Edward Feser's Blog, page 47

Continetti on post-liberal conservatism

At the Washington Free Beacon, Matthew Continetti proposes a taxonomy of contemporary American conservatism.  Among the groups he identifies are the “post-liberals.”  What he means by liberalism is not twentieth- and twenty-first century Democratic Party liberalism, but rather the broader liberal political and philosophical tradition that extends back to Locke, informed the American founding, and was incorporated into the “fusionist” program of Buckley/Reagan-style conservatism.  The “post-liberals” are conservatives who think that this broader liberal tradition has become irredeemably corrupt and maybe always has been, and thus judge that the fusionist project of marrying a traditionalist view of morality, family, and religion to the liberal political tradition is incoherent and ought to be abandoned. Continetti notes that post-liberals are “mainly but not exclusively traditionalist Catholics,” and proposes a test for determining whether someone falls into the category:
One way to tell if you are reading a post-liberal is to see what they say about John Locke.  If Locke is treated as an important and positive influence on the American founding, then you are dealing with just another American conservative.  If Locke is identified as the font of the trans movement and same-sex marriage, then you may have encountered a post-liberal.
End quote.  Well, if you’ve read my book Locke , then you know that by this criterion, I am pretty clearly a post-liberal.  And frankly, if you look at the world through Aristotelian-Thomistic and/or orthodox Catholic eyes, I think you pretty much have to be some kind of post-liberal.  But what kind, exactly?  Here things are not as simple as Continetti seems to think.
“The liberal ideology calls for careful discernment”
The late Michael Novak, who was no post-liberal, made a useful distinction between liberal institutions on the one hand, and liberal philosophical foundations on the other.  Examples of liberal institutions would be the market economy, limited government and its constitutional constraints, and the rule of law.  There is in fact nothing essentiallyliberal about any of these things, but they have certainly come to be closely associated with the modern liberal political order.  Examples of liberal philosophical foundations would be Locke’s version of social contract theory, Kant’s conception of human civilization as a kingdom of ends, Rawls’s egalitarian theory of justice, and Nozick’s libertarian theory of justice.
Now, someone could accept some version of the liberal institutions in question while rejecting all of the alternative liberal philosophical foundations. 
For example, in my opinion, only someone blinded by ideology could deny the astounding and unequaled power of the market economy to lift human beings out of poverty, or the irrational and impoverishing nature of central planning.  Socialism is idiotic as well as evil, and no one who is unwilling to acknowledge that is to be taken seriously on matters of politics and economics.  At the same time, it is no less ideologically blinkered to deny the corrosive moral and social consequences of modeling all human relations on market transactions between sovereign individuals, or to deny that private financial power poses grave dangers just as governmental power does.  As I argued in my recent Claremont Review of Booksessay on Hayek, liberal individualism undermines the family and national loyalties, which in turn undermines even the preconditions for the stability of the market itself.  And the “woke capitalism” of the modern corporation may turn out to be as insidious a threat to the moral order and to freedom of thought and expression as anything the U.S. government has done.
It is possible to affirm both of these sets of thoughts at once – to acknowledge the achievements of so-called liberal institutions while rejecting any liberal philosophical rationale for these institutions.  The empirical evidence supports the acknowledgement, whereas, for the post-liberal conservative, philosophical consistency requires the rejection.  For, I would argue, you simply cannot marry Catholicism or Thomism to Lockean political philosophy or to Kantianism, much less to Rawlsianism or libertarianism, any more than you can marry them to socialism in any of its noxious varieties. 
An important implication of this is that it is fallacious to suppose that a post-liberal conservative must ipso facto be an authoritarian, as many commenters on the recent dispute between David French and Sohrab Ahmari seem to suppose.  But it is true that the reasons a post-liberal conservative would oppose authoritarianism are likely to reflect prudence as much as, or more than, principle.  For example, a fusionist conservative and a Thomist might agree that it is a bad idea to make adultery a criminal offense.  But for the fusionist, who accepts the fundamental liberal assumptions about the purposes of government, that is because such a policy would be an unjust violation of the individual right to personal liberty, which for the liberal includes even the liberty to make grave moral mistakes.  By contrast, a Thomist would argue instead that while it would not be per se unjust to make adultery illegal, such a policy is very unlikely to do much good in practice and is likely to produce unintended evils as a side effect. 
To be sure, there are also going to be issues on which the post-liberal conservative is bound to insist on holding a paternalistic line as far as possible, where many fusionists are now willing to cave in – for example, on questions about drug legalization, censorship of pornography, the push for transgender rights, and so on.  If you think that is “authoritarian,” then you are committed to saying that pretty much all human civilizations before about 20 minutes ago were authoritarian – and have, I submit, drunk very deeply indeed of the liberal individualist Kool-Aid.
Now, exactly how ought institutions like the market to be informed by a non-liberal philosophy such as Thomism?  What sorts of specific policies would result?  How far should government go in shoring up the moral order, and how far is it even realistic for it to go in the sorry circumstances we now find ourselves in?  Those are complicated questions that call for the phronesis of a good statesman as much as they call for theorizing.  My own view is that the right theoretical principles are those worked out by Thomist moral and political philosophers in the mid twentieth century under the influence of thinkers like Aristotle, Aquinas, and Bellarmine and the encyclicals of popes Leo XIII and Pius XI, and which are reflected in the manuals of the day.
The point for the moment, though, is just to emphasize that it is a false choice to suppose that one must either follow the fusionist in endorsing some brand of liberalism, or go in for some kind of authoritarianism.  Pope Paul VI had his faults, but spoke wisely when he said that “the liberal ideology calls for careful discernment.”  What he meant is that the good ends that liberals rightly seek to achieve – he cites “economic efficiency,” “personal initiative,” “the defense of the individual against the increasingly overwhelming hold of organizations,” and “a reaction against the totalitarian tendencies of political powers” – must be disentangled from the bad philosophical assumptions that liberals typically deploy in defense of these good ends.  The insinuation that one must accept philosophical liberalism in order to achieve these ends is itself one of the rhetorical tricks of the liberal ideologue’s trade.
Keep political philosophy depoliticized
That brings me to some other remarks from Continetti.  He writes:
What the post-liberals seem to call for is the use of government to recapture society from the left.  How precisely they intend to accomplish this has been left undefined…
Another question is whether the post-liberal project is sustainable in the first place.  The post-liberals… may have over-interpreted the results of the 2016 election.  Trump is many things, but it is safe to say that he is not an integralist.  Prominent online and in my Twitter feed, the post-liberals might also misjudge their overall numbers…
A conservatism that does not incorporate the ideas of freedom and civil and religious liberty that imprinted America at its birth not only would be unrecognizable to William F. Buckley, Barry Goldwater, and Ronald Reagan.  Americans themselves would find it alien and unappealing.
End quote.  Speaking just for myself, I haven’t much idea in the first place what a “post-liberal project” is supposed to look like, if that is meant to refer to some sort of practical political program with a set of detailed policy proposals, an electoral strategy, and so on.  And like Continetti, I don’t think recent U.S. politics gives much ground for optimism about such a project, however it would be spelled out.  The reason I favor a variation on what Continetti calls “post-liberal conservatism” is because I think it is true, not because I think it promises a winning party platform.  I understand, of course, that Continetti is a writer on politics (and a good one), for whom questions of what is likely to secure electoral success and legislative victories are of special interest.  But questions about what is actually true are, I humbly submit, not entirely unimportant. 
If anything, Continetti understates the grounds for pessimism about the prospects for a post-liberal conservative politics.  For contemporary Western society is radically out of step with the basic premises to which the post-liberal conservative is committed.  Indeed, I would say that liberalism is a Christian heresy and one that seems now to be approaching its full metastasization.  I would say that it is the moral and political component of the broader heresy of modernism, which is at high tide and sweeping all before it, the flood now having penetrated deeply into even the innermost parts of the Church.  It is like Arianism both in its breathtaking reach and in its longevity.  It is worse than Arianism in its depravity.  Its god is the self – the sovereign individual of the liberal, and the subjective religious consciousness of the theological modernist – and in seeking to conform reality to the self rather than the self to reality, it tends toward subjectivism, relativism, fideism, voluntarism, and other forms of irrationalism.  And there is no limit to the further errors that might follow upon such tendencies.  That is why, as Pope Pius X said, modernism is the “synthesis of all heresies.” 
Because of this irrationalism, the liberal and modernist personality tends to be dominated by appetite, and by sexual appetite in particular, since the pleasures associated with it are the most intense.  But he also has a special hostility to the natural purpose of sex – marital commitment, children, and family – because that imposes the most stringent obligations on the self.  The family is also the fundamental social unit, and thus the model for all other social obligations, such as those entailed by ties of nationality.  Hence it is inevitable that the liberal and modernist personality will seek to reshape the family, and through it all social order, to conform to his desires.  Woke socialism is the last stop on the train ride that begins with radical individualism.
Some readers will no doubt find all of that overwrought, to say the least.  The point, however, is that it is a diagnosis that is hard to avoid if one begins with the sorts of premises to which post-liberal conservatives are typically committed.  And it entails that an ambitious near-future post-liberal conservative political program is probably not feasible, precisely because, as Continetti says, there simply are not enough voters who still sympathize with that view of the world.  In the short term, it seems to me, the post-liberal conservative will have to settle for rearguard actions, piecemeal and often only temporary victories, uneasy alliances with other conservatives, and in general a strategy of muddling through that can hope at best to take the edge off the worst excesses of late stage liberalism. 
Where he must be ambitious is in working for the long term revival of Western civilization.  For the average person, that means committing oneself firmly to a countercultural way of life – to religious orthodoxy, to having large families, and to preserving the social and cultural inheritance of the past the best one can at the local level, Benedict Option style.  For the intellectual, it means working to revive the classical (Platonic, Aristotelian, Scholastic) tradition in Western thought, and showing how it is not only in no way incompatible with, but provides a surer foundation for, the good things that modernity has produced (such as modern science, limited constitutional government, and the market economy).
The good news the post-liberal conservative can give the fusionist is that rejecting liberal philosophical foundations does not entail rejecting these good things, even if it does mean interpreting or modifying them in ways that the fusionist might not like.  The bad news is that philosophical liberalism has so eaten away at the moral foundations of Western society that these good things too are threatened along with everything else.
But like the Church, the post-liberal conservative must think in centuries.  Arianism did eventually disappear, so thoroughly that in hindsight it is difficult to recall what all the fuss was about.  And in the long run liberalism too will disappear, because it is now so deeply contra naturam that its ultimate collapse is inevitable.  Future generations will look back and marvel that such a freak show ever existed.  What remains to be determined is how much damage it will leave behind it, and how far it will go in persecuting those who resist its ever more extreme permutations.  
Now, the dim prospects for short term post-liberal conservative political success can be turned into an advantage.  Short term political calculation can make it difficult to think wisely about matters of political philosophy – and has done so with too many contemporary American conservatives, who trim the sails at the level of theory because of what they see in the polls and the ballot box.  That is part of the reason so many of them have chucked out the traditionalist side of fusionism, and more or less become libertarians rather than genuine conservatives. 
It is easier to resist such temptations when you have no illusions in the first place that your ideas are likely to have much electoral success.  You can depoliticizepolitical philosophy in the sense of focusing on inquiring into what is actually true, without being distracted by questions about what will play well with voters or be conducive to forming political alliances.  And in the long run, when implementation becomes more feasible, it is also likelier to be successful, because the theory will have been worked out more rigorously. 
Here, ironically, the post-liberal conservative can learn something from the founders of fusionist conservatism.  Whittaker Chambers famously thought that, by becoming a conservative, he’d joined the losing side.  Hayek knew he was a dinosaur, and that to try to revive 19th century style classical liberalism in the 1940s and 1950s was an ambition of Jurassic Park proportions.  Buckley made National Review a journal of ideas precisely by attracting disaffected intellectuals like James Burnham, Frank Meyer, and Russell Kirk.  They were all free to think and write seriously precisely because they were in the political wilderness.  As a result, when the electoral prospects for fusionist conservatism finally did became brighter, there were substantive and well-developed ideas to implement.
Sometimes, when you have less to win, you also have less to lose.  That affords a kind of liberty that the post-liberal conservative can enthusiastically embrace.
Related posts:
Hayek’s tragic capitalism
Socialism versus the family
Liberty, equality, fraternity?
Cardinal virtues and counterfeit virtues
Poverty no, inequality si
The conservative critique of libertarianism
Conservatism, populism, and snobbery

