Edward Feser's Blog, page 41

Sandstad and Jansen on Aristotle’s Revenge

At the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, philosophers Petter Sandstad and Ludger Jansen review my book Aristotle’s Revenge .  From the review:
Feser’s book adds to a growing body of literature on neo-Aristotelian approaches in metaphysics and the philosophy of science.  However, Feser stands out from other analytic neo-Aristotelians with his in-depth knowledge and discussion of 20th and 21st century neo-Thomistic literature, and one can learn a lot from reading this book… The book is certainly written in an accessible style and language, which makes it readable also for undergraduate students, and even a popular audience could find much of the discussion valuable… Maybe professional philosophers will be interested in reading some of Feser’s polemics, for instance, against structural realism, reductionism, or non-presentist views of time. Finally, the book can serve as a reference point for metaphysicians and philosophers of science interested in learning about neo-Thomistic approaches in these fields… [I]t will certainly be exciting for scholars of Aristotle or Aquinas to see how these theories are used to elucidate the exciting discoveries of modern physics, biology and neuroscience.
On the book’s treatment of specific topics, they write:
Feser’s account is not a mere repristination of neo-Scholastic Aristotelianism but is also tailored to deal with current scientific ideas.  Some of Feser’s discussions are of particular interest.  For example, Feser’s mereological take on formal and material causation is highly original…
Another exciting topic… is that of potentiality.  One idea original to the new book is that kinds of natural substances can be ordered along a scale of potentiality, according to how many potentialities they have… Highest on the scale is prime matter, which has the potential to become anything.  Lower on the scale are fermions, even lower is water, and very low on the scale are, e.g., cows and other higher forms of life.
End quote.  Unlike a couple of other recent reviewers, Sandstad and Jansen have no difficulty focusing on what the book is actually about:
The book is not a historical scholarly work on Aristotle; it does not discuss different interpretations of Aristotle; and it only references a couple of works by Aristotle scholars.  Rather, the book is a systematic work within metaphysics, philosophy of science, and what Feser calls ‘philosophy of nature’ – which is basically a more traditional term for what is currently called ‘metaphysics of science’.
End quote.  Sandstad and Jansen raise some interesting points of criticism as well.  For example, commenting further on what they call the “scale of potentiality” that I say exists in nature, they write:
Feser seems not to distinguish sufficiently between potentialities, possibilities, and dispositions...  In cases like the fermions, what has many potentialities has very few dispositions, while for cows or humans, it is the other way around.  
End quote.  This is a good point, and the distinctions Sandstad and Jansen are drawing here are very important and essential to a thorough and precise hylemorphic analysis of various kinds of substance.  In fact I do develop these distinctions myself in Scholastic Metaphysics , in chapter 1 on act and potency.  I do not deploy them in the specific passages on which Sandstad and Jansen are commenting, because my intention there was not to provide an analysis of cows, fermions, etc. per se, but rather to make other points. 
For example, when I describe the scale of potentialities in matter in the context of discussing quantum mechanics (at pp. 312-15 of Aristotle’s Revenge), the point is to note how as we descend down the levels of physical reality, including those that feature in the micro-level description afforded by modern physics, we arrive at ever closer approximations to the notion of prime matter.  When I describe the scale of potentialities in matter in the context of discussing evolution (at p. 426), the point is to note how one of the aspects of a transformist account of the origins of species might be said to be implicit in hylemorphism. 
I don’t think my neglect of the distinctions Sandstad and Jansen call attention to affects the specific points I was making in passages like these.  All the same, they are right to note that a fuller account of various kinds of substance would have to bring those distinctions in.
To be sure, they continue their criticism as follows:
This also points to a limitation of Feser’s idea of virtual existence: Saying that it is possible for a fermion to be part of a cow is not the same as saying that the fermion has a disposition to be part of a cow.  There is a further problem.  On the one hand, all ‘higher’ forms of being are already ‘virtually’ contained in prime matter – which means that there are powers in prime matter that allow for the generation of the other forms of being… On the other hand, Feser insists that substances (like fermions, copper or cats) bring with them new and irreducible powers.  It is not obvious how he can resolve this tension.
End quote.  I’m not certain that I see what the first problem is that Sandstad and Jansen are trying to call attention to here, but if I do understand them correctly, it seems to me that once again they may be ignoring the specific intentions I had in the passages on which they are commenting. 
For example, when I say that the parts of a true substance are within it virtually (such as a fermion being virtually within an ordinary physical object), what I am trying to do is to explain ideas like the difference between substantial form and accidental form (where the parts of a thing which has only an accidental form are in it actually rather than merely virtually).  I am not, in that context, offering a complete analysis of the active and passive potencies of fermions and the like in general, or of the ways that what is true of them in one context (e.g. as constituents of a cow) might not be true of them in another (e.g. outside a cow).  It is perfectly true that such an analysis is important, but it just isn’t what I am concerned with in the specific passages in question.  An account might be incomplete without being incorrect(as I am sure Sandstad and Jansen would agree).
Similarly, there is no conflict between the claim that various kinds of physical substance are contained potentially within prime matter, and the claim that higher forms of physical substance have powers that the lower forms lack.  For we have to keep in mind the complexity that a complete account of the efficient causes of a thing has on the hylemorphic story.  For a certain kind of physical substance to come into being, you need not only the presence of matter having the appropriate potencies, but also the presence of an efficient cause able to actualize those potencies.  For example, a rag soaked in gasoline has the potential to catch fire, but a momentary gentle cool breeze passing over the rag won’t actualize that potential.  You need another kind of efficient cause to do that.
