Edward Feser's Blog, page 54

Three problems with the change to the Catechism (Updated)

UPDATE 8/13: The Stream recently interviewed me about the change to the Catechism.

In a new article at Catholic Herald, I analyze the recent revision to the Catechism in greater detail.  I argue that there are three serious problems with it.  

An op-ed on the revision by Joseph Bessette, my co-author on By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed , appears at The Wall Street Journal.  

Joe and I were recently interviewed by LifeSiteNews.  Today I did a Skype interview on the subject with Michael Knowles at The Daily Wire. At Public Discourse, Prof. Korey Maas comments on my arguments concerning capital punishment and their relationship to the controversy over Dignitatis Humanae.

Three problems with the change to the Catechism

In a new article at Catholic Herald, I analyze the recent revision to the Catechism in greater detail.  I argue that there are three serious problems with it.  
An op-ed on the revision by Joseph Bessette, my co-author on By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed , appears at The Wall Street Journal.  

Joe and I were recently interviewed by LifeSiteNews.  Today I did a Skype interview on the subject with Michael Knowles at The Daily Wire.
At Public Discourse, Prof. Korey Maas comments on my arguments concerning capital punishment and their relationship to the controversy over Dignitatis Humanae.

Pope Francis and capital punishment

Pope Francis has changed the Catechism’s teachingon capital punishment so that it now flatly rules out the practice as “inadmissible” on doctrinal, and not merely prudential, grounds – apparently contradicting two millennia of clear and consistent teaching to the contrary.  I comment on this development in an article at First Things. That capital punishment can be legitimate at least in principle is a teaching that clearly meets the criteria for being an infallible and irreformable doctrine of the ordinary Magisterium of the Church, for reasons I set out at length in a recent article at Catholic World Report.  The evidence is set out in even greater depth by Joseph Bessette and I in our book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment .
To contradict this traditional teaching is a doctrinal error, pure and simple – something possible when a pope is not speaking ex cathedra, albeit most popes bend over backwards to avoid even the appearance of such a thing.  However, on several issues – marriage and divorce, worthiness to receive Holy Communion, contraception, capital punishment, and more – Pope Francis has repeatedly made statements that appear to contradict traditional Catholic teaching, and has persistently refused to respond to respectful requests for clarification made by members of the hierarchy and prominent theologians.  Moreover, he has done so not only in offhand comments during interviews and the like, but in official magisterial documents, such as Amoris Laetitia, and now the Catechism.  
This is, to put it mildly, a highly unusual situation.  These are not normal times in the Church.  It was providential that the CDF under Pope St. John Paul II made it explicit, in Donum Veritatis , that Catholic theologians have the right and sometimes even the duty respectfully to raise criticisms of deficient magisterial documents.  As I showed in a recent article, this teaching is by no means a novelty, but has deep roots in the tradition of the Church – for example, in Aquinas’s discussion of the right and duty of the faithful to correct errant prelates, even publicly.  There can be no reasonable doubt that the norms set out by Donum Veritatis, by Aquinas, and by this neglected part of Catholic tradition in general, are by no means of merely theoretical interest.  They have urgent contemporary practical application.  
Defenders of the change to the Catechism will no doubt be trotting out the (sometimes shrill and poorly argued) critiques of By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed that appeared last year.  Here are links to my replies to the most significant of these critiques:
Hot Air vs. Capital Punishment: A Reply to Paul Griffiths and David Bentley Hart, Catholic World Report (November 28, 2017)
Traditional Catholic Doctrine on Capital Punishment is Irreversible: A Reply to E. Christian Brugger, Public Discourse(November 19, 2017)
St. John Paul II Did Not Change Catholic Teaching on Capital Punishment: A Reply to E. Christian Brugger, Public Discourse(November 20, 2017)
Capital Punishment, Catholicism, and Natural Law: A Reply to Christopher Tollefsen, Public Discourse (November 21, 2017)
On capital punishment, even the pope’s defenders are confused [A reply to Robert Fastiggi, Austen Ivereigh, Christian Brugger, and Mark Shea], Catholic World Report (October 21, 2017)
Catholic theologians must set an example of intellectual honesty: A reply to Prof. Robert Fastiggi, Catholic World Report (October 30, 2017)
Yes, traditional Church teaching on capital punishment is definitive [A further reply to Fastiggi], Catholic World Report(November 21, 2017)
Capital punishment and the infallibility of the ordinary Magisterium, Catholic World Report (January 20, 2018)