Rist slapped (Updated)

UPDATE 5/31: Commentary from Fr. Joseph Fessio, Fr. John Zuhlsdorf, and Phil Lawler.

LifeSite reports that Prof. John Rist, one of the signatories of the recent open letter accusing Pope Francis of heresy, has abruptly been banned from all pontifical universities – which he learned one day by finding himself suddenly denied permission to park his car at the Augustinianum, where he had been doing research.  Read the whole thing for the sorry details of the episode.I have been critical of the open letter, but this strikes me as undeservedly shabby treatment.  Whatever one thinks of his views, Rist is not some hotheaded pamphleteer or hack blogger.  He is a serious thinker, an eminent scholar of classical and early Christian philosophy, the author of many important books, a longtime professor at the Catholic University of America, and a loyal and orthodox son of the Church.  It seems to me not irrelevant to point out that he is also 83 years old.
When Vatican officials persistently refuse to address the actual substance of the arguments of critics – and indeed, refuse even just to answer straightforward questions like the dubia – and when heterodox Catholic academics and public intellectuals are largely allowed free rein, this sort of action seems extremely petty, to say the very least.  Even dissidents like Hans Küng and Charles Curran, who were disciplined by the Church under Pope St. John Paul II, were first given due process and the opportunity to defend themselves.
There is, to my knowledge, no evidence that Pope Francis himself had anything to do with what has happened.  One hopes that, should he learn of it, he will urge the relevant officials to show to Prof. Rist the mercy that the pope has so heavily emphasized during his pontificate. 
At Twitter, Matthew Schmitz calls attention to the contrast between the treatment afforded Rist and the way Cardinal Avery Dulles recommended dealing with dissidents.  In an earlier post, I discussed Pope Benedict XVI’s manner of dealing with criticism.

Rist slapped

LifeSite reports that Prof. John Rist, one of the signatories of the recent open letter accusing Pope Francis of heresy, has abruptly been banned from all pontifical universities – which he learned one day by finding himself suddenly denied permission to park his car at the Augustinianum, where he had been doing research.  Read the whole thing for the sorry details of the episode. I have been critical of the open letter, but this strikes me as undeservedly shabby treatment.  Whatever one thinks of his views, Rist is not some hotheaded pamphleteer or hack blogger.  He is a serious thinker, an eminent scholar of classical and early Christian philosophy, the author of many important books, a longtime professor at the Catholic University of America, and a loyal and orthodox son of the Church.  It seems to me not irrelevant to point out that he is also 83 years old.
When Vatican officials persistently refuse to address the actual substance of the arguments of critics – and indeed, refuse even just to answer straightforward questions like the dubia – and when heterodox Catholic academics and public intellectuals are largely allowed free rein, this sort of action seems extremely petty, to say the very least.  Even dissidents like Hans Küng and Charles Curran, who were disciplined by the Church under Pope St. John Paul II, were first given due process and the opportunity to defend themselves.
There is, to my knowledge, no evidence that Pope Francis himself had anything to do with what has happened.  One hopes that, should he learn of it, he will urge the relevant officials to show to Prof. Rist the mercy that the pope has so heavily emphasized during his pontificate. 
At Twitter, Matthew Schmitz calls attention to the contrast between the treatment afforded Rist and the way Cardinal Avery Dulles recommended dealing with dissidents.  In an earlier post, I discussed Pope Benedict XVI’s manner of dealing with criticism.