In the same way, though there is a sense in which both copper and cats are present potentially in prime matter, different kinds of efficient cause are necessary in order to actualize those potentials.  This is precisely because copper and cats have different causal powers, and those causal powers are due in part to the efficient causes of these things, and not just to their material causes.  Now, in the specific passages that I think Sandstad and Jansen might have in mind here (e.g. the one at p. 426), what I am doing is, again, simply noting how part of a transformist story of the origin of species (though not the whole of such a story) lies in the hylemorphic notion of matter and the different potencies that different kinds of matter have.  But I am not claiming that an appeal to the wide range of potencies present in prime matter is sufficient for a transformist story.  It is not.  (I do say more about what the efficient-causal side of the story would have to look like, just a little later on in the book at pp. 428-32.)
A further objection raised by Sandstad and Jansen is the following:
Another problem is that Feser often confuses the metaphysical and the epistemological aspects of science.  For instance, the Aristotelian doctrines are often argued to be indispensable because the phenomena otherwise would be unintelligible… Similarly, the principle of sufficient reason is about intelligibility, rather than anything metaphysical.
End quote.  Here I would certainly plead not guilty.  For one thing, I simply reject Sandstad’s and Jansen’s assertion that the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) has no metaphysical significance.  Indeed, PSR plays such a central role in rationalist and Neo-Scholastic metaphysics that it is surprising that Sandstad and Jansen would make this assertion so flatly, without at least acknowledging that their opponents are bound to regard it as tendentious or even question-begging.
Recall that in the view of Thomists and other Scholastics, being and truth are both transcendentals, and thus convertible.  Truth is just being considered as intelligible, and given the convertibility of the transcendentals we can infer that anything that has being must accordingly be intelligible – in which case PSR has metaphysical significance.  It tells us the way reality is, not just how we have to think about it.  (For further discussion, see my treatment of PSR at pp. 137-46 of Scholastic Metaphysics.) 
Offering examples of my alleged conflation of metaphysics and epistemology, Sandstad and Jansen write:
[I]n his discussion of reduction in chemistry, Feser argues that the identification of the lower levels presupposes a prior grasp of the higher levels... Further, Feser accepts Locke’s point that “real essence, you might say, ‘piggybacks’ on nominal essence”… But, this dependence seems to be merely epistemological, namely to know the real essence of a thing one must first know its nominal essence.
End quote.  But in fact, the points I am making in these passages are by no means merely epistemological.  When critics of reductionism in chemistry note that the micro-level phenomena the reductionist focuses on are unintelligible apart from the macro-level description, the point is that the micro-level phenomena simply wouldn’t exist in the specific way they do apart from the macro-level facts.  It isn’t merely the epistemological point that we wouldn’t know about the former apart from the latter.  It is a deeper, metaphysical point to the effect that the former wouldn’t objectively be there in the first place apart from the latter.  Indeed, it is this deeper, metaphysical fact that explains the epistemological situation. 
Similarly, the point about Locke is that unless there really were something objectively out there that corresponded to the nominal essence (of gold, say), there just wouldn’t objectively be a real essence (the chemical facts about gold) of the kind that we in fact find to be correlated with that nominal essence.
All the same, the relationship between the metaphysical and epistemological considerations here is an important issue, and perhaps one that I should have addressed more thoroughly so as to forestall objections like the one Sandstad and Jansen raise.
Though it is not clear that it is meant as a criticism, Sandstad and Jansen also write:
[W]hile Feser occasionally criticises theories in the current literature (such as Ladyman’s ontic structural realism), he more often engages with older views, such as the early moderns, or logical positivism, or Russell and Quine; or literature from the 80s and 90s.
As a result, it is not easy to identify the intended audience. 
End quote.  Now, I don’t know why it would be mysterious who my intended audience is, because I think that should be clear not only from the content of the book, but from the preface and indeed the back cover copy.  The book is about the relationship between modern science and the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition in metaphysics, and it interacts with the literature in contemporary metaphysics and philosophy of science that elucidates that relationship.  Its intended audience, then, includes anyone who might be interested in this topic, such as analytic philosophers who are interested in the current neo-Aristotelian revival in metaphysics, Thomists who are curious about what is going on in analytic philosophy, or people working in ethics or philosophy of religion curious about how the metaphysical assumptions underlying ideas like traditional natural law theory or Scholastic natural theology might be defended in light of modern science.
I’m also not clear why it is odd that I would treat the “older views” referred to by Sandstad and Jansen.  For example, to understand the dispute between the Aristotelian and mechanistic conceptions of nature, you have to know something about the early modern origins of that dispute.  To understand why it is of great importance whether special relativity presupposes verificationism, you have to know something about the many grave problems raised against verificationism by critics of logical positivism.  To understand the nature and implications of epistemic structural realism, you need to know something about Russell’s version of that view and the debate it engendered.  And so on.  Everything I put into the book is meant to play some role in furthering its overall project.  Whether some of these issues and ideas are “older” or not much discussed by contemporary writers seems to me irrelevant.  Indeed, part of my point is that they should be more discussed.
But I don’t want to make more of this issue than Sandstad and Jansen themselves do.  And I thank them for their kind words about the book and for their thoughtful and stimulating criticisms.

