where Feser is at his best, and readers will not be disappointed with his critique of positions such as Buddhism's no-self doctrine (chapter 2)…

Feser again is at his best in cogently establishing the immateriality of the intellect.  He puts forth various arguments.  His most powerful argument is a modified version of James Ross's argument from the indeterminacy of the physical (chapter 8)… One of the unique contributions that Feser makes to contemporary literature is his defense of the immateriality of the intellect from its simplicity (chapter 8).  Readers should pay close attention to this powerful argument.”

You might suppose from the title of Etienne Gilson’s The Unity of Philosophical Experience that it is a book about philosophy in general.  And ultimately it is.  But its bulk is devoted to detailed accounts of the ideas of thinkers Gilson regards as having gotten things badly wrong, such as Abelard, Ockham, Descartes, Malebranche, Kant, and Comte.  There is relatively little about thinkers Gilson regards as having gotten things largely right, such as Aristotle and Aquinas.  This might seem odd.  For the sympathetic reader might suppose that the experience of philosophers like Aristotle and Aquinas should surely count as least as much as (indeed, more than) that of more wayward thinkers, when elucidating the nature of philosophy.

At Catholic World Report, philosopher Sam Nicholson kindly reviews my book Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature.  From the review:

"As its title suggests, Immortal Souls by Edward Feser provides a robust philosophical defense of the immortality of the soul.  The scope of the book reaches far beyond this one topic, however, as Feser methodically exposits and defends the entire Aristotelian-Thomist metaphysics of the human person, addressing in depth such topics as personal identity, freedom of the will, perception and cognition, phenomenal consciousness, and artificial intelligence.  The result is an extraordinarily comprehensive and detailed sweep through contemporary philosophy of mind, addressing nearly every major topic of interest.  Feser makes a forceful case that Thomism remains a live option, able to resolve many seemingly intractable problems at the intersection of philosophy and the sciences of cognition…

My recent three-hour interview with Matt Fradd on Pints with Aquinas is now available in its entirety at YouTube.  The discussion is wide-ranging, covering the current state of the Catholic Church, papal history, contemporary U.S. politics, atheism and theism, the sexual revolution and its transformation of the Western world, philosophical skepticism, artificial intelligence, integralism, and much else.

Negative theology (also known as apophatic theology) is an approach to the study of the divine nature that emphasizes that our knowledge of God is (either largely or wholly, depending on how far one wants to take this) knowledge of what God is not, rather than what God is.  There is an interesting parallelism between this idea and Karl Popper’s account of the nature of scientific knowledge.  I don’t claim that this necessarily has much if any significance for either theology or the philosophy of science (and I’m no Popperian in any event), only that the parallels seem real.  Make of them what you will.

My essay “From Justin Martyr to Alvin Plantinga and Back Again: Advice from the First Christian Philosopher” appears in the anthology Advice to Christian Philosophers: Reflections on the Past and Future of Christian Philosophy, edited by (and with an essay by) Christopher Woznicki.  It’s a volume of articles inspired by Alvin Plantinga’s famous essay “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” which is included.  Other contributors include Charity Anderson, Michael Austin, William Lane Craig, Gregory Ganssle, Marina Garner, Paul Gould, Adam Green, Ross Inman, J. P. Moreland, Dolores Morris, Meghan Page, Timothy Pawl, Tim Pickavance, Joshua Rasmussen, Yoon Shin, Peter van Inwagen, Thomas Ward, Greg Welty, Eric Yang, and Linda Zagzebski.  More information here.

Pro-lifers should rejoice in the defeat of Kamala Harris, and of the Democratic Party, which remains the greatest threat to the unborn in American politics.  But they cannot rest, because their job is only half done.  The second greatest threat has yet to be dealt with, and that is Donald Trump.