Tugwell on St. Albert on negative theology

Negative theology is a crucial component of classical theism.  To a first approximation, the idea is that at least with respect to some aspects of the divine nature, we can say what God is not rather than what he is.  But again, that is only a first approximation, and a potentially misleading one at that.  In his long and substantive introduction to the spiritual theology of St. Albert the Great in Albert and Thomas: Selected Writings , Fr. Simon Tugwell makes some important observations about the matter.  I want to call attention to four of them. An obvious and uncontroversial example of negative theology would be the claim that God is uncaused.  To say that God is uncaused is, by itself, merely to say that he is not caused.  This assertion doesn’t strictly tell us what God isbut what he is not.  Pretty simple.  Except that there is more to it than that, and my “by itself” qualifier is essential.  This brings me to the first point from Tugwell:
1. Negative theology is not a matter of God merely lacking something
Suppose your eight-year-old child has started piano lessons and seems to be doing reasonably well.  You mention to a friend that your child seems to be musical.  Suppose your friend responds, blandly and without a trace of irony: “That’s interesting.  I was watching this movie Amadeus last night.  Mozart was musical too.”  I’ve embellished Tugwell’s example a bit, but he observes that “we might… hesitate to say that Mozart was ‘musical’; the little boy next door may be musical, but Mozart—?  The word hardly begins to do justice to his talent” (p. 43).  
The point, of course, is not that Mozart is lackingmusical ability, but rather that what he has is not properly conveyed by attributing to him the sort of thing a little boy has.  Saying that “Mozart was musical too” trivializes his ability.  Mozart is more than “musical” in the sense in which the boy is musical, not less.  Hence, Tugwell suggests, we might truly say that Mozart was not musical, insofar as what Mozart had was not limited to being “musical” in the way that a little boy might be musical.
To supplement Tugwell’s example, consider the famous lines from The Elephant Man: “I am not an animal!  I am a human being!”  In saying this, Joseph Merrick was not intending to contradict the Aristotelian definition of a human being as a rational animal, and he was certainly not claiming to be less than an animal.  Rather, he was saying that he was more than a mere animal.  You might think of the remark as a kind of “negative anthropology,” one we all deploy when we distinguish human beings from animals.  What we are saying is not that human beings lack animality, but rather that they cannot be reduced to mere animality.  
So, go back to the claim that God is uncaused.  When we refer to the cause of a thing, we are identifying something external to it that explains it or makes it intelligible, something that makes it the case that it exists or that it has some attribute.  But when classical theists say that God is uncaused, they are not saying that God lacks intelligibility or an explanation of his existence or attributes.  They are not denying the principle of sufficient reason.  Rather, they are saying that, unlike other things, the source of God’s intelligibility, what explains his existence and attributes, is not to be found in something external to him.  Rather, it is to be found within him, in his very nature.  Things need causes to the extent that they exhibit potentiality or composition.  God is purely actual or without potentiality, and absolutely simple rather than composite.  Hence he needs, and indeed can have, nothing outside him that could cause his existence and attributes.  
The claim that God is uncaused is, accordingly, not the claim that God has less intelligibility than things that have causes do, but rather that he has more intelligibility than these other things do.  His intelligibility is entirely intrinsicto him as something that is, as it were, “already” purely actual and thus has no need for some external agent to actualize him.  Other things have less intelligibility insofar as any explanation of their existence and attributes has, to some extent, to refer to something outside them.
In general, claims of negative theology are not mere negations.  They are not mere denials that God is this or that.  They tend to contain an affirmative implication as well, to the effect that there is something in God (intelligibility, for example), but without the limitations that that something exhibits when it is found in creatures.  
2. The metaphorical and mystical names of God
This leads naturally to a second point.  St. Albert notes that there are two sorts of negations that the negative theologian wants to make.  Suppose someone said that “God is a rock,” meaning that, like a rock, God is solid, stable, and a foundation on which other things might rest.  The negative theologian will point out that this way of speaking can only be metaphorical rather than literally true.  
But other claims about God are not metaphorical.  For example, when we say God is a cause, we are speaking literally.  But God’s mode of causality is nevertheless radically unlike that of creaturely causes.  For example, when bringing about effects, God does not work through corporeal organs, the way we do.  For the very existence of anything corporeal is precisely part of what he is causing.  Hence we have to deny that God’s causality is like the causality with which we are familiar in experience.  As Aquinas emphasizes, we have to say that there is in God, not the samecausality that we see in the world around us, but rather something analogous to what we call causality in the world around us – where analogical attributions of this sort are not univocal but not metaphorical either.  