Discussion with Graham Oppy

Earlier today on Cameron Bertuzzi’s Capturing Christianity program, I had a very pleasant and fruitful live exchange with Graham Oppy.  You can watch it on YouTube.  This is the second exchange Oppy and I have had on the show.  The first was last July, and you can still watch that on YouTube as well.  In that earlier exchange we discussed my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God .  The book comes up in the latest exchange as well, as does Oppy’s Religious Studies article “On stage one of Feser’s ‘Aristotelian proof.’”

Review of Kerr

My review of Gaven Kerr’s excellent book Aquinas's Way to God: The Proof in De Ente et Essentia appears in the current issue of The Thomist (Vol. 83, No. 2).

Preternatural theology

Natural theology is traditionally distinguished from revealed theology.  Natural theology is concerned with knowledge about God’s existence and nature that is available to us via the use of our natural cognitive faculties, such as by way of philosophical arguments.  It does not require an appeal to any special divine revelation, whether embodied in scripture, the teachings of a prophet backed by miracles, or what have you.  There might happen to be teachings in some source of special divine revelation that overlap with the deliverances of natural theology, but what makes something a matter of natural theology is that it can at least in principle be known apart from that. Revealed theology is concerned with knowledge about God that is available by way of some special divine revelation, distinct from anything we know by philosophical arguments or the like.  It has a source that is supernatural in the sense of being beyond what the natural order of things is capable of producing.  That is why a miracle (a suspension of the natural order) is, in Catholic theology, taken to be a necessary condition for our knowing that something really has been divinely revealed.  The content of revealed theology might include matters that are also knowable by way of natural theology, but typically it involves matters that could not in principle be known that way.
To illustrate, an argument from motion to the existence of a divine prime unmoved mover would be an example of natural theology.  You don’t need scripture or the guidance of a prophet or the Church in order to construct such an argument, which is why a pagan thinker like Aristotle could discover it.  By contrast, that there is more than one Person in God (the doctrine of the Trinity) is an example of revealed theology.  We can know it only because it has been specially revealed, where the genuineness of the revelation is backed by miracles (such as Christ’s resurrection).  The doctrine of divine simplicity would, according to Catholic theology, be an example of something that we know both from natural theology and revealed theology.  It is knowable by purely philosophical arguments, which is why it could be arrived at by pagan thinkers like Plotinus.  But it is also a dogma of the Church, in the sense of being a teaching that Catholicism holds to have been taught infallibly under divine guidance.
Now, though in the abstract this distinction is clear and neat, in practice matters of natural and revealed theology can have a great influence on each other, and the boundaries between them are not always sharp.  Sometimes this is because revealed theology influences natural theology.  How could that be?  Well, natural theology, like any other human enterprise, can involve error.  For example, Plotinus correctly reasons to the conclusion that God must be simple or non-composite, but wrongly concludes that this rules out attributing to him anything analogous to intellect.  Hence he locates intellect in a secondary divine hypostasis.  The Catholic theologian guided by divine revelation would judge this to be an error of philosophical reasoning, and argue that in fact it is a matter of sound natural theology that both simplicity andintellect must be attributed to God.
You might think this is a cheat, but it is not.  For one thing, the Catholic theologian would give philosophical arguments for the conclusion that there is intellect in God – that is to say, arguments that in no way appeal to divine revelation, but only to purely philosophical considerations.  For another thing, even some pagan philosophers (such as Aristotle) would agree on attributing both simplicity and intellect to God.  Hence, appeal to divine revelation is not necessaryfor attributing both simplicity and intellect to God, even if it might guide this or that individual thinker in arriving at that conclusion.  It is not like the doctrine of the Trinity, which could not be arrived at on purely philosophical grounds.
Having said that, natural theology can guide the way that revealed theology is articulated.  For example, though the doctrine of the Trinity could not have been known through purely philosophical arguments, once we have it in hand as a result of divine revelation, philosophical analysis can affect how we understand it.  For example, it might tell us that such-and-such a way of formulating the doctrine must be wrong, because the formulation would entail polytheism, and polytheism can be known to be false both as a matter of natural theology and as a matter of revealed theology.  Or we might find that certain philosophical concepts and terminology (substance, essence, etc.) are indispensable in articulating the doctrine.
Given that grace builds upon nature rather than destroying it, we should expect that matters of supernatural or revealed theology and matters of natural theology are in practice closely interwoven even in the sources of divine revelation, and that is indeed what we find.  For example, the law given through Moses contains many components that are matters of natural law (such as the commandments against murder, stealing, and adultery) in addition to components that are matters of temporarily operative special divine law (such as the sacrificial system).  Catholic doctrinal definitions taken to be protected from error by way of special divine assistance sometimes incorporate terminology having a philosophical provenance (such as “transubstantiation,” or the characterization of the soul as the “form” of the body).
Now, all of this is intended as stage-setting for an explanation of the concept expressed in the title of this post.  What do I mean by “preternatural theology”?  What is preternatural is what is beyond the power of some part of the natural order to produce, and yet is not strictly supernatural insofar as it can be caused by some other part of the created order and not only by God. 
A stock example would be the phenomena associated with demonic possession.  Take the strange abilities exhibited by the Linda Blair character (or rather, by the evil spirit possessing her) in the movie The Exorcist – suddenly speaking in languages previously unknown to her, levitating above her bed, causing objects in her room to move without touching them, etc.  There is an obvious sense in which these are not natural.  In the ordinary course of events, these things don’t happen and people don’t have the power to make them happen.  On the other hand, they are in various respects not strictly supernatural either.  For one thing, they are not miracles, insofar as God is not the one making them happen.  For another, they are not all of themselves naturally impossible (for example, there is nothing per se impossible about a person speaking Latin, even if the Linda Blair character shouldn’t have been able to do it).  And they are produced by a demon, who is part of the natural order broadly construed just as much as we are.  The created world includes the angels and demons, and thus what they do is not of itself supernatural in the sense of being beyond the natural order altogether. 
Now, the possibility and indeed reality of a purely natural theology is something commonly and traditionally affirmed in Catholic teaching.  Human beings completely outside the orbit of Christian revelation can and sometimes do have at least an imperfect knowledge of God.  And yet scripture tells us that “all the gods of the Gentiles are devils: but the Lord made the heavens” (Psalm 95:5, Douay-Rheims version), and that “the things which the heathens sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God” (1 Corinthians 10:20).  How can these claims be reconciled?
The way they can be reconciled is by seeing that just as truths of natural theology and truths of revealed theology are often intermixed, so too can truths of natural theology and errors of what we might call preternatural theology be intermixed. 
Hence, consider religions like Hinduism and Islam.  Hinduism features the worship of multiple deities, such as Vishnu and Shiva, and both the fact of this multiplicity and some of the details of the cults of these gods are simply incompatible with Christian doctrine.  At the same time, there is an impressive philosophical tradition within Hinduism that includes both arguments for the existence of a divine creator and the teaching that there is a single ultimate divine reality of which the multiple deities are only manifestations.  Islam claims to be based on a special divine revelation, and that too is a claim that no Christian can accept.  But Islam too has an impressive philosophical tradition that includes powerful argumentation concerning the existence and attributesof God.
Someone could consistently both hold on scriptural grounds that the distinctive theological claims of such religions have a diabolical preternatural provenance, and allow that the errors due to that provenance are nevertheless intermixed with truths of natural theology.  A message might seem to be from God while in fact being from the devil, and yet a person who wrongly accepts that message might also have some genuine knowledge about God by way of independent philosophical arguments.  A pseudo-revelation can be mixed in with truths of natural theology, just as a genuine revelation can be mixed in with truths of natural theology. 
There are two extreme views to be avoided, then.  One error (made by some traditionalists) would be to suppose that, because a certain non-Christian religion is based on a pseudo-revelation, its adherents cannot have any genuine knowledge of God of a natural theology sort.  The other error (made by some liberals) would be to suppose that, because adherents of a certain non-Christian religion evidently do have some genuine knowledge of God of a natural theology sort, that religion’s purportedly revealed doctrines must really be at worst merely confused expressions of this natural theology and therefore more or less innocent.  In other words, the propositions:
(1) Religion R contains some false theological beliefs of diabolical origin, and
(2) Religion R contains some true theological beliefs grounded in natural theology
are consistent with one another.  One cannot appeal to (1) as a reason to reject (2) and one cannot appeal to (2) as a reason to reject (1).  This is important to keep in mind when considering issues such as whether adherents of different religions are talking about the same thing when they use the word “God.”
Further reading:
Christians, Muslims, and the reference of “God”
Islam, Christianity, and liberalism again
Canine theology
Geach on worshipping the right God
Point of contact