Many pro-life Trump supporters will be shocked and angered at such a statement.  But I urge them to resist this emotional reaction and dispassionately consider the cold, hard facts.  Trump supports preserving access to the abortion pill, which is responsible for the majority of abortions in the United States.  Since these pills can be sent by mail into states where abortion is restricted or banned, preserving such access largely undermines recent state-level pro-life measures.  Trump also actively opposes those measures in any event, insisting that they are “too tough” and need to be “redone.”  He has repeatedly said that, even at the state level, abortion must remain legal beyond six weeks.  And he wants the federal government to pay for, or to force insurance companies to pay for, in vitro fertilization (IVF) treatments – a practice that results in the destruction of more human embryos than even abortion does.  The only threat to the unborn Trump has clearly and consistently opposed is late-term abortion, which accounts for a mere 1% of abortions.  In short, the policies Trump favors would prevent very few abortions and encourage the discarding of millions of embryos.  True, Trump is much better than Harris in supporting the rights of pro-lifers.  But he is now only a little better in upholding the rights of the unborn.

The debate over capital punishment between conservative and progressive Catholics typically exhibits the following dialectic.  The conservative will set out a case from natural law, scripture and tradition, and social science for the thesis that capital punishment is at least in principle licit and in practice still needed in some circumstances – as Joseph Bessette and I do at length in our book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed.  The progressive will reply with an impassioned but vague appeal to human dignity, a cherry-picked statement from the recent magisterium, and a tendentious empirical claim (for example, that capital punishment does not deter, or is implemented in a racist manner), and top things off with in an ad hominem attack (such as accusing the conservative of being bloodthirsty or having a political motive).  The conservative will then complain that the progressive has attacked a straw man and simply ignored rather than answered his key points.  The progressive will at this point either ignore the conservative or simply repeat his original, question-begging reply at higher volume.

After some frustrating delays in distribution, my book Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature is now in stock and available from Amazon and Barnes and Noble.  Here are the back cover copy, endorsements, and table of contents:

Immortal Souls provides as ambitious and complete a defense of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical anthropology as is currently in print.  Among the many topics covered are the reality and unity of the self, the immateriality of the intellect, the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, the critique of artificial intelligence, and the refutation of both Cartesian and materialist conceptions of human nature.  Along the way, the main rival positions in contemporary philosophy and science are thoroughly engaged with and rebutted.

Ever since the Dobbs decision permitted states to set their own abortion policies, Donald Trump has taken the position that the issue should stay at the state level.  Dobbs itself doesn’t require this, and leaves open the possibility of a federal ban.  But Trump nevertheless declines to pursue such a ban, and indeed is opposed to such a ban.  Now, a federal ban is in any event currently politically unrealistic, and will likely remain so for the foreseeable future.  But some take the view that, even if abortion amounts to murder, it would be wrong to impose a federal ban even if it were politically possible to do so.  They make their case on federalist grounds, arguing that a national abortion ban would usurp power that rightly belongs to the states.  Some argue on natural law grounds, specifically, suggesting that the principle of subsidiarity would rule out a federal ban.  If this were true, then it would follow that even a pro-life Catholic should oppose a federal abortion ban.  What should we think of this argument?

The Thomistic Institute has launched a new Aquinas 101 learning platform for its well-known and excellent series of videos.  Check it out here.  Press release and further information can be found here.

Pope Francis recently added yet another item to the long list of doctrinally problematic statements he has issued through the course of his pontificate.  Commenting on the plurality of religions during a speech at the Catholic Junior College in Singapore, he said:

If you start arguing, “My religion is more important than yours,” or “Mine is the true one, yours is not true,” where does this lead?  Somebody answer.  [A young person answers, “Destruction”.]  That is correct.  All religions are paths to God.  I will use an analogy, they are like different languages that express the divine.  But God is for everyone, and therefore, we are all God’s children.  “But my God is more important than yours!”  Is this true?  There is only one God, and religions are like languages, paths to reach God.  Some Sikh, some Muslim, some Hindu, some Christian.

As the article from which I quote this passage notes, while the Vatican’s initial English translation of the pope’s words attempted to sanitize them, it was later corrected to make it clear that this is indeed what the pope said.  And what he said flatly contradicts traditional Catholic teaching.  Francis criticizes those who take one religion to be the true or most important one, and implies that Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Sikhism, etc. are as equal as different languages are. 