Popes, heresy, and papal heresy

In an interview at National Catholic Register, philosopher John Rist defends his decision to sign the open letter accusing Pope Francis of heresy (on which I commented in an earlier post).  At Catholic Herald, canon lawyer Ed Peters argues that the letter fails to establish its main charge.  Properly to understand this controversy, it is important to see that a reasonable person could judge that both men have a point – as long as we disambiguate the word “heresy.” What is heresy?
“Heresy” is a word that has both a broader ordinary usage and a narrower technical usage, and both usages have their place.  In this respect it is like words such as “assault” or “robbery,” which have both ordinary usages and technical legal usages.  If a lady slaps a man for saying something ungentlemanly, most people would probably not think of that as an “assault,” but legally it might be classified that way (even if left unprosecuted).  A tax which served to fund no legitimate governmental function would meet the commonsense criterion for “robbery” (the unjust taking of property by force), but no legal code would count it as such.   
There is nothing necessarily wrong with such semantic divergence.  Ordinary usage is not always precise, but the law needs to be.  Hence technical legal definitions don’t always correspond exactly to ordinary usage, even if there is considerable overlap.
The same thing is true of “heresy.”  As Parente, Piolanti, and Garofalo’s Dictionary of Dogmatic Theology says, the word “originally… meant a doctrine or doctrinal attitude contrary to the common doctrine of faith” (p. 123).  The word derives from the Greek hairesis, which means a “choice” of some elements of Christian doctrine out from among the others, which the heretic rejects.  (Heretics, you might say, are the original “pro-choice” types.)  Hilaire Belloc notes in The Great Heresies that a heresy involves plucking a theological thesis out from the larger context that gives it its precise meaning, and thereby distorting it. 
For example, the heresy of Sabellianism treats Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as mere modes or aspects of one divine Person, rather than as three divine Persons.  The reason it does so is that it “chooses” or focuses on God’s unity to the exclusionof his Trinitarian nature.  It rejects one aspect of Catholic doctrine in the name of another aspect.
This is the way heresies typically operate.  They aren’t made up out of whole cloth.  Rather, they start with something that really is there in Catholic doctrine, but focus on it so obsessively and exclusively that they distort it, ignoring other doctrinal elements that balance out the one that the heretic fixates on, and attention to which would have prevented him from falling into error.
Now, suppose a Catholic puts such an emphasis on Christ’s mercy that he takes it to imply that someone in an adulterous second “marriage” can be absolved and receive Holy Communion despite having no intention of refraining from adulterous acts in the future.  This would manifestly be a heresy in the original sense cited by the Dictionary, and in the sense explained by Belloc.  For it would both be an obvious departure from two millennia of common doctrine, and would involve a distortion of the notion of mercy, turning it into a kind of license to sin.
Indeed, it would be an especially perverse distortion, since it would, in the name of Christ’s teaching on mercy, reverse Christ’s teaching against divorce and remarriage – a teaching that Christ enjoined on his disciples precisely in the name of mercy!  For it was, Christ said, only because of their “hardness of heart” that the Israelites were permitted by Moses to divorce, a permission he explicitly cancelled.  So, a permissive attitude toward divorce and remarriage is the very last thing one could justify in the name of Christ’s understanding of mercy.
Does Pope Francis endorse such a reversal of traditional teaching?  The open letter accuses him of this and other errors.  Of course, some of the pope’s statements on doctrinal matters are ambiguous, and in interpreting what a person means, it is only fair to look at the larger context rather than consider an ambiguous statement in isolation.  The trouble, the open letter argues, is that the larger context makes things look only worse for the pope, not better.  For, the letter notes, the pope has made a series of problematic statements, and refuses to respond even to repeated respectful pleas for clarification from some of his own cardinals and from theologians.  Moreover, he praises and promotes churchmen who favor a heterodox interpretation of his words, while criticizing and sidelining those who uphold traditional doctrine. 
Prof. Rist rightly complains of “double-talk,” and of a “servile mentality” among some of the open letter’s critics, who nitpick over details while “diverting attention from the main concerns.”  He might have added that the pope’s defenders have for years now mostly relied on blatant sophistries and ad hominem attacks rather than addressing the concerns of the pope’s critics in good faith and with serious arguments.  They have, given the feebleness of their case, only reinforced rather than defused worries about the pope.  Prof. Rist says: “I am not a canonist... What I am is someone who believes he can recognize intended heresy in word [and] also how the words are confirmed by the actions.”  And if one understands “heresy” in the older and broader senses of the term expressed in Parente, Piolanti, and Garofalo’s Dictionary and in Belloc’s The Great Heresies, one can see his point (even if, as I suggested in my earlier post, it would have been better to speak of papal negligence vis-à-vis heresy).
Who decides?
The trouble is that the open letter does not confine itself to these broader senses of the term.  It explicitly accuses the pope of heresy in the technical, canon lawsense of the term.  And in making such a charge, it matters very much whether one is a canonist – which Ed Peters is. 
Now, there are three major problems here.  The first is that the term “heresy” has a narrower meaning in canon law than it does in popular usage, or even in the usages I cited from Belloc and from the Dictionary.  Heresy in the canonical sense entails “the obstinate denial or obstinate doubt after the reception of baptism of some truth which is to be believed by divine and Catholic faith.”  The key phrases here are “obstinate” and “divine and Catholic faith.” 
The first point to make is that for someone to be a heretic in the canonical sense, it is not enough that he holds an opinion that is in fact heretical.  He has to know that it is.  That is to say, his opinion has to be formally heretical rather than merely materially heretical.  This is where the obstinacy condition becomes crucial. The idea is that a person can usually be counted as a formal heretic only if he has been warned that his opinion is heretical, and has nevertheless persisted in his opinion. 
Now, the open letter argues that the pope has indeed been obstinate in heresy, but this brings us to the second key phrase.  What is to be believed “by divine and Catholic faith” are doctrines that have been officially defined as such by the Church.  To be sure, there are lots of other things Catholics are also required to assent to, but denying or doubting them would not count as heresy in the canon law sense.  As Parente, Piolanti, and Garofalo’s Dictionary says:
Heresy in the full sense of the word is opposed to a truth of divine-Catholic faith.  If the denial concerns a revealed truth which is clear and commonly admitted as such, but has not been defined by the Church, the one who denies such a truth is called proximus haeresi (very close to heresy).  (p. 123)
Hence, even to establish that the pope is a heretic in the broader senses cited in the Dictionary and by Belloc would not suffice to show that he is a heretic in the narrower canon law sense (much less an obstinate one) as opposed to being merely “proximate” or “very close” to heresy.  Now, the authors of the open letter realize this too, and they try to make a case that the pope is guilty of heresy in this stricter sense.  The trouble is that the very ambiguity of the pope’s words make such a case difficult.  Precisely because his statements can be read in different ways, even an unsympathetic reading might yield only something “heretical” in the broader sense rather than in the narrow canon law sense. 
That brings us to the second difficulty, which is the one emphasized by Peters.  Canon law is governed by a “principle of benignity” which requires that the accused be given the benefit of the doubt, and in particular that the law be interpreted in a way that is as benign or favorable to the accused as is reasonably possible.  Given this principle, Peters says, “heresy cases are not impossible under canon law, but they are, and are meant to be, very difficult.”
It would, accordingly, be difficult to show that the pope meets both the condition of obstinacy, and the condition of denying a doctrine that is heretical in the narrow canon law sense.  A defense lawyer might argue that the pope’s persistent ambiguity is precisely evidence, not of heresy, but rather that he simply lacks interest in and sufficient knowledge of doctrine (as opposed to being interested and knowledgeable enough to deny it, as a heretic would be) and that he lacks either patience or capacity for clear and careful theological reasoning. 
There is an irony here in that Pope Francis and his defenders often badmouth what they call “legalism” and the cavils of the “doctors of the law.”  For it is precisely “legalism” which provides the pope with his best defense against the charge of heresy, and precisely a “doctor of the law” who would be best able to get him an acquittal.
But that brings us to the third problem, which is that you can’t put a pope on trial in the first place.  As canon law says, “the First See is judged by no one.”  Contrary to what some people suppose, that does not mean that Catholics cannot ever criticize a pope for prudential or even doctrinal errors.  The Church allows such criticism under certain circumstances.  What it means is that there is no one on earth with the authority to do anything about it if the pope ignores such criticism.  Vis-à-vis the governance of the Church, his only superior is God. 
So what happens if a pope really does become a heretic (which can happen when he is not speaking ex cathedra)?  There are different theological theories about this, but no settled Church teaching and no mechanism in canon law for dealing with such a situation.  On one theory, a pope who becomes a formal heretic is ipso facto automatically excommunicated, and thus no longer a member of the Church, and thus no longer pope.  So, if the cardinals or bishops were to issue a finding to the effect that this has happened, they would not be judging a pope, because he wouldn’t be a pope any longer.  They would just be noting a fact, as they would be if they simply reported that a pope had died.  It would then be possible for them to remove the (now former) pope, and proceed to the election of a new pope.
The authors of the open letter appeal to this sort of theory.  They rightly reject the sedevacantist interpretation of the theory, according to which a heretical pope would automatically lose his office even without any intervention on the part of the bishops (such as their issuing a warning to the pope that he is in danger of formal heresy).  As the open letter says, this would throw the Church into chaos.  Any individual Catholic with a stack of theology books and a blog could decide for himself that a pope has lost his office on account of heresy, refuse to recognize him, and call on others to do the same.  We would have exactly the sort of “private judgment” and consequent anarchy that Catholicism has always criticized Protestantism for, and which the Church’s hierarchical structure is intended to prevent.
So, the open letter suggests, the right way to understand the theory is to hold that a pope could not lose his office on account of heresy without some prior formal action on the part of the bishops.  In particular, the letter argues that the bishops would first have to have warned the pope more than once, and that if he remains obstinate after their doing so, they would have to issue some sort of formal declaration to the faithful to the effect that the pope has become a formal heretic.  Only subsequent to their doing so could a pope plausibly be said to have lost his office.  However, the open letter suggests:
These actions do not need to be taken by all the bishops of the Catholic Church, or even by a majority of them.  A substantial and representative part of the faithful bishops of the Church would have the power to take these actions. 
End quote.  The reason for this qualification is obvious.  It could turn out, of course, that some bishops, even a majority of them, sympathize with the heresy into which a heretical pope has fallen, and would therefore not be inclined even to warn him, much less declare him a heretic.  And even non-heretical bishops might be wary of such an extreme measure.  Hence, the open letter judges, it would suffice if “a substantial and representative part of the faithful bishops” take action.
Now, the problem with all of this is not merely that it is just a theory, albeit a defensible one.  The problem is that it doesn’t really solve the grave difficulty facing the sedevacantist interpretation of the theory.  For now the problem of “private judgment” and the anarchy it entails simply arises once again at the level of the bishops.  Suppose that half of the bishops decide that a pope has become a formal heretic and lost his office, but that the other half disagrees and tells the faithful that the pope is not a formal heretic.  What happens then?  Does the pope lose his office or not?  Is the first group of bishops supposed to convince the cardinals to elect a new pope?  What if the cardinals are themselves in disagreement about whether the current pope has lost his office?  What if the heretical antipope simply waits things out, lives for another decade or so, and keeps appointing new cardinals, until the only ones left are those appointed by him?  How do we ever have another valid papal election?
Or, even if the first half of the bishops do convince the cardinals to gather and elect a new pope, what happens if the other half of the bishops simply refuse to recognize him, and continue to recognize the pope that their fellow bishops have declared a formally heretical ex-pope?  Now we would have two competing popes.  Who decides which one is the true pope?
Of course, a fifty-fifty split is optimistic.  A more likely scenario would be one where a minority of bishops declare the pope a formal heretic and judge that he has lost the papal office.  So what happens in that case?  Do they elect a new pope, while the majority of the Church continues to be in communion with the current pope (whom the minority now regards as an antipope)?  Suppose this majority retains control of the Vatican and all of the other real estate and other institutions of the Church.  What happens to the idea that the Church is a visible institution that is clearly identifiable and continuous over time, rather than a Gnostic secret society? 
This is all horrible enough, but it is really only the beginning of sorrows.  For in the chaos that ensues, everyday Catholic life would become intolerable.  Some bishops and priests would remain in communion with the pope that has been declared heretical, and some would not.  So, are the former to be judged schismatic?  And in that case, how could their acts be licit, or in some cases even valid?  Will your local parish priest retain his faculties for weddings and for hearing confessions?  How will the ordinary Catholic be able to know that his marriage is valid or that he has been truly absolved of his sins?  How will he know who to trust on doctrinal questions?  Even learned faithful Catholics would have great difficulty resolving some of the theoretical and practical problems that will arise in the circumstances described.  How is the average Catholic supposed to manage?
Again, the problem of “private judgment” and its consequent anarchy threatens the open letter’s position, no less than it threatens the sedevacantist position that the letter rightly rejects.
Prof. Rist and the letter’s other signatories judge that the situation in the Church is extremely bad and that many faithful Catholics are in denial about it.  They are absolutely right about that.  They judge that action must be taken, and that too many faithful Catholics lack the spine for it.  They are right about that too. 
Where they go wrong is in forgetting rule one for dealing with a crisis: “First, do no harm.”  Because as bad as things are, they could be even worse – much, much worse.  Imagine the Arian doctrinal crisis, the heterodoxy of Pope Honorius, the Great Western Schism, the chaos that followed the Cadaver Synod, and the moral squalor of the pre-Reformation Church, all rolled into one gigantic and unprecedented mess.  It could happen.  Maybe it will happen; we’re part of the way there already.  But it could also happen that Pope Francis reverses course, or, perhaps more plausibly, that he does not but that his successor does (even if this too is not a sure thing).  Since these are manifestly better scenarios than the horror story I have just told, the best thing for faithful Catholics to do is to facilitate them.  And, to say the least, a reasonable person could doubt that the best way to facilitate them is to float the suggestion that Pope Francis ought to lose his office due to heresy.
A small (papal) error in the beginning…
However the current crisis is resolved, one of the good fruits it is likely to bear in the long run is a more sober understanding of the nature of the papal office.  Catholic theology and magisterial teaching during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries put heavy emphasis on the large scope of papal power, and for good reason.  But papal power is not unlimited, and it is possible to overemphasize it.  Indeed, if even heresy is something a pope might in theory be guilty of, lesser but still serious errors are also possible and more likely – and have indeed been committed by recent popes, which is part of the reason we’re in the mess we’re in.  One of the excellent points Prof. Rist makes in his interview is this:
John Paul’s theatrical talents, and his comparative indifference to Curial reform, have not been helpful. The former encouraged the disastrous practice, which we now see in spades, of assuming that if you want the answer to any question, you go to the pope as talking oracle: The media took (and takes) advantage of that, often to the detriment of the Church.
End quote.  Part of Rist’s point here is that Pope St. John Paul II was such a strong personality that the line between the man and the office he held came to be blurred.  Many people, including too many faithful Catholics, started to think that Catholicism is just whatever the current pope happens to be saying (even though this was certainly not John Paul II’s own view). 
Cardinal Ratzinger was sensitive to this problem, and made it clear that not everything John Paul II said amounted to binding Catholic teaching (as in his 2004 memo on worthiness to receive Holy Communion, which noted that Catholics are not obliged to agree with the pope’s call to abolish capital punishment).  As Pope Benedict XVI, he emphasized the limits of papal power, especially in matters of doctrine:
The Pope is not an absolute monarch whose thoughts and desires are law.  On the contrary: the Pope's ministry is a guarantee of obedience to Christ and to his Word.  He must not proclaim his own ideas, but rather constantly bind himself and the Church to obedience to God's Word, in the face of every attempt to adapt it or water it down, and every form of opportunism…
The Pope knows that in his important decisions, he is bound to the great community of faith of all times, to the binding interpretations that have developed throughout the Church's pilgrimage.  Thus, his power is not being above, but at the service of, the Word of God.  It is incumbent upon him to ensure that this Word continues to be present in its greatness and to resound in its purity, so that it is not torn to pieces by continuous changes in usage.
End quote.  Unfortunately, this was too little too late, and many have come to think of the papacy in essentially voluntaristterms.  The sequel has been the Orwellian notion that a pope can by fiat turn a reversal of doctrine into a development of doctrine, and heretical water into orthodox wine.
Prof. Rist also makes reference to John Paul’s “comparative indifference to Curial reform,” and that is another major part of the story of what is happening in the Church today.  People wonder: Where did all these heterodox prelates come from?  The answer is that they gained prominence in the Church, and in many cases were made bishops and cardinals, precisely under John Paul II and Benedict XVI.
Now, these popes certainly tried to reign in the worst heretical excesses of the post-Vatican II period, but they were never as draconian as their enemies liked to pretend.  Though famous dissident theologians like Hans Küng and Charles Curran lost the right to label themselves officially as professors of Catholic theology, they were not excommunicated or defrocked.  They have remained priests in good standing, and have continued teaching and writing and otherwise freely spreading their ideas in Catholic circles.  And these are just the most visible dissidents.  Countless other heterodox theologians have been left entirely unmolested and free to teach and write whatever they like, in Catholic institutions and elsewhere.  Naturally, these people have had an enormous influence on generations of Catholic laymen, priests, and prelates, even if the latter usually don’t express their heterodox views frankly and in public. 
This patience with heterodoxy contrasts with the attitude of past popes.  It is one thing to try to live up to the Church’s teachings and to fail, but quite another to reject those teachings and lead others to do the same.  That is why, while the Church has always tolerated those guilty of sins of weakness (drunkenness, fornication, etc.), she has, traditionally, not tolerated heresy.  You can’t follow Catholic teaching even imperfectly if you don’t know what it is.  Hence, while other sins are like a bad flu, heresy is like cancer.  If it is found in some part of the Church, it must either be cured straightaway (by convincing the heretic to repent) or removed (by excommunication, if there is no repentance).  Otherwise the whole organism is threatened. 
So, why were John Paul II and Benedict XVI less severe than past popes in dealing with heterodoxy?  That’s a complicated issue, but I suspect that two of the main reasons are these.  First, with Vatican II, the Church sought to affirm, as far as was possible consistent with orthodoxy, whatever positive aspects might be found in modernity.  This led churchmen increasingly to adopt the rhetoric of freedom, democracy, human rights, religious liberty, the dignity of the person, etc., and to deemphasize those aspects of traditional Catholic teaching that do not sit well with such rhetoric.  Now, this rhetoric is, of course, the rhetoric of the liberal political tradition, broadly construed – the tradition of Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, and company.  And central to this tradition is the ideal of minimizing coercion, and respecting the liberty of the individual conscience, as far as is reasonably possible.
Now, churchmen whose moral sensibilities have been formed by this sort of rhetoric are naturally going to find distasteful the exercise of coercive power.  Gently persuadingthe heterodox is bound to seem more agreeable than disciplining them, and more in keeping with the ideals of freedom, democracy, etc.  That, I submit, is one factor underlying the leniency of the post-Vatican II popes.
The second factor, I would suggest, is that both John Paul II and Benedict XVI were intellectuals, and started out as academics.  Now, the intellectual, and especially the academic, highly values the give and take of free debate, and wants to settle disagreements through argumentation rather than the exercise of authority.  Of course, in an academic setting that is exactly the right approach to take.  But it might be tempting for an academic who becomes pope to transfer that approach to this very different context – to treat the Church as if it were a big classroom or professional academic meeting, and the faithful as students or fellow academics who will come around to the right conclusions if only you set out the arguments for them in a compelling way.
In short, though we admirers of John Paul II and Benedict XVI often think of them as Philosopher-Kings, they were really Professor-Presidents.  And the students they should have failed or dropped from the class have now taken over the classroom.