Adventures in the Old Atheism, Part IV: Marx

I have never been remotely attracted to Marxism.  Its economic reductionism, vision of human life as a struggle of antagonistic classes, hostility to the family, and the hermeneutics of suspicion enshrined in its theory of ideology, are all repulsive and inhuman.  Other elements, such as the theory of surplus value and prophecies about the withering away of the state and the idyll of life under communism, are sheer tosh.  These flaws are grave and real whatever one thinks about capitalism.  Indeed, opposition to Marxism is in my view a prerequisite to being a serious critic of capitalism, for Marxism contains none of the good that is in capitalism, much of the bad that is in it, and adds grave evils of its own to boot. All the same, let’s give that old rascal Karl Marx his due, because that is the point of this series.  As with Nietzsche, Sartre, and Freud, Marx’s atheism exhibits far more gravitas than that of any of the New Atheists.  The reasons are twofold.  First, the brand of philosophical naturalism that underlies Marx’s atheism is less crude than that of Dawkins and Co.  Second, as with the other Old Atheists, you won’t find in Marx the chirpy naïveté about the consequences of naturalism and of abandoning religion that you see in the New Atheists.
Red Aristotelianism
Marx was, of course, a materialist, as are the New Atheists.  Now, materialism is often associated with a rejection of teleology.  This was the case with the ancient atomist form of materialism, which rejected explanations in terms of what Aristotelians call final causality, in favor of those appealing only to efficient causality.  It is true also of the materialism of New Atheists like Alex Rosenberg, who insists that teleology can play no role in genuinely scientific explanations. 
An interesting feature of Marx’s materialism is that he evidently took teleology to be precisely part of the explanatory toolkit of the materialist, as Allen Wood plausibly argues in his book on Marx.  (See especially pp. 104-11.)  It is sometimes assumed that the specific way this is so is that Marx took history to have communism as its inevitable culmination, but as Wood notes, the positing of a grand goal of that sort is not the fundamental way in which Marx makes use of the notion of teleology.  Naturally, as an atheist, he also did not have in mind divine directedness – nor direction by any human mind nor any other sort of mind, for that matter.  What he had in mind, fundamentally, is simply the idea that material systems reliably exhibit tendencies toward certain outcomes, and that identifying the outcome toward which a component of the system aims or for the sake of which it operates is a crucial part of explaining it.  For example, Marx deploys this mode of explanation when he claims that certain kinds of social relations exist within an economic system in order toallow it to make efficient use of its productive powers, or that moral and religious ideas prevail in a society in order to uphold its basic economic structure.
In other words, the notion of teleology Marx deploys is an essentially Aristotelian one, even if he applies it in ways Aristotelians would not necessarily agree with.  And as Wood points out, the basic soundness of this general mode of explanation does not stand or fall with the soundness of this or that particular application Marx makes of it.
Writers like Scott Meikle have also argued that a kind of Aristotelian essentialism underlies Marx’s social theory.  The consequence is that Marx understands human well-being in a way that is at least in very general terms Aristotelian.  As Wood writes, “the good life, for both Marx and Aristotle, consists chiefly in the actualization of one’s powers” (p. 37).  The difference – needless to say, not a small one – is that Marx’s conception of human nature and of human powers is far more narrowly economic than Aristotle’s, and the economics in question is, well, Marxist.
Though a materialist, then, Marx’s conception of the material world is not quite as desiccated as that of a Democritus or a Rosenberg, and thus affords more metaphysical common ground with the Aristotelian theist, and even with the Aristotelian natural law theorist – albeit they reach very different conclusions about morality.  But that brings us to the next point.
Marx contra moralism
One of the more preposterous features of New Atheist rhetoric, and of secularist rhetoric in general, is the shrill moralism with which it often condemns religious believers.  For in at least many cases, the metaphysical presuppositions of the one flinging the rhetoric undercut any grounds for moralism of any kind.
I am not appealing here to the idea that atheism can’t support moral judgments insofar as morality rests on arbitrary divine commands.  Morality doesn’t rest on arbitrary divine commands.  What I have in mind instead are other philosophical presuppositions of morality that at least many secularists reject.  For example, morality presupposes free will.  Some New Atheist types (such as Jerry Coyne) make a big show of the claim that free will is an illusion.  But no one who denies free will has any business pouring contempt on religious believers, or on anyone else, for their alleged moral and rational failings.  For if free will is an illusion, they can’t help what they do, any more than the rain can help falling.
Or consider evolutionary theories of knowledge, such as Dawkins’ “meme” theory, on which concepts and beliefs are characterized as competing by way of an analogue of natural selection.  Ideas spread insofar as some concepts and beliefs get themselves replicated and others die out, just as some organisms survive and reproduce and others fail to do so.  If this is all that cognition amounts to, then truth and falsity go out the window.  An idea might become widespread even though it is false or it might disappear even though it is true, and it is survival value rather than truth or rationality that determines what happens.  Indeed, even a belief’s appearanceof being more true or rational might itself be an illusion that persists because of its survival value.  Now, if this sort of view were true, there would be no point in condemning religious beliefs as false or irrational, or praising atheist beliefs as true and rational.  What matters is ability to replicate, and religious ideas – as New Atheists are always complaining – are very good at that.
I would also argue that morality is impossible without teleology of some kind, even if just the thin kind Marx is willing to countenance.  For, as Aquinas notes, the notion of the good is inextricably linked with the notion of an end.  Goodness is on analysis always a matter of realizing an end, and badness a matter of failing to realize it.  Hence if there is no teleology of any kind in the objective world, there can be no objective goodness and badness, and thus no objective morality.  In which case, while an atheist system of morality might be possible for an atheist who affirms teleology (as Marx does, and as Thomas Nagel at least toys with doing), no atheist who regards teleology as an illusion has any business engaging in moralism.  Some atheists realize this (Rosenberg, for example) but many do not.
Now, Marx is not guilty of this particular error, or at least not entirely.  For though, like anyone else, he often falls into criticizing others in terms that seem to imply moral disapproval, his official stance is to eschew moral categories when defending his characteristic positions.  Famously, his critique of capitalism is not a critique on grounds of justice, and he was dismissive of socialists who made their case on moral grounds. 
The irony is that, given his essentialism and teleology, he could, unlike other atheists, develop a kind of natural law approach to ethics and try to defend socialism that way.  But he does not do so, because of his economic reductionism.  For Marx, the cultural “superstructure” of law, morality, politics, religion, etc. necessarily reflects the economic “base” of a society.  For example, modern notions of property rights, of the duty to honor contracts, etc. reflect the needs of a capitalist economic order.  They are necessary to keep the motor running, as it were.  Similarly, the assumption that slavery was legitimate reflected the economic structure of Roman society, the assumption that serfdom was legitimate reflected the economic structure of feudal society, and so on.
Now, for Marx, there is nothing else for morality to bethan something like the rules of a society’s economic game.  There is no set of moral principles that transcends different possible economic systems and by reference to which they might be judged, any more than there is a set of meta-rules governing board games, by which Monopoly and Risk might be judged.  But that means that there is no way, from within an economic and social order, to criticize that order on moral grounds.  Criticizing capitalism on socialist moral grounds, but from a position within the capitalist economic order itself, is for Marx like playing Monopolywhile trying to justify certain moves by appealing to the rules of Risk.  It’s just muddleheaded.  Hence his rejection of attempts to critique capitalism from a moral point of view.  Indeed, he even goes so far as to deny that capitalism is unjust.  Injustice is not the problem with it, in his view.  To be sure, he thinks it is harmful in various ways, but he doesn’t think those harms can be objected to on moral grounds.  Rather, they are something like the monkey wrench in the motor of capitalism that is going to bust it apart from within and transform it into socialism.
For Marx, then, morality is an inherently conservativeinstitution, always reflecting the deepest assumptions of the established order of things.  To appeal to morality in critiquing an established order as a whole (rather than merely this or that part of it) is precisely to play by the rules of that order, and thereby to set oneself up for defeat.  It’s like appealing to the rules of Monopoly to justify condemning the entire game of Monopoly as illegitimate – something not just mistaken but incoherent.
Now, this would apply to any moral critique of religionas well, since that too is part of the superstructure that reflects the economic base.  Marx’s position would entail that a sweeping moral condemnation of religion is as incoherent as a moral criticism of capitalism.  When religious believers complain that atheist critics who appeal to morality are living on borrowed capital, I think Marx would have to sympathize.  He would have to regard that particular brand of atheistic criticism as no less naïve than the moralistic brands of socialism of which he is so dismissive.
Against bourgeois atheism