In the weeks since I wrote on the dilemma that Donald Trump has put social conservatives in, the problem has only become far more pronounced.  Trump has stated that a second Trump administration “will be great for women and their reproductive rights.”  His running mate J. D. Vance has said that if a national abortion ban were passed by Congress, Trump would veto it.  Though claiming to support pro-life measures at the state level, Trump says that in Florida, abortion should be legal even past the first six weeks of pregnancy.  And he has said that in a second Trump administration, the government would either pay for, or require insurance companies to pay for, all costs associated with IVF treatment – even though IVF treatments kill more embryos every year than abortion does, so that an IVF mandate would be even worse than Obama’s notorious contraception mandate.  Trump has also come out in support of legalizing marijuana for recreational use.

Robert Lawrence Kuhn is well-known as the creator and host of the public television series Closer to Truth, an invaluable source of interviews with major contributors to a variety of contemporary debates in philosophy, theology, and science.  (Longtime readers will recall an exchange Kuhn and I had at First Things some years back on the question of why there is something rather than nothing, which you can find here, here, and here.)  Recently, Kuhn’s article “A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications”    appeared in the journal Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology.  It is an impressively exhaustive survey of the field, and will be extremely helpful to anyone looking for guidance through its enormous and often bewildering literature.  Kuhn kindly includes a section on my own contributions to the subject.

Let’s begin with the obvious.  No social conservative could possibly justify voting for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz.  They are pro-abortion extremists, as Ryan Anderson shows in an article on Harris at First Things and Dan McLaughlin shows in an article on Walz at National Review.  Their records on other matters of concern to social conservatives are no better.  It goes without saying that they are absolutely beyond the pale.

Despite his recent betrayal of social conservatives, Donald Trump remains less bad on these issues.  Indeed, his appointments to the Supreme Court made possible the overturning of Roe v. Wade.  It is understandable that many social conservatives have concluded that, his faults notwithstanding, they must vote for him in order to prevent a Harris/Walz victory.  The argument is a serious one.  But the matter is not as straightforward as they suppose, because the problem is not merely that Trump will no longer do anything to advance the pro-life cause.  It is that his victory would likely do positive harm, indeed grave and lasting damage, to the pro-life cause and to social conservatism in general. 

The reality of hell is the clear and infallible teaching of scripture and tradition.  I would argue that even purely philosophical argumentation can establish that the soul that is in a state of rebellion against God at death will remain that way forever.  The universalist heresy denies these truths, and insists that all will be saved.  It has in recent years seen a remarkable rise in popularity.  In Catholic circles, Balthasar’s view that there is at least a reasonable hope that all human beings will be saved has also gained currency.

These are extremely grave delusions which, by fostering complacency, are sure to add to the number of the damned.  In reality, there is no reasonable hope whatsoever that all are saved.  The relevant philosophical and theological considerations make this conclusion unavoidable.  I have addressed these issues in some depth in many articles over the years, and it seemed to me a good idea to collect them in one place for readers who might find that useful. 

My six-part video course on Six Arguments for the Existence of God is available for free from the Word on Fire Institute.  A short preview and sign-up information are available here.  An interview about the course can be read here.

Readers who follow me on X (Twitter) will know of the intense debate occurring there over the last week between social conservatives critical of Trump’s gutting of the GOP platform and those defending it.  A pair of bracing, must-read articles at First Things and National Review recount how pro-lifers were brazenly shut out of the platform process.  For social conservatives to acquiesce out of partisan loyalty would be to commit assisted political suicide.  Today I posted the following, which elaborates on considerations I raised in an earlier article:

A brief memo to social conservatives worried that criticism of the GOP will cost it votes, and who claim that the critics are politically naïve:

First, yes, criticism could cost the party votes. That’s precisely the point. The party could lose votes IF, in the months remaining before the election, it does not try seriously to meet the concerns of social conservatives. In particular, the GOP must be made to see that it cannot take their votes for granted. And the party must do something to make up for the appalling injustice that was done to social conservatives during the platform process, as recounted in the First Things article linked to. 