Hayek’s Tragic Capitalism

My essay “Hayek’s Tragic Capitalism” appears in the Spring 2019 issue of the Claremont Review of Books.  (It’s behind a paywall at the moment.)  From the article:
Nor will one find in [Hayek’s] work the chirpy optimism with which many libertarians and Reaganite conservatives ritualistically defend the market economy.  Hayek’s case for free enterprise doesn’t fit any of the usual simplistic stereotypes.  He not only explicitly and persistently rejected laissez-faire, but could write as eloquently about the moral downside of capitalism and the emotional attractions of socialism as any left-winger.  In an era in which – young socialist chic notwithstanding – global capitalism appears to have swept all before it, it is the triumphalist defenders of the free market rather than its critics who have the most to learn from Hayek’s cautious, nuanced apologia… For all its purported gritty realism, however, Hayek’s fusionism is no more stable than the more familiar kind.  Even putting aside Hayek’s agnosticism and his materialist assumptions about human nature (neither of which I share), his position is seriously problematic in at least three respects…
None of this implies a condemnation of capitalism per se.  The problem is one of fetishizing capitalism, of making market imperatives the governing principles to which all other aspects of social order are subordinate.  The irony is that this is a variation on the same basic error of which socialism is guilty – what Pope John Paul II called “economism,” the reduction of human life to its economic aspect.  Even F. A. Hayek, a far more subtle thinker than other defenders of the free economy, ultimately succumbed to this tendency.  Too many modern conservatives have followed his lead.  They have been so fixated on socialism and its economic irrationality that they have lost sight of other, ultimately more insidious, threats to Western civilization – including economism itself.  To paraphrase G. K. Chesterton, a madman is not someone who has lost his economic reason, but someone who has lost everything but his economic reason.
Read the whole thing.  The essay is something of a companion piece to my recent Heritage Foundation lecture on “Socialism versus the Family.”