Of course, Marx famously characterizes religion as the opium of the people, but it is extremely superficial to think that he is here issuing a glib zinger, after the fashion of some pimply atheist teenager mouthing off on Reddit.  Let’s take a look at the context of the remark, in Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.  He writes:
Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification.  It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion.Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.  Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions.  It is the opium of the people.The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness.  To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.  The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.
End quote.  Now, notice that while Marx certainly regards religion as a tissue of falsehoods, there is no contempt here whatsoever for the religious believer.  Quite the opposite.  To see how and why, let’s note a few things about Marx’s analysis and its implications.
First, Marx is here giving a teleological explanation of religion.  He is saying that it serves a certain function in the economic order of a society, namely that of making that order intelligible to the oppressed members of that society in a way that reconciles them to it and affords them an illusory kind of happiness despite their oppression. It is part of the superstructure that is supported by, but also in turn reinforces, the base.
Second, there can be no question, then, of peeling away religion and understanding it in isolation from the larger order of which it is a part, or of discarding it while keeping the rest of that order intact – any more, say, than one could understand a heart in isolation from the whole organism, or chuck it out while keeping the rest of the organism alive.  Religion and its larger social context, especially its economic context, are a package deal.  Its disappearance presupposes the disappearance of that entire larger context.
Third, religion is for that reason not fundamentally a matter of some misguided or dishonest leaders taking advantage of ignorant masses, and its remedy is not to be found in exposing those leaders or in intellectuals correcting their errors.  It goes much deeper than that, into the very roots of the social order, so that the leaders and the intellectual class are just as much shaped by it as the masses. 
Fourth, while Marx’s “opium” remark is certainly intended to compare religion to a drug-induced stupor, the accent is clearly not on the stupor itself but rather on the conditions that make the stupor attractive and indeed necessary – which, Marx emphasizes, involves “real suffering.”  Imagine a man whose leg is being amputated and whose agony is soothed only by the use of literal opium.  Suppose you take the opium from him, bring him out of the euphoria he was feeling, and convince him that whatever experiences he was having were delusional – while all this time the doctors continued sawing on his leg.  Given Marx’s analysis, this is analogous to what undermining religion while keeping the rest of the existing social order in place would involve.  And telling religious people what fools they are is comparable to lecturing the man whose leg is being sawed off about what a fool he is for taking opium and believing the delusions it afforded him.
The difference between Marx and your typical New Atheist should be obvious.  For the New Atheist, religion is the cause of our unhappiness, and getting rid of it the key to securing happiness.  For Marx, religion is a palliativefor our unhappiness, unhappiness which can only be increased if religion is taken away while the sources of our unhappiness remain.  For the New Atheist, religious believers are objects of scorn and condemnation.  For Marx, they are objects of pity and concern.  For the New Atheist, eliminating religion is basically a matter of educating people (by means of books, etc.) about an intellectual error they are making.  For Marx, it is a matter of nothing less momentous than an entire social order giving way and being replaced by something so radically different and historically unprecedented that we cannot now even imagine it, where this utopian transformation can ultimately be secured only by impersonal economic processes rather than propagandistic efforts on the part of individuals.
In short, given Marx’s analysis, the New Atheist keen on destroying the convictions of ordinary religious believers is, to the extent he succeeds, cruel – but also wasting his time insofar as he is not going to succeed in any large-scale way so long as the overall existing social order persists.  For a serious Marxist, it can only add insult to injury that Dawkins and Co. peddle their wares like any capitalist, at $15.95 a pop, thereby getting rich while the condition of the masses remains unchanged.  And affluent secularists’ broadcasting banalities like “There’s probably no God.  Now stop worrying and enjoy your life” is essentially an update of Marie Antoinette’s “Let them eat cake.”
As Denys Turner remarks in his essay on Marx and religion in The Cambridge Companion to Marx , Marx “appeared to believe that simple atheism – atheism that rests on the straightforward negation and reversal of what theism claims – is as ideological as the theism it all too simply rejects” (p. 336).  Just as the communism of the future will in Marx’s view simply move beyond the moral categories in terms of which human beings now evaluate their actions, so too will it move beyond the dispute between religious believers and their critics.  Turner concludes: “Marx’s atheism is not anti- but posttheistic.  It is therefore postatheistic” (p. 337).
Lessons for conservatives
That is all well and good if you buy Marxism.  But is there anything even us devoutly non-Marxist types might learn from Marx, other than the interesting implications of his false premises?
Not a whole lot, in my view.  As with so many modern thinkers, what’s true in Marx (such as his Aristotelianism) isn’t new, and what’s new (such as the specific application he makes of Aristotelian ideas) isn’t true.  And much of it isn’t just untrue, it’s awful.  In my opinion, there’s too much of Marx’s distinctive errors lurking behind most of his insights to make them salvageable.  For example, it seems to me that you have to buy too much into his economic reductionism (and bad Marxist economics to boot) to find much of value in, say, his account of exploitation and alienation under capitalism.  That’s not to say that there isn’t any such thing as exploitation and alienation under capitalism, but only that if there is, Marx’s analysis isn’t too helpful in identifying it.  I suspect that because Marx uses words like “alienation” and “exploitation,” and it seems plausible that capitalism can be alienating and exploitative in some sense, people wrongly suppose that there must be real insights on these topics lurking in Marx.  (For discussion of some senses in which capitalism can indeed be said to have alienating and exploitative features, see my Claremont Review of Books essay “Hayek’s Tragic Capitalism.”)
However, that is not to say that there is nothing at all of interest in Marx.  Roger Scruton, in The Meaning of Conservatism , plausibly suggests that Marx was onto something in his analysis of “commodity fetishism.”  Scruton distinguishes the consumption of property from its possession, where the former involves treating property as a mere means, while the latter involves treating it as an end in itself.  Think of the way that people can be attached to an heirloom, to a work of art, or to a piece of land or a home, and desire to preserve it and pass it down as a heritage for their children – whether this is something grand like an aristocratic estate (think of Lord Grantham’s attitude to Downton Abbey), or a more humble abode of the sort most of us have to settle for.  This sort of example illustrates what Scruton means by the possession of property, the enjoyment of it for its own sake.  By contrast, property is merely consumed when it is used for the sake of something else, usually only temporarily.  Pencils and paperclips, candy bars and soft drinks, and stocks that are bought and then sold as soon as sufficient profit can be drawn from them, would be examples.
Both consumption and possession are innocent in themselves, but the essence and legitimacy of property as an institution, Scruton argues, is to be found primarily in possession.  For we cannot flourish as the embodied creatures we are without the stable extension of ourselves constituted by home and other possessions.  The Marxist attack on property presupposes a conception of property primarily in terms of consumption – property thought of essentially as a commodity – but property-as-mere-commodity is not property as such, but rather a corrupt or degenerate form of the institution of property. 
However, Scruton thinks Marx is right to hold that under capitalismproperty tends to be conceived of primarily in terms of consumption or commodity rather than in terms of possession.  Indeed, the individualism and consumerism of capitalist societies tend to lead to treating everything as a commodity, and thus as a means rather than an end in itself.  Think of the way people talk of their “brand,” of “selling themselves,” of the re-description of prostitution and pornography as “sex work,” of the home as something to “flip” for a profit rather than to possess and pass on, of “starter marriages” no less than “starter homes,” and on and on in a culture of increasingly ephemeral attachments rather than rootedness.  The very idea of intrinsic value tends to dissolve into the cash nexus.  Mass production reinforces this tendency, since it facilitates our thinking of things as essentially indistinguishable, disposable, and replaceable.
Marx didn’t think this wholly bad, because it contributes to the erosion of traditional morals and institutions and thereby helps prepare the way for the socialism he welcomed.  But precisely for these reasons, no conservative can approve of it.  That doesn’t entail that a conservative must oppose capitalism full stop, and Scruton doesn’t.  But neither should any conservative regard capitalism as an unmixed blessing, nor acquiesce to the libertarian tendency to make of the market a model for political and social relations in general.
“Capitalism,” after all, is a sweeping term that is used to label all sorts of phenomena, some good and some bad.  Too many of capitalism’s critics foolishly try to attack it at its strongest point.  They follow Marx in the by now manifestly falsified claim that capitalism leads to greater material impoverishment.  In fact capitalism has greatly increased general material prosperity.  The real problem – and it is a much more serious problem than many modern American conservatives want to acknowledge – is that it tends to do so at the cost of impoverishing us spiritually. 