Albert gives as an example the attribution of fatherhoodto God.  This is, for Albert, no mere metaphor.  At the same time, here too we are attributing to God something which, in its creaturely manifestations, has all sorts of limitations that cannot apply to God.  For example, human fathers produce their children by way of sexual reproduction and thus by way of corporeal organs, they are imperfect in their love and wisdom, and so on.  None of this is true of God.  So, for much of the content we associate with the term “father,” the negative theologian will deny that it applies to God.
These non-metaphorical attributions are labeled by Albert the “mystical” or “secret” names of God.  The idea is that when we call God a cause or a father, we are not speaking merely metaphorically, but that since the limitations associated with creaturely causes or fathers must be negated, the positive content of the attribution is thinned out in the extreme.  The nature of God’s causality and fatherhood are in this way largely secretor hidden to us.  We can affirm literally that God is a cause and that he is a father, but we can say far more about what this does not involve than what it does involve.  
There are, Albert says, three ways that these mystical names of God can be potentially misleading, so that the negative theologian insists on qualifying them:
[T]hey present as complex a reality which is of infinite simplicity; they present imperfectly what is absolutely perfect; and they sometimes present as an accident something which is really substance.  (Quoted at p. 77 of Tugwell)
Hence, creaturely causes are always composite.  In the case of a physical substance, this entails having corporeal parts, and with all creaturely causes it entails at the very least being a composite of act and potency.  But God is pure actuality and entirely simple or non-composite.  Creaturely causes are always in various ways limited or imperfect in their causal power.  God is not.  In a created thing, we can distinguish between the thing itself, its causal power, and the exercise of that causal power on some particular occasion.  In God, who is simple or non-composite, we cannot make such distinctions.  Hence much of the content we associate with the things of our experience that we call causes has to be negated in the case of God.
This does not entail that there is no positive content left over once the needed negations have been made, though classical theists disagree about the extent to which our knowledge of God is negative.  (I discuss this issue in the chapter on God’s nature in Five Proofs of the Existence of God .)  But even where the attribution of something God is not metaphorical, the negative theologian insists that its positive content will, given God’s pure actuality, simplicity, etc., inevitably be at least somewhat less than meets the eye.
I would add to what St. Albert and Tugwell have to say that if you think this somehow makes theology suspect, you should keep in mind that exactly the same thing occurs in physics, when the physicist describes something remote from ordinary experience.  For example, as philosopher of physics David Albert notes in his book Quantum Mechanics and Experience , the physicist’s notion of a superposition has very little positive content.  What the physics tells us about a quantum object in a superposition of states A and B, Albert says, is that it is not in A and it is not in B and it is not in both and it is not in neither, but rather in a superposition of A and B.  “And what that means (other than “none of the above”) we don’t know” so that “superposition” is “just a name for something we don’t understand” (p. 11).  
This is exactly what we should expect.  The human intellect’s natural home, as it were, is the world of ordinary physical objects, which are mixtures of actuality and potentiality.  But God is pure actuality devoid of potentiality.  And quantum mechanics, I would argue, studies that level of physical reality which is closest to (though not quite identical with) what the Aristotelian would call prime matter – the pure potentiality to take on form. The closer the intellect gets to either pure actuality or pure potentiality, the less its ordinary modes of description apply, and the more those modes of description have to be qualified by negations.
3. Negative theology can lead precisely toward scripture rather than away from it
Classical theists are sometimes accused of conceiving of God in a way that lets philosophical speculation trump scripture.  When one considers how deeply scripture permeates the thinking and writing of classical theists like Athanasius, Augustine, Aquinas, et al., the charge can be seen to be quite ridiculous.  But as Tugwell points out (see pp. 43 and 78-79), classical theism’s emphasis on the role of negative theology in a proper understanding of God often leads its advocates precisely toward an accent on scripture rather than away from it.