More on presentism and truthmakers

The esteemed Bill Vallicella continues to press the truthmaker objection against presentism.  I remain unimpressed by it.  Can we break this impasse?  Let me try by, first, proposing a diagnosis of the dialectical situation.  Then I will respond to the points Bill makes in his latest post. Truthmaking and common sense
Bill, Alex Pruss, and others who are impressed by the truthmaker objection seem to think that they are merely appealing to a commonsense assumption that it would be metaphysically costly to give up, and that the trouble with presentism is that it can be reconciled with this commonsense truthmaker assumption only with considerable effort.  But I think that that is not at all what is going on.  I would say that what the critics are appealing to is not in fact a commonsense assumption, but rather a tendentious metaphysical interpretation of a commonsense assumption.  Presentism in no way conflicts with the commonsense truthmaker assumption itself.  At most, it conflicts only with the tendentious metaphysics that the critics are reading into it.
Note, before I proceed, that neither side in this dispute is saying that whatever the commonsense view turns out to be must ipso facto be the correct view.  Common sense can be wrong.  But I think both sides would agree that common sense is innocent until proven guilty, so that, all things being equal, it is better for a view to be consistent with common sense.  And what I am arguing is that, though Bill and others seem to think that presentism is at odds with common sense vis-à-vis truthmaking, they are mistaken about that.
Now, what common sense does indeed suppose is, I submit, something like this: Thoughts and sentences are, at least in most cases, made true by some reality beyond the mind and beyond language.  For example, if I have the thought that the cat is on the mat or I utter the sentence “The cat is on the mat,” then that will be true only by virtue of something distinct from my thoughts and distinct from the sentence, namely the presence of some cat on some mat.  In other words, common sense presupposes some kind of realism, as opposed to idealism or linguistic idealism. 
Naturally, common sense allows that there are somethoughts and utterances that are made true by facts about mind or language.  For example, the thought that I am now thinking about the cat on the matis made true by something going on in my mind, and the sentence “The word ‘cat’ has three letters” is made true by some fact about language.  But when I am thinking or speaking about the cat on the mat itself, the “truthmaker,” if you want to call it that, is something extra-mental and extra-linguistic.
Now, this commonsense assumption is applied to facts about the past no less than to facts about the present.  The thought that Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March, and the sentence “Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March,” are true because, as a matter of extra-linguistic and mind-independent fact, Caesar really was assassinated on the Ides of March.  Caesar, his murder, and the Ides of March aren’t things I made up or hallucinated, they aren’t mere collections of ideas in my mind or in some collection of minds, and they aren’t mere byproducts of how we use words or the like. 
In no way is this at odds with presentism.  Presentism holds that, where temporal things are concerned (as opposed to eternal or aeviternal things) only present things exist.  Hence, the cat on the mat exists, but Caesar and his assassination no longer do.  But this in no way conflicts with the commonsense assumption I’ve been describing, because it doesn’t somehow make Caesar and his assassination mind-dependent or language-dependent.  It is still the case that the thought that Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March and the sentence “Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March” are true only because of something extra-mental and extra-linguistic, namely Caesar’s really having been assassinated on the Ides of March.
So far so good.  The trouble begins only when contemporary analytic philosophers come along, take the innocuous commonsense assumption I’ve been describing, and transform it into something they call The Truthmaker Principle ©, which is the centerpiece of something called Truthmaker Theory (patent pending).  It is proposed that what common sense is committed to is the assumption that thoughts and sentences are made true by what exists.  Then it is suggested that this must be understand to mean what exists simpliciteror full stop.  And thenit is pointed out that in that case, whatever it is that makes thoughts and sentences about Caesar and the Ides of March true must be the same sort of thing that makes thoughts and sentences about the cat on the mat true.  The next thing you know, we are seriously entertaining the strange thesis that Caesar’s assassination must exist despite this event’s having ended over two millennia ago.  The sequel is that many dissertations, journal articles, and blog posts are written, many chins are earnestly pulled and brows furrowed, and (in my case, at least) some eyes are rolled. 
Whatever we want to say about this, it has nothing to do with common sense, and thus inherits none of the presumed innocence of common sense.  I would imagine that, if asked, common sense would say that truthmakers need not exist.  After all, common sense would say, the sentence that “Unicorns don’t exist” is true, but that’s not because of anything that exists.  Rather, the sentence is true precisely because unicorns don’t exist.  All common sense wants to say is that it is something about extra-mental and extra-linguistic reality that makes the sentence true, namely that there aren’t any unicorns in extra-mental or extra-linguistic reality.  That’s all the “truthmaking” we need.  We don’t need something to exist in order for the sentence to be true.  Perhaps common sense needs to be modified here.  We might say that the fact that unicorns exist is in some sense real, even if unicorns themselves are not.  But the point is that common sense itself doesn’t say this – it doesn’t ask or answer the sort of questions that truthmaker theorists might ask and answer.
Similarly, I imagine that common sense would say that there’s nothing in its assumption that thoughts and sentences are made true by extra-mental and extra-linguistic reality that requires that even existent “truthmakers” must exist full stop.  After all, the cat still exists and Caesar doesn’t, and yet neither depends on mind or language for the reality it has or had.  The Aristotelian-Thomistic philosopher (the ally of common sense) would add that it is odd to insist on talking about existence simpliciter or full stop.  After all, he says, we need to distinguish time, eternity, and aeviternity.  There is a clear sense in which what is eternal exists simpliciter or full stop, since it never comes into being or passes away.  But where temporal things are concerned, talk of what exists simpliciter or full stop is misleading, precisely because temporal things do come into being and pass away.  We can say that Caesar’s assassination existed simpliciter or full stop, since of course it did in fact occur.  But what does it mean to say that his assassination exists simpliciter or full stop, if this is not meant as the assertion that it exists now?  Does it mean that that it exists in an eternal way (as God does)?  That would be false, and in any case it isn’t what Bill or other critics of presentism are saying.  Does it mean that it exists in the way that past events are claimed to exist by presentism’s rival eternalism (which holds that past, present, and future things and events are equally real)?  That is certainly not an assumption that common sense would make, nor would Bill or other critics of presentism claim that eternalism is presupposed by common sense.  Into the bargain, this interpretation would beg the question against presentism. 
But what, then, does it mean to say that Caesar’s assassination exists simpliciter?  However we answer this question, we are, again, going well beyond anything assumed by common sense.  And thus we are going well beyond anything that would put the presentist at odds with common sense.
Notice that there is nothing special about presentism here.  Go back to the unicorn example.  It so happens that in the truthmaker literature, there is a lot of heavy going not only about presentism, but also about “negative existentials,” as they are called.  A thought or sentence to the effect that there are no unicornswould be an example of a negative existential.  How can our affirmation of such a thought or sentence be reconciled with the “truthmaker principle” as it is construed by many truthmaker theorists?  Do we have to give up the principle?  Do we have to modify it and allow that at least some truths lack truthmakers?  Do we have to say that the fact that there are no unicorns is among the things that exist, and that this existent is what makes true the sentence “There are no unicorns”?  Is it metaphysically extravagant to affirm the existence of such facts?
You might think this a weighty metaphysical conundrum, or you might think it much ado about very little.  Either way, it is hardly a serious reason to stop affirming negative existentials like “There are no unicorns,” “There are no mermaids,” etc.  If we have to give up either negative existentials or “truthmaker theory,” then we should give up the latter.  But again, this does not mean giving up what common sense supposes vis-à-vis “truthmaking.”  It merely means giving up some metaphysical construct that philosophers have come up with. 
Same with presentism.  If presentism conflicts with anything, it conflicts only with some tendentious theses of “truthmaker theory,” not with anything common sense supposes about what makes thoughts and sentences true. 
It seems to me that if Bill is going to insist that the truthmaker objection is a major challenge to presentism, then he ought also to start writing blog posts about what a grave challenge the truthmaker principle is to negative existentials, so that anyone who ever denies that something exists (unicorns, mermaids, the Easter Bunny, etc.) – which would, of course, include Bill himself – owes us an explanation of how he can reconcile this denial with the principle.  But if he does not think that our practice of denying the existence of things is problematic (and I am sure he does not), despite its apparent conflict with the truthmaker principle, then it seems to me that, to be consistent, he should conclude that the truthmaker objection to presentism is not after all as worrisome as he has taken it to be.
Presentism and truthmaking
Let’s turn to the points Bill makes in his latest post.  Bill writes: “I will take [Feser] to be saying that the truth-maker of 'Caesar was assassinated' is the fact of Caesar's having been assassinated.”  That’s correct.  That is indeed the view I expressed in earlier posts replying to him.  However, Bill goes on to object:
This is a concrete state of affairs, the subject constituent of which is Caesar himself. This state of affairs cannot exist unless Caesar himself exists.  Now Feser grants the obvious point that Caesar no longer exists.  That is is a datum that no reasonable person can deny. It follows that the truth-making state of affairs no longer exists either. 
On presentism, however, what no longer exists does not exist at all. 
End quote.  But the objection fails.  For it is, I would say, simply not true that “the fact of Caesar's having been assassinated… cannot exist unless Caesar himself exists.”  The correct thing to say is that the fact of Caesar’s having been assassinated cannot exist unless Caesar himself existed.  And Caesar did indeed once exist.  Hence it is false to conclude that “the truth-making state of affairs no longer exists either.”  The state of affairs of Caesar’s having beenassassinated does exist, even though Caesar himself doesn’t.   (To be sure, the state of affairs of Caesar’s being assassinated – present tense – will exist only if Caesar does, but that is not what we are talking about.  Again, what we are talking about is the state of affairs of Caesar’s having been assassinated.)
Bill says that unless Caesar exists, “there is nothing to ground the truth that Caesar was assassinated.”  But of course there is.  What grounds it is the fact that he did indeed exist and was in fact assassinated.  That’s the difference between sentences like “Caesar was assassinated” and sentences like “The Easter Bunny was assassinated.”  The Easter Bunny never did exist and thus never was assassinated.  Hence there is nothing to ground the truth of the latter sentence.
Bill is unhappy with this, apparently because he assumes that we should be able to describe all truthmakers in a tenseless way.  But there is nothing in what common sense says about truthmaking that requires that assumption, and it is an assumption that simply begs the question against presentism. 