Aquinas 101

The Thomistic Institute has added to the great work it is already doing by introducing Aquinas 101, “a series of free video courses… that help you to engage life’s most urgent philosophical and theological questions with the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas.”  Here are four brief and lucid examples: Fr. Dominic Legge on the problem of evil, Fr. James Brent on the principle of non-contradiction, Fr. Thomas Joseph White on the abiding relevance of Aquinas, and Fr. Gregory Maria Pine on how to read the Summa Theologiae.  Check them out and enroll today!

Upcoming talks, etc.

On February 6 on Cameron Bertuzzi’s Capturing Christianity, Graham Oppy and I will resume the debate on the existence of God that we began last July.
On February 11, I will be giving a talk at Cornell University on the topic “What is Matter?”  The event is being hosted by the Thomistic Institute and will be at 6:30 pm in the Physical Science Building, Room 120.
On February 19, I will be giving a talk at UCLA on the same topic.  This event too is being hosted by the Thomistic Institute.  Keep an eye on the Thomistic Institute website for further details.On March 6, I will be giving the Aquinas Lecture at Notre Dame Seminary in New Orleans.  Details to come.
On April 3, I will be giving the keynote address, on the topic of laws of nature, at the Science and Christianity conference at Harvard University.
On May 1, I will be giving the John Paul II Lecture at the University of Dallas on the topic of Aquinas on sex and gender.  Details to come.
In June, I will be speaking at the 10thAnnual Summer Philosophy Workshop at Mount Saint Mary College in Newburgh, NY.  The theme this year is Aquinas on Knowledge, Truth, and Wisdomand the workshop will be held from June 24 - 28.