Second, it is not the critics, but those who urge their fellow social conservatives to keep their mouths shut, who are politically naïve. The only thing politicians can be relied on to respond to is the prospect of losing votes or losing money. If the GOP fears that it might lose the votes or financial contributions of a critical mass of social conservatives, it will have to take their concerns seriously. If, instead, social conservatives acquiesce to what has happened rather than fighting back, the party will have no incentive to try to address their concerns in the future – and every incentive not to do so, given the unpopularity of social conservatism in the culture at large.

The stakes are high, and that is precisely why social conservatives must raise the alarm NOW, while they might still influence the direction of the party, not in some fantasy post-election future. The actual political reality is that if the GOP wins, having thrown social conservatives under the bus without any pushback from them, the party will draw the lesson that it no longer needs to worry about them or their concerns.

It is impossible not to admire the resilience and fighting spirit with which Donald Trump responded – literally within moments – to the failed attempt to take his life.  And that he is among the luckiest of politicians is evidenced not just by his survival, but by the fact that the moment was captured in photographs as dramatic as any seen in recent history.  His supporters are understandably inspired, indeed electrified.  And his enemies are sure to be demoralized by the sympathy this event will generate – not to mention the blinding contrast between Trump’s virility and the accelerating decline of his doddering opponent.  Naturally, that those enemies include some very bad people only reinforces Trump’s supporters’ devotion to him, which is now at a fever pitch.  But it is precisely at moments of high emotion that the cold water of reason, however unpleasant, is most needed.

The latest issue of First Things features a symposium on the future of the Catholic Church, to which I contributed an article on the future of the Magisterium.  You can read the entire symposium online here.

Though John Rawls wrote much that is of relevance to religion – and in particular, to the question of what influence it can properly have on politics (basically none, in Rawls’s view) – he wrote little on religion itself.  After his death, his undergraduate senior thesis, titled A Brief Inquiry into the Meaning of Sin and Faith, was published.  Naturally, it is of limited relevance to his mature thought.  However, published in the same volume was a short 1997 personal essay titled “On My Religion,” which is not uninteresting as an account of the development of his religious beliefs.  I think it does shed some light on his political philosophy.  From Rawls’s best-known works, the conservative religious believer is bound to judge Rawls’s knowledge and understanding of religion to be shallow.  And indeed, I think his views on these matters were shallow.  But as the essay reveals, that is not because he didn’t give much thought to them.

Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant both had an enormous formative influence on modern moral and political philosophy, and on liberalism in particular.  But their approaches are very different.  Hobbes begins with what strikes the average reader as a base and depressing conception of what individual human beings are like in their natural state, and sees society arising out of an act of cold, calculating self-interest.  Kant, by contrast, seems committed to a lofty and inspiring conception of human beings, and regards society as grounded in a respect for the dignity of persons.

Roger Scruton’s essay “Rousseau and the Origins of Liberalism” first appeared in The New Criterion in 1998, and was reprinted in The Betrayal of Liberalism, edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball.  Among the many good things in it, there is an important expression and defense of the conservative understanding of tradition.  Scruton writes:

Modern liberals tend to scoff at the idea of tradition.  All traditions, they tell us, are “invented,” implying that they can therefore be replaced with impunity.  This idea is plausible only if you take the trivial examples – Scottish country dancing, Highland dress, the Coronation ceremony, Christmas cards, and whatever else comes with a “heritage” label.  A real tradition is not an invention; it is the unintended byproduct of invention, which also makes invention possible… [A] tradition, precisely because it is not invented, has authority.  “Unintended byproducts” of invention contain more knowledge than any person can discover unaided.

My new book Immortal Souls: A Treatise on Human Nature is now available for pre-order in the U.S. at Amazon.com.  Here again are the back cover copy, endorsements, and table of contents:

Immortal Souls provides as ambitious and complete a defense of Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical anthropology as is currently in print.  Among the many topics covered are the reality and unity of the self, the immateriality of the intellect, the freedom of the will, the immortality of the soul, the critique of artificial intelligence, and the refutation of both Cartesian and materialist conceptions of human nature.  Along the way, the main rival positions in contemporary philosophy and science are thoroughly engaged with and rebutted.