Bill might object that the fact that Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March is a weird sort of fact if Caesar does not exist.  I don’t think it is weird at all.  What would be weird is to say that Caesar exists despite having been assassinated, and that his assassination exists despite being an event that ended over two millennia ago!  Be that as it may, there are, as I noted in a previous post in this exchange with Bill, various kinds of fact and various kinds of truths.  It is a mistake to suppose that all facts and all truths must be of the same kind, and thus a mistake to suppose that all truthmakers must be of the same kind.  It is also important to note that “exists” is what Thomists would call an analogical term.  When we apply it to things as diverse as substances, accidents, relations, facts, temporal things, aeviternal things, eternal things, etc., we are not using it in a univocal way, even if we are not using it in an equivocal way either.  Hence we should not expect that what is true of some existents is going to be true of others. 
Naturally, all of this raises a host of questions, but the point is that what Bill seems to think is a clear and straightforward difficulty for presentism is in fact not clear or straightforward at all.  One has to make tendentious metaphysical assumptions, and arguably question-begging ones at that, in order to generate the tension Bill thinks exists between presentism and the truthmaker principle. 
Presentism, common sense, and begging the question
As I’ve said, I would not claim that whatever view is the commonsense view must ipso facto be true.  Still, that presentism is the commonsense view cannot plausibly be denied.  Yet Bill denies it.  He writes:
Presentism… is not common sense, nor is it 'fallout' from ordinary language.  Speaking with the vulgar I say things like, 'The Berlin Wall no longer exists.' I am using ordinary English to record a well-known historical fact. Saying this, however, I do not thereby commit myself to the controversial metaphysical claim that wholly past items are nothing at all and that present items alone exist, are real, or have being. The Berlin sentence and its innumerable colleagues are neutral with respect to the issues that divide presentists and eternalists.
End quote.  I have to say that I find this claim very strange.  Take the following two propositions:
(1) The Berlin Wall does not exist.
(2) The Berlin Wall exists.
Bill seems to be claiming that on a natural, commonsense reading of the sentence “The Berlin Wall no longer exists,” that sentence does not plausibly entail (1) rather than (2).  Rather, the sentence, as far as commonsense is concerned, is neutral between (1) and (2).  Seriously?  Surely, “The Berlin Wall no longer exists” is, on a natural or commonsense reading, equivalent to “The Berlin Wall does not exist anymore.”   And surely, on a natural or commonsense reading, the statement that the Berlin Wall does not exist anymore entails that the Berlin wall does not exist.  Whether or not you think presentism is true, then, it seems quite a stretch to say that it “is not common sense, nor is it 'fallout' from ordinary language.”
In response to the charge that he is begging the question, Bill writes:
I do not assume that only presently existing items can serve as truth-makers.  What I assume is that only existing items can serve as truth-makers.  To appreciate this, consider timeless entities.  God, classically conceived, is an example… Or consider so-called 'abstract' objects such as the number 7. It is true that 7 exists.  What makes this truth true? The number 7! So again a truth-maker needn't be temporally present, or in time at all, to serve as a truth-maker. But it must exist. 
End quote.  Well, OK, fine.  But I think Bill is missing the point I was making.  He says that the truth of “Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March” presupposes that Caesar exists.  I would say: If that is meant as a roundabout way of saying that Caesar existed, then that is true.  Of course, Bill doesn’t mean it that way.  So how does he mean it?  Does he mean that Caesar exists eternally, or perhaps aeviternally?  Surely not, since Caesar was not God or an angel or a Platonic Form.  Does he mean that Caesar exists in time?  Naturally, Bill would say that Caesar existed in time, but he also agrees that Caesar does not exist now.  But in what way does Caesar exist, then, if it is not eternally, or aeviternally, or in time now?  I imagine that Bill would respond by saying: “Caesar exists in time, but not now – rather, he exists at some earlier point in time.”  But that would beg the question against the presentist, who denies that there exist any points in time other than now. 
Perhaps Bill would say that there is some furthersense in which Caesar might be said to exist – not eternally, not aeviternally, not now, and not (on pain of begging the question) at some earlier point in time.  But if so, then we are owed an explanation of exactly what sense that is.  And whatever the answer is, it too would beg the question, at least against me, since I would deny that there are any further alternatives, and I would certainly deny that we need to posit any further ones in order to respect commonsense qualms about truthmaking.
Facts and truthmaking
Bill says that my position faces a dilemma.  The truthmaker for the thought that Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March would, he says, have to be either a “fact that” or a “fact of.”  The fact that would be the propositionthat Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March.  The fact of would be a concrete state of affairs.  But it cannot be the first, because no proposition can be its own truthmaker.  And it cannot be the second, he says, because Caesar and his assassination do not exist, according to presentism.  Hence the concrete state of affairs that would be the fact of does not exist, and thus cannot serve as a truthmaker.
In response, I would say that Bill is simply describing the second horn of this purported dilemma in a tendentious way.  Yes, Caesar and his assassination do not exist, and hence the fact of Caesar’s being assassinated does not exist.  But it doesn’t follow that the fact of Caesar’s having been assassinated does not exist.  And that can serve as the truthmaker.  The fact of needn’t be what Bill supposes.  Bill will not like this since, again, he seems to assume that we must describe all truthmakers tenselessly.  But that assumption is, as I have said, question-begging.
In the comments section of Bill’s post, a reader points out that what I am talking about are facts that are neither propositions nor states of affairs with existing constituents, and that Bill “seemed to assume that such a thing is impossible rather than directly addressing the possibility” and “didn't address this other than to deny it.”  That is exactly right.  When I talk about the fact that Caesar was assassinated, I am not talking about a proposition; rather, I am talking about what the proposition that Caesar was assassinated is aboutor represents.  Nor am I talking about states of affairs with existing constituents, since Caesar and his assassination no longer exist.  Bill’s reader correctly notes that I am talking about a third possibility that Bill ignores.
Am I talking about a state of affairs of some other kind?  That depends on what you mean by “state of affairs,” an expression that is used by philosophers in different ways.  What I would say is that there are simply various ways that things are and various ways that things were, independently of thought and language, and that those are the sorts of thing I am talking about when I say that the fact that the cat is on the mat, the fact that Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March, etc. are what make true the corresponding thoughts and sentences.  Since there are these ways that things are and ways that things were, you can say that they have a kind of being and thus, if you want, that they exist(even if, in the case of ways that things were, they concern things do not themselvesexist anymore).
Does this raise metaphysical issues?  Of course.  What matters for present purposes, though, is this.  First, what I’m saying doesn’t in any way conflict with what common sense supposes vis-à-vis truthmaking.  Common sense simply doesn’t get remotely close to considering recherché ontological questions about the difference between propositions and facts, the nature of facts whose constituents no longer exist, etc.  Hence, whatever qualms Bill has about my position, he cannot reasonably say that it is somehow in tension with commonsense or intuitive assumptions about truthmaking.
Second, the issues raised are not unique to presentism.  Again, that there are no unicornsis also among the ways that things are.  Now, how can there exist facts about what does notexist?  Fair question, but no one thinks the fact that we can ask it poses some urgent, earthshaking problem for our practice of saying things like “There are no unicorns.”  Similarly, that we can raise metaphysical questions about the nature of facts about things that no longer exist does not constitute some urgent, earthshaking problem for the presentist thesis that Caesar’s assassination does not exist.
I would say: Unicorns don’t exist and never did, and Caesar’s assassination does not exist even though it once did.  Truthmaker theory has to accommodate itself to these data rather than the other way around.  Bill’s problem, it seems to me, is that he is letting the tail of tendentious contemporary truthmaker theory wag the dog of (what I claim is) the presentism that common sense takes for granted.  To be sure, if he wants to present some argument for favoring the tendentious metaphysics over common sense, that’s fine.  Again, what I object to is the suggestion that the burden of proof is on the presentist rather than on the tendentious metaphysician.
Some loose ends
Bill rejects the claim I made in an earlier post to the effect that the truthmaker objection to presentism can succeed only if the critic has a plausible alternative to presentism (and the alternatives, I argue in Aristotle’s Revenge , all fail).  Bill notes that, despite his criticisms of presentism, he does not embrace the standard eternalist alternative, and in fact he is willing to allow that it might turn out that all the extant theories of time are untenable.
This might be true of Bill as a matter of biographical fact, but it is irrelevant to the point I was making.  The truthmaker objection to presentism holds that a sentence like “Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March” can be true only if Caesar exists, and the objection concedes that Caesar does not exist now.  But then the person raising the objection owes us an explanation of exactly howCaesar can intelligibly be said to exist if he doesn’t exist now (and also doesn’t exist eternally or aeviternally).  And as I noted above, the only answer on offer is the claim that he exists at some past point in time, as theories like eternalism and the growing block theory would hold.  But in that case, the truthmaker objection, to be intelligible, at least implicitly presupposes that some such alternative theory is correct.  It will not do, then, to say that one can coherently press the truthmaker objection against presentism and at the same time hold that none of the alternative theories are any good.  The objection will not work unless some alternative theory also works. 
Finally, Bill comments in passing on a brief remark I made in Aristotle’s Revenge (at p. 239) to the effect that there is a sense in which past events exist now insofar as their effects remain.  Bill says:
[I]t is not clear to me how this notion (causal trace theory) is supposed to cohere with what Feser says elsewhere in his section on time. How does it cohere with what we discussed above?  It is one thing to say that the truth-maker of 'Caesar was assassinated' is the fact that C. was assassinated, and quite another to say that the truth-maker exists in the present in the form of present effects of C.'s past existence.  
End quote.  I don’t think Bill read what I wrote with sufficient care.  What I actually wrote in Aristotle’s Revenge is that “past and future exist now only in the loose sense that they are, as it were, causally contained in what exists now” but that “what actually exists in the strict sense is what exists now” (p. 239, emphasis added).  The qualifiers “loose” and “strict” should have made it clear what I meant, and why there is no conflict between what I said about causal traces and the presentist thesis that past events do not exist.  And I never said (nor would I say) that Caesar’s effect on the present is the truthmaker for the sentence “Caesar was assassinated.” 
Related posts:
Vallicella on the truthmaker objection against presentism
Vallicella on existence-entailing relations and presentism
Aristotelians ought to be presentists
Gödel and the unreality of time
A difficulty for Craig’s kalām cosmological argument?
Yeah, but is it actually actually infinite?