Johnson on Aristotle’s Revenge

At Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Monte Ransome Johnson reviewsmy book Aristotle’s Revenge .  Prof. Johnson is an Aristotle scholar and historian of philosophy, which is relevant to understanding his review.  He says some nice things about the book, singling out my discussion of Aristotle and computationalism as “interesting” and writing:
Feser's book could be useful to those interested in defending anti-reductionist positions in various disputes in philosophy of science… Feser's impressive grasp of this anti-reductionist literature makes him a formidable polemicist, able to sift the avalanche of philosophy of science literature and find the concepts he is looking for.  End quote.  The bulk of Prof. Johnson’s review is devoted to discussing how closely the views I defend do or do not correspond to those of either Aristotle himself or of later Aristotelian and Scholastic thinkers, and how closely the views I criticize as characteristic of the mechanical world picture do or do not correspond to those of specific early modern thinkers.
This is not entirely unfair, insofar as at least in the first chapter of my book I make some general historical remarks about the Aristotelian tradition and about the origins of the rival mechanical world picture.  Johnson’s emphasis is also understandable given that he is, as I have said, an Aristotle scholar and historian of philosophy – and, I should add, a scholar and historian whose work I have long admired.  I have profited from his fine book Aristotle on Teleology and often recommend it.  If you are interested in either Aristotle or teleology, you should read it.
All the same, I think Johnson has let his own interests and expertise, rather than the content of the book, determine the amount of attention his review devotes to these questions of historical scholarship and Aristotle exegesis.  And that has led him greatly to overemphasize these matters and to underemphasize others.  (For example, my chapter on “Space, Time, and Motion” – at well over 100 pages, the longest chapter in the book and perhaps the most densely argued – is referred to in a single sentence and in only the most general way.)
The trouble is that the book is not really aboutAristotle himself and it is not even about the history of philosophy.  It is about certain ideas, considered more or less ahistorically.  And Johnson is aware of this.  As a result of his comparison of the claims and arguments I defend with those of Aristotle himself, he judges:
The true purpose of Feser's book, it seems, is not actually to avenge Aristotle, but to show how Aristotle affords concepts that can be adapted by neo-neo-Scholastics to combat certain metaphysical interpretations of contemporary science.
and
Given the lack of references to primary and secondary sources for Aristotle's views, the position defended in Aristotle's Revenge is better described, as Feser frequently does, as neo-Aristotelian or, more accurately, Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy.
End quote.  That is all quite true.  But it isn’t like I hide this.  Prof. Johnson is a bit like a detective who stands lost in thought before declaring “I conclude that the butler did it!” – when all the while Jeeves had been standing right there beside him trying to confess.
It seems that Prof. Johnson would prefer that I not describe what I am up to as “Aristotelian” – that I should stick to adjectives like “neo-Scholastic” or “Aristotelian-Thomistic” or even, if I must, “neo-Aristotelian.”  It seems to me, though, that this is to demand too narrow a usage.  Terms like “Platonic” and “Marxist” are commonly used to connote ideas that you won’t always find explicitly set out in Plato or Marx themselves, but rather are associated with the traditions they inspired.  Of course, it is true that in some cases this can lead to misunderstanding.  However, this loose kind of usage is so common that learned readers realizethat it is intended only loosely.  Hence, especially in academic contexts, it is perfectly innocent, and clear that all that is meant is that the ideas in question are associated with a broadly “Platonic” or “Marxist” view of things, and not necessarily with Plato or Marx themselves.
In the present case, the label “Aristotelian” is frequently used in contemporary academic analytic philosophy to refer to ideas that are broadly Aristotelian in spirit, whether or not one finds them explicitly stated in Aristotle’s Physics or Posterior Analytics or wherever.  Consider, for example, Tahko’s anthology Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics and Groff and Greco’s volume Powers and Capacities in Philosophy: The New Aristotelianism – in neither of which will one find much in the way of Aristotle exegesis.  My book is intended as a contribution to this movement and literature, and I imagined that it would be taken in that spirit.
If this broad use of the term “Aristotelian” is a foible, it is not a foible unique to me – in which case, I think Prof. Johnson should blame the common practice to which I’ve acquiesced rather than my book, specifically.  Anyway, I think that too much weight is placed on what is ultimately a minor semantic issue.
However, I do not want to fail to acknowledge the good points that Johnson makes in the course of discussing this issue.  For example, he cites a number of works of contemporary scholarship on Aristotle that I might have cited but did not.  I am indeed familiar with most of the things to which he refers.  The Max Delbrück article is something I’ve quoted from several times in previous work.  I reviewedthe Armand Leroi book a couple of years ago.  Carlo Rovelli’s interesting article essentially went to the periphery of my mind as I worked on my book given that, as Johnson notes (with apparent regret), I explicitly declined to defend Aristotle’s physics and focused instead only on matters of philosophy of nature.  These materials simply got lost in what Johnson rightly calls the “avalanche” of literature I was interacting with, and I could mention yet other things that I kick myself now for not having included.  To be sure, I don’t think any of the particular arguments I give suffers much for the lack of these references.  All the same, Johnson is right that I should have included them.
Regular readers of this blog will find this much of Prof. Johnson’s review reminiscent of the reviews of Glenn Ellmers and Eric Wise, who also overemphasized questions of Aristotle exegesis.  However, there are crucial differences between Johnson’s review and theirs.  For one thing, unlike Ellmers and Wise, Prof. Johnson does not turn a review of a philosophy of science book into a verbose and irrelevant discourse about (of all things) modern politics and Christian theology.  For another, unlike Ellmers and Wise, Prof. Johnson does actually engage substantively with some of the arguments of my book.
So let me turn to that.  Johnson has a fair bit to say about my use of retorsion arguments, which I take to be a species of reductio ad absurdum arguments.  Some of Johnson’s remarks seem to me to rest on misunderstandings.  For example, he writes: “So Feser thinks that his retorsion arguments taken together undergird a positive doctrine he calls epistemic structural realism.”  No, that’s not correct.  Johnson is conflating two very different lines of argument from my book.
What the retorsion arguments to which he is referring are intended to show is the limits of what might be overthrown by either empirical science or revisionary metaphysics.  For example, I argue that the reality of change, the reality of efficient causation, the principle of sufficient reason, etc. cannot coherently be overthrown in the name of science.  The reasons for affirming epistemic structural realism are very different, and have to do with arguments concerning the nature of mathematical representation and considerations about what survives theory change in the history of physics.
Prof. Johnson also writes:
Although Feser is aware that "some have questioned the probative force of such arguments" (p. 80), he does not mention that Aristotle was chief among them.  Aristotle holds that indirect reductio arguments are inferior to direct negative arguments, which are in turn inferior to direct positive arguments (Posterior Analytics I.26); reductio arguments must fall far short of demonstrative knowledge (as defined in Posterior Analytics I.2), since its premises are not only not prior to, not better known than, and not explanatory of their conclusions, but they are not even true! 
End quote.  That’s all fair enough in the abstract.  However, which of these modes of argumentation are preferable or even possible depends on the subject matter.  In the Metaphysics, Aristotle famously remarks that it shows a lack of education to try to demonstrate something self-evident like the principle of non-contradiction, since it is presupposed in the very attempt at demonstration.  In the Physics, he says that it would be absurd to try to prove the reality of things with natures, since what is obvious doesn’t need proof.  So, direct positive arguments are out of the question when dealing with a skeptic who denies the laws of logic or the reality of natures. 
Does that mean we can say nothing to convince such a person?  No, because we can instead deploy retorsion arguments.  And it is precisely when defending rock bottom or basic assumptions about reality, of the kind Aristotle has in mind in passages like the ones I’ve referred to, that I deploy such arguments.  Aristotle would hardly object to that, and I think that Prof. Johnson would agree that Aristotle does not question the value of reductio arguments full stop.  Rather, he simply denies that they are the best arguments to use in some contexts.  But those contexts don’t include the specific kinds of context in which I deploy them in my book.
Commenting on what I say about teleology, Johnson writes:
The fact that the early modern figures did apply final causality to human beings, to God, and to their accounts of the laws of nature, while readily acknowledged by Feser (p. 50), is not discussed much by him, except in order to assert that "an atheistic version of the mechanical world picture is incoherent" (p. 51). Feser's position is not argued but rather expressed in a series of rhetorical questions, such as: "If there is no God and no substantial forms either, how can we make sense of the operation of laws of nature?" (p. 51).
End quote.  It seems to me that this is not at all a fair representation of what I say on this subject.  As I argue, the mechanical world picture characterized matter in such a way that, if that picture is consistently spelled out, neither intentionality nor consciousness can be found in it.  Dualist proponents of the mechanical philosophy like Descartes thus locate these phenomena outside the material world – in God and in human souls – but since atheists deny the reality of God and the soul, such a relocation of intentionality and consciousness are out of the question for them.  But their characterization of matter, I argue, makes a reduction of consciousness and intentionality to matter impossible; nor can an eliminativist position vis-à-vis consciousness and intentionality be made coherent.  Hence an atheist version of the mechanical philosophy itself cannot be made coherent.  (This is why atheists are well advised to go the Thomas Nagel route of considering a neo-Aristotelian position – though of course, in my view this ultimately promises to pose other problems for atheism down the line.) 
This is one of the lines of argument I give for the incoherence of an atheistic mechanical philosophy, and of course I develop all the relevant subsidiary points in detail.  I also develop other arguments, such as an analysis of laws of nature that notes that the notion was originally a theological one and that alternative accounts of laws face insuperable problems (unless one opts for an Aristotelian account – but that would entail giving up the mechanical philosophy).
Hence, to characterize my view as defended by nothing more than a few rhetorical questions is unjust.  I don’t think Prof. Johnson is knowingly being unfair here – I suspect he is simply too hastily and carelessly trying to summarize arguments he does not find persuasive.  But the summary is very misleading.
Anyway, as I say, Prof. Johnson makes some fair points too, and I thank him for his review and once again recommend his own work to all students of Aristotle -- and indeed, to all students of Aristotelianism too.