Some comments on the open letter

What should we think of the recent open letter accusing Pope Francis of heresy, signed by Fr. Aidan Nichols, Prof. John Rist, and other priests and academics (and for which Prof. Josef Seifert has now expressed his support)?  Like others who have commented on it, I think the letter overstates things in its main charge and makes some bad arguments, but that it also makes many correct and important points that cannot reasonably be dismissed merely because the letter is seriously deficient in other respects.  As to the main charge, it is true that a pope can fall into doctrinal error, even material heresy, when not speaking ex cathedra.  However, whether and how a pope can be charged with formal heresy, and what the consequences would be if he were guilty of it, are simply much less clear-cut canonically and theologically than the letter implies.  Some of the Church’s greatest theologians have speculated about the matter, and while there are serious arguments for various possible positions, there is no theological consensus and no magisterial teaching which resolves the issue.  Moreover, a pope falling into formal heresy would be about as grave a crisis for the Church as can be imagined.  So, maximum caution is called for before making such a charge, and in my opinion it is simply rash flatly to accuse the pope of “the canonical delict of heresy,” as the letter does.
Some of the arguments deployed are also ill-advised, to say the least.  For example, it was foolish to appeal to the allegedly sinister shape of the staff that the pope used in a particular mass as evidence of heretical intent.  To be sure, the open letter does not make much of this, but it is a bad argument, and the letter’s critics have understandably pounced on it.
I would guess that these serious problems with the letter are one reason that it did not gather more signatures, though it is certainly significant that it attracted signatories as formidable as Nichols and Rist.  (This is not meant in any way as a slight against the other signatories, some of whom are also formidable scholars.  But most of them have signed several other public statements critical of Pope Francis, so the fact that they signed this one is less noteworthy than the fact that Nichols and Rist signed it.) 
Another reason, I suspect, is that by now it seems that there is little point to further public letters and petitions critical of Pope Francis, when several others have already been issued and simply ignored by the pope, the cardinals, and the bishops.  (I signed one of them myself.)  I realize that the signatories to this latest open letter do not suppose they are likely to move the bishops to action, but merely want to get into the historical record a summary of the problems with some of Pope Francis’s words and actions and the fact that there were faithful Catholic scholars who criticized them.  But there is a point to doing even that much only if the letter adds something new and significant to the previous letters and petitions, and the main thing this one adds is a charge that is, as I say, rashly made. 
Having said all that, it simply will not do for critics of the letter to point to its deficiencies and then roll over and go back to sleep.  The letter, however problematic, is a response to statements and actions of the pope that are also seriously problematic.  And if its rashness reflects a kind of exasperation on the part of the signatories, it cannot reasonably be denied that the pope can indeed be exasperating. 
For example, Pope Francis has made many statements that at least seem to contradict traditional Catholic teaching on divorce and remarriage, conscience, grace, the diversity of religions, contraception,capital punishment, and a variety of other topics.  The open letter is right about that.  Indeed, at least where the number of problematic statements from Pope Francis is concerned, the open letter actually understates the case, because it does not address the pope’s remarks about contraception, capital punishment, or certain other issues.  The sheer volume of these problematic statements is alarming in itself, whatever one thinks of any one of them considered in isolation.  You can find previous popes who have made a theologically problematic statement here or there.  You cannot find a previous pope who has made so manytheologically problematic statements. 
It is true that the pope’s defenders have come up with ways to read some of these statements so as to reconcile them with traditional doctrine.  But there are two general problems with such attempts, even apart from the fact that not all of the proposed readings are terribly plausible.
First, and as I have pointed out before, when defending the doctrinal soundness of a statement, it does not suffice to come up with some strained or unnatural interpretation that avoids strict heresy.  That is a much lower standard than the Church herself has applied historically, and would rule out very little. 
To take an example I have used in the past, even the statement “God does not exist” could be given an orthodox interpretation if you strain hard enough.  You could say: “What I mean when I say that is that God does not ‘exist’ in the sense of merely having or participating in existence, the way other things do.  Rather, he just is Subsistent Being Itself and the source of the existence of other things.”  The trouble is that the average person would not understand such a high falutin’ interpretation even if it occurred to him.  The average person would naturally hear the statement in question as an expression of atheism.  He would be especially likely to do so if the statement was addressed to a mass audience rather than to an audience of academics, and if the person who made the statement did not himself clarify things by explicitly giving a non-atheistic interpretation. 
A theological statement – especially when made by a churchman to a mass audience – should be clearly orthodox on a natural reading, not merely arguably orthodox on some creative reading.  This is why the Church has traditionally held that being strictly heretical is only one of several ways that a statement can be doctrinally objectionable.  Even a statement that is not explicitly heretical might still be erroneous, or proximate to heresy, or rash, or ambiguous, or “offensive to pious ears,” or subject to one of the other theological censureswith which the Church has in the past condemned various theological opinions. 
Where the question of problematic papal statements is concerned, we might consider the cases of Pope Honorius I and Pope John XXII, who are frequently cited as the two clearest examples of popes who arguably were guilty of heresy.  Their defenders have argued that the precise wording of the statements that got them into trouble could be construed as strictly heretical only in light of later dogmatic definitions, rather than in light of definitions already on the books in their day.  Even if that is the case, however, the fact remains that John XXII, who had denied that the blessed in heaven immediately enjoy the beatific vision after death, recanted this error in the face of vigorous criticism from the theologians of his day.  The fact remains that Honorius was condemned by two later popes for his statements, which at least gave aid and comfort to the Monothelite heresy.  Pope St. Leo II declared:
We anathematize… Honorius, who did not attempt to sanctify this Apostolic Church with the teaching of Apostolic tradition, but by profane treachery permitted its purity to be polluted.and:
Honorius… did not, as became the Apostolic authority, extinguish the flame of heretical teaching in its first beginning, but fostered it by his negligence.
So, whether or not Honorius and John XXII were guilty of strict heresy, they were undeniably guilty of making statements that fell under one or more of the lesser theological censures cited above.  Similarly, even if Pope Francis’s problematic statements can be given readings that avoid strict heresy, it doesn’t follow that they can avoid falling under one or more of the lesser theological censures.
The second problem with the proposed explanations of Pope Francis’s remarks is that it is the pope himself, and not his defenders, who should be providing them, and he has persistently refused to do so.  The open letter is right to complain about this.  For one thing, upholding traditional teaching and resolving doctrinal disputes is the main job of a pope.  Hence, that he has still not responded to the now famous dubia(to take just one example) is indefensible.  He has in this regard clearly failed to do his duty, and it is intellectually dishonest for his defenders to pretend otherwise.  Had the pope simply reaffirmed traditional teaching in response to these straightforward and respectfully presented questions from several of his cardinals, the main doctrinal controversy that has roiled his pontificate would have been swiftly resolved. 
For another thing, what a person fails to say, and how he acts, can “send a message” no less than what he does explicitly say.  The open letter is also right to emphasize that.  Suppose, to return to my example, that I not only publicly stated “God does not exist,” but also refused to say one way or the other whether I myself endorsed the non-atheistic interpretation of this utterance proposed by some of my defenders on my behalf.  Suppose also that I frequently praised atheist thinkers like Nietzsche, Marx, Sartre, et al. and frequently criticized theistic religions and thinkers.  But suppose too that, for all that, I still denied that I was an atheist.  People would naturally be confused, and many would suspect that I was simply engaging in double-talk – that I really was an atheist but didn’t want to be entirely frank about it.
Similarly, when the pope not only makes theologically ambiguous statements about divorce and remarriage, conscience, etc. but refuses to clarify those statements, and promotes and praises people with a reputation for departing from traditional teaching in these areas while criticizing and sidelining people with a reputation for upholding traditional teaching, it is hardly surprising if many people worry – whether correctly or not – that he does not agree with traditional teaching but doesn’t want to say so directly. 
Suppose that the open letter had alleged, not that the pope is guilty of the canonical delict of heresy, but rather that the pope’s words and actions have, even if inadvertently, encouraged doctrinal error, or perhaps that the pope has been negligent in his duty to uphold sound doctrine.  It would be much harder to defend the pope against these milder charges, as the evidence adduced in the open letter clearly shows.  These milder charges also would not raise the question of the loss of the papal office, with all of its unresolved canonical and theological difficulties and horrific practical implications.  And it would also (unlike the prospect of a formally heretical pope) have clear precedents in the cases of Honorius and John XXII.
The Church famously teaches that the salvation of souls is the supreme law.  She does not teach that defending the pope at all costs is the supreme law.  Some of the pope’s defenders seem not to know the difference.  But as the precedents of St. Paul’s rebuke of St. Peter, the condemnation of Pope Honorius, and the 14th century theologians’ criticism of Pope John XXII all show – and as the Church herself has always acknowledged – it can happen, albeit very rarely, that what the salvation of souls requires is precisely the correction rather than defense of a pope.  The open letter is right about that too.  However, such correction must be carried out with filial reverence, and with extreme caution. 
Related posts:
The Church permits criticism of popes under certain circumstances
Papal fallibility
Why Archbishop Viganò is almost certainly telling the truth
Denial flows into the Tiber
How Pope Benedict XVI dealt with disagreement
Nudge nudge, wink wink

Review of Brague

My review of Rémi Brague’s new book Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom for the Modern Age appears at Catholic Herald.  Links to other book reviews can be found at my main website.

Open the thread!

It’s your opportunity lawfully to indulge your impulse to make those off-topic comments I’m constantly having to delete.  Do so in good conscience, because nothing is really off-topic in this, the latest open thread.  From Donald Fagen to Ronald Reagan, from the Black Dahlia to papal regalia to inverted qualia – discuss whatever you like.  As always, just keep it classy and civil and free of trolling and troll-feeding.  Links to previous open threads can be found here.

Aristotelians ought to be presentists

Presentism holds that within the temporal domain, only the present exists and the past and future do not.  Alex Pruss thinks that Aristotelians shouldn’t be presentists.  That would be news to Aristotle, Aquinas, and other presentist Aristotelians.  I agree with them rather than with Alex, and I think that presentism is in fact the natural view to take if one starts with an Aristotelian view of the nature of physical reality, and of the nature of time in particular.  I spell all this out at length in Aristotle’s Revenge .  Here I will just try briefly to convey the general idea. Remember that change, for the Aristotelian, entails the actualization of potential.  For example, when a green banana ripens and turns yellow, the banana’s potential to be yellow is actualized, and when it later begins to rot and turns brown, its potential to be brown is actualized.  Now, time, for the Aristotelian, is just the measure of change with respect to succession.  When we say that it took a week for a banana to ripen and then rot, we are measuring the rate at which these changes succeeded one another.  Time thus piggybacks on change.  
Hence, the material world is a temporal world precisely because it is a changeable world.  For the Aristotelian, matter just is, fundamentally, the potentiality for form, and change is the actualization of that potentiality – matter’s taking on new forms which supplant the ones that had been there before.  Time actually passes only insofar as this supplanting occurs.  Because God is pure actuality without potentiality, his mode of existence is strictly eternal or timeless rather than temporal. 
Angels occupy a strange middle ground.  Because they are immaterial, angels are, unlike physical objects, imperishable.  They have no matter that can lose substantial form, which is what happens when a physical substance perishes.  So, being immaterial, they are not in time.  Still, angels, like us, have to be created, and they can exhibit something analogous to change of a mental sort.  Hence they are not eternal either.  This middle ground between temporality and eternity is called aeviternity.  
Now, suppose God creates a physical universe with only a single thing in it, an unripe green banana.  Suppose that he does so in such a way that its natural tendencies are miraculously suspended.  For example, it does not begin to ripen.  It is changeable, but its potentialities are not actualized, so that there is in fact no change.
For this reason, there is also no passage of time in this imagined world.  Hence there are no past or future events.  Is there a present?  Surely there is, because since this is a material world, we are not talking about eternity and we are not talking about aeviternity.  We are talking about the third alternative, a temporal world.  It’s just a world in which time has been suspended – precisely because change has been suspended – rather than being altogether atemporal.  It’s now in this world, even if what is now never becomes past.  It is for that reason a presentist world, since the present exists and past and future do not.
Now suppose instead that change is not suspended and the banana begins to ripen.  It goes from green to yellow.  What that means is that it has lost its greenness and gained yellowness, and that in turn boils down to its no longer being merely potentially yellow but instead actually yellow, and its no longer being actually green.  And if the process continues until the banana rots, the banana will eventually actualize its potential to be brown.  In this case we have the passage of time.  
While the banana is still yellow, though, does the future, brown state of the banana exist? Of course not, because the brownness is at this point still in the banana only potentially, not actually.  The future state of the banana no more exists in this scenario than it did on the first scenario, in which change was suspended.  There being change, and thus temporal passage, on this second scenario in no way suffices to make it true that future things and events exist.  They willexist, but until the potentialities are actualized, they do not.
But what about the past, such as the banana’s being green?  Does that exist after the banana has turned yellow?  How could it?  After the banana has turned yellow, its greenness is at that point no longer actual, any more than the brownness is actual.  Hence the greenness no more exists than the brownness does.  The greenness did exist, just as the brownness will exist.  But neither does exist.  The past, like the future, no more exists on this scenario than it did in the first scenario, in which change had been suspended.  So on this scenario too, we have a presentist world.  But the actual world is in all relevant respects like this second scenario.  It’s just that there are a lot more things in the actual world than a single banana.  So the actual world is a presentist world.
Now, so far I have left only implicit a further, key element of the Aristotelian view of time, and making it explicit will help make it clear where the illusion that past and future events exist comes from.  Remember that I said that time is the measure of change with respect to succession.  But whois doing the measuring?  The answer is that the mind does the measuring.  There is a sense, then, in which time is mind-dependent.  The qualifier “in a sense” is crucial, however, because the Aristotelian view of time is not an idealist one.
The best way to understand it is to think of it on analogy with the Aristotelian position on universals. For the Aristotelian, a universal like triangularity does not exist as a Platonic Form, in a third realm distinct from concrete individuals on the one hand and minds on the other.  It exists only as abstracted by the mind from concrete individual triangles.  At the same time, it is not a free creation of the mind.  Triangularity is really there in the concrete individual triangles, but just mixed in with their individualizing features, as it were, rather than existing there qua universal.  The Aristotelian view is not Platonist, but it is not nominalist either.
Now, where time is concerned, the Aristotelian rejects the idealist view that time is entirely a creation of the mind, just as he rejects the nominalist view that universals are free creations of the mind.  But neither does the Aristotelian accept the idea that time exists as a kind of substance in its own right, entirely apart from the world of changing things, as the Newtonian absolutist does.  That, for the Aristotelian, would be comparable to the Platonic error of regarding universals as substances in their own right, occupying their own distinctive realm.  To speak of time as if it existed entirely apart from change and apart from the minds that measure change is like speaking of triangularity as if it were a Platonic Form that existed entirely apart from all concrete individual triangles and all minds.
One thing that can happen when we start to Platonize time in this way is that we take the units in terms of which the mind measures change – seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, and so on – and we reify them.  For example, we start talking about last month, or about the year 1947, as if it were some entity that we have in some way moved past, and of next month, and the year 2047, as if they too were entities, but ones that we haven’t arrived at yet.  We concretize abstractions, as we do when we talk about the Form of Triangularity. 
This is exacerbated by the tendency in physics to confuse mathematical models of physical reality with physical reality itself.  Especially since space too tends in physics to be represented in a highly abstract mathematical way, the highly abstract mathematical representation of time that physics works with facilitates thinking of time as space-like, which further aggravates the tendency to think of all moments of time as in some way equally real.  From the Aristotelian point of view, these are all just variations on the same Platonizing error.  The B-theory of time, speculations about the possibility of time travel, and other exotica familiar from the contemporary philosophy of time literature have diverse philosophical motivations – including philosophical motivations disguised as scientific ones – but a major part of the story is this basic error (as the Aristotelian sees it) of reifying abstractions.  (Again, these points are all developed at length in Aristotle’s Revenge.)
Let me now turn, then, to Alex Pruss’s objection.  Alex writes:
A foundational commitment of Aristotelian philosophy is that all facts are grounded in what substances and features intrinsic to substances, namely forms and accidents, exist. But it is possible for the past to have been different without there being any difference in what substances and features intrinsic to substances presently exist. Therefore, the Aristotelian cannot equate present existence with existence.
In other words, Aristotelians cannot escape the standard grounding arguments against presentism.
End quote.  What he has in mind by “the standard grounding arguments against presentism” are arguments like the truthmaker objection and the objection from existence-entailing relations, which I have addressed in my recent exchanges with Bill Vallicella.
Now, Alex is right that the Aristotelian grounds facts in existing substances and features of substances.  But he errs in assuming that this thesis simply must be read in a way that would pose problems for the presentist.  That Aristotelians like Aristotle and Aquinas were themselves presentists should make that obvious enough.  There are facts about the White House and there are facts about the north tower of the old World Trade Center, whereas there are not, in the same sense, facts about Stark Tower (from the Marvel comics and movies).  The reason is that the White House does exist and the north tower of the World Trade Center didexist, whereas Stark Tower is purely fictional.  
What the Aristotelian thesis that Alex cites is intended to rule out are views that deny the ontologically fundamental status of substances, as well as idealism, relativism, and other views that might be taken to deny the reality of ordinary material substances.  Presentism fully respects such concerns.  Again, there really was a north tower of the old World Trade Center, even though it no longer exists.  We needn’t somehow translate that statement into a statement about what exists now, or what exists in some tenseless way, in order to capture the relevant point.  The fact that the tower didexist is sufficient to respect the Aristotelian concern to ground all facts in reality.  
Nothing more need be said, it seems to me, to reconcile the Aristotelian’s presentism with his concern to ground all facts in real substances and their features.  If someone has a problem with this reconciliation, I submit that it is not Aristotelianismthat is the source of the worry, but some other philosophical commitment.