Scruton’s virtues

The Guardian reports that conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton has died.  I vividly recall the first time I became aware of Scruton.  I was an undergraduate philosophy major in the late 1980s, and a professor had posted on the bulletin board near his office an article about Scruton, on which he’d scrawled the words: “Mrs. Thatcher’s favorite philosopher.”  It was not intended as a compliment.  But since I was a conservative as well as an aspiring philosopher, it attracted rather than repelled me.  During the many hours I spent in bookstores in those days, seeing Scruton’s name on the spine of a book became a reason instantly to pull it off the shelf and take a look.  And actually reading Scruton soon gave reason to seek out everything else he’d written.  Which, as every Scruton admirer knows, could become a full time job. Scruton rose to prominence despite having views that couldn’t be more out of step with the times or with the orthodoxies peddled by his fellow academics.  The reasons why, everyone knows.  He was much smarter and better read than most of them, had a considerably greater range of interests and competence, and wrote more clearly and beautifully.  He also had greater courage, as reflected in what he was willing to say and what he was willing to suffer.  Sometimes superior ability and virtue win out, despite the odds.   Scruton could not help but become a heroic figure to younger conservative intellectuals.
Scruton’s thought is so deep and wide-ranging that it cannot possibly be summarized in a few lines.  But there are three aspects of his conservatism that stand out especially – the first having to do with its content, the second with its intellectual quality, the third with its moral quality. 
As to its content, what is most distinctive about Scruton’s conservatism is its emphasis on the unique nature and dignity of the person.  Now, there is a lot of woolly and mediocre thinking of a “personalist” nature.  But not from Scruton.  His own articulation and applications of this idea – from his account of the phenomenology of sexual desire, to his emphasis on the personal nature of social institutions (traditionally known as the idea of the corporate person or moral person) – are of the first rank, and will stand as an important contribution to conservative theory.
As to the intellectual quality of Scruton’s thinking, in addition to the virtues I’ve already mentioned is its nuance.  All conservative thought is wary of the ideologue, who insists on wedging the complexity of human moral and social life into the procrustean bed of a simplistic abstract model.  But as Oakeshott warned, a conservative thinker must be cautious lest his opposition to this sort of thing transform him into a counter-ideologue.  Scruton never fell into this trap.  To take one example, this was evident in his treatment of capitalism, a subject about which too many other conservatives show little nuance.  Some, rightly repelled by socialism and the pathologies of the welfare state, will listen to no criticism of capitalism.  Others, rightly put off by this libertarian extremism, go to the opposite extreme of refusing to see any merit in capitalism.  Scruton rightly saw that capitalism is an enormously complex phenomenon that has both salutary and pernicious elements which, unfortunately, are difficult to disentangle.  His treatment of environmentalism is similarly subtle.
As to the moral character of Scruton’s work, what stood out most starkly was the admirable piety and gratitude that motivated it.  Modern intellectuals tend to be spoiled and ungracious creatures, whose inclination to bitch and moan seems only to increase the better things get, and who seem to occupy themselves concocting ever more recherché reasons for badmouthing their society and their forebears.  Scruton, by contrast, was a man who manifestly deeply loved and appreciated our Western cultural inheritance, for all its faults, and stood up for it the way a loyal son would stand up for his mother and father.  As his moving piece in the Spectatorlast month showed, this sense of gratitude was left undiminished by the sufferings of the last year of Scruton’s life. 
Since Scruton was a true philosopher, he would not mind my appending a critical note.  In my opinion, the main weakness in his work was in metaphysics – in particular, a tendency to concede too much to philosophical naturalism, and to overestimate the strength of the arguments in its favor.  However, there are already lots of other thinkers offering powerful criticisms of naturalism.  But there is no one else doing quite what Scruton did, or as well as he did it.  Especially in his work on aesthetics, where perhaps he has left his most lasting mark on philosophy – and writing on specific topics from architecture to music to the visual arts to pop culture – Scruton has long been, and will doubtless long remain, the “go to” man for those seeking understanding.
It is regrettable that it sometimes takes a thinker’s death to prod people finally to read his work.  But better late than never.  For those interested in getting a sense of the depth of Scruton’s thinking in as painless and reader-friendly a way as possible, I would recommend the following.  For his political philosophy and ethics, the best place to start is in my view his anthology Philosopher on Dover Beach .  For aesthetics and culture, you cannot do better than Scruton’s little gem of a book An Intelligent Person’s Guide to Modern Culture .  For a lucid, witty, and endlessly insightful treatment of general topics in philosophy, check out the mammoth and magisterial Modern Philosophy: An Introduction and Survey .  For moving autobiography, see Scruton’s Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life .  Requiescat in pace.

Review of Swinburne

My review of Richard Swinburne’s recent book Are We Bodies or Souls? appears in the February 2020 issue of First Things.  You can read it online.