The reason is that one of the key themes of negative theology is the limitations that inevitably face the unaided human intellect in grasping the divine nature given, on the one hand, its creaturely and finite nature, and on the other hand, the infinity of God.  The human mind simply cannot, on its own, attain very much in the way of positive knowledge of the divine nature (though, again, exactly how much or little positive knowledge we have is a matter of dispute between classical theists).  Hence we must rely largely (or entirely, depending on the negative theologian in question) on God’s revelation to us in the Bible, rather than on anything philosophical speculation can yield.  
In this way, negative theology can lead precisely to an emphasis on scripture over philosophy as a source of knowledge of the divine nature.  Note that the point isn’t that it always leads in this direction or that it has to.  Moreover, even the scripture-oriented negative theologian will insist that scriptural descriptions of God must always be interpreted in a way that avoids the attribution to God of any creaturely limitations.  The point is rather that it is superficial to suppose that classical theism’s key philosophical commitments entail a downgrading of scripture.
4. Negative theology is a remedy against idolatry
Albert summarizes the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius as the thesis that God “is seen precisely in our ignorance of him” (quoted at p. 90).  It is only when we take seriously all the ways that God is not, how radically unlike created things he is, that we begin to get a glimpse of the divine nature.  Tugwell writes:
[This] might appear to make God painfully remote.  But if this is how it strikes us, we need to look carefully at our reaction.  There is a very proper way to make Godremote from us, namely, the removing of our comfortable false gods, our idols.  Negative theology reminds us of just how many things are not God. The patron saint of a later and rather different kind of "mystical theology," St. John of the Cross, tears away at our domesticated deities with almost insolent ruthlessness.  If we feel that St. Albert is “taking away our God,” maybe our “God” was never really worth having anyway. (p. 92)
It is in light of these four points from Tugwell that we need to understand the criticisms Thomists sometimes raise against the thesis that “God is a person.”  Tugwell writes:
If certain particular ways of talking about God come to be taken as fully clear and satisfactory accounts of what God is like, our very clarity will do much to obscure our apprehension of him. The modern dogma, for instance, that “God is a person” can be given a perfectly serviceable sense, as long as we do not imagine that it tells us what God is in a way that we can understand.  If we omit the negative corrective, as most of the devotees of this slogan appear to do, then not only do we produce some rather bizarre theologies, not only do we cut ourselves off from many centuries of Christian tradition, but we also trap ourselves in assumptions about the Christian life that may actually make life rather miserable for us… [T]his is likely to conjure up all kinds of associations, which will in many cases be frequently disappointed. (p. 94)
Tugwell goes on to suggest that to say something like “God is truth” is no less correct than saying “God is a person,” but entails such a radically different way of conceiving of God that it helps to balance slogans like “God is a person” and to correct the crude anthropomorphisms we are liable fall into if we focus obsessively on that slogan.  
It is these crude anthropomorphisms that can lead to the spiritual misery and disappointment to which Tugwell refers.  We can start to think of God in a very worldly way, as if he were like a rich uncle or a conscientious bureaucrat, only smarter and stronger and invisible.  If an uncle doesn’t send us that check we desperately need or a local bureaucrat doesn’t get that pothole repaired, we start to doubt his good will or competence.  And if God doesn’t get us that job we prayed for, or heal that disease we’re suffering from, we start to doubt hisgood will or competence – if we are thinking of him in crudely anthropomorphic terms.  But God is not a mere doler-out of this-worldly goodies and favors, not because he is lessthan that, but because he is morethan that.  His will for us is for a good that transcends these worldly goods, and if he does not give us what we want here and now it is only because he wants to give us something far greater in the hereafter.  And he knows – in a way we can’t, and precisely because he is not a mere cosmic uncle or bureaucrat – that denying us these worldly goods is itself sometimes precisely the best way to ensure that we attain that higher good.  
As I have explained many times – though some people seem willfully to refuse to get the point – when criticizing the thesis that “God is a person,” the Thomist is emphatically not saying that God is impersonal.  To think that is like thinking that Joseph Merrick was denying that he had the animal faculties of sensation, appetite, and locomotion when he said “I am not an animal.”  It is like thinking that we are denying that Mozart had musical ability when we object to the bland remark that “Mozart was musical too.”
No, Merrick was saying that he was more than a mere animal, not less.  Mozart was more than merely “musical” in the way that a little boy might be musical, not less.  And God is more than the sort of person with which we are familiar in ordinary experience, not less.  The slogan “God is a person” trivializes the intellect, will, and love that are in God, just as “Mozart was musical too” trivializes Mozart’s ability, and just as remarks like “Human beings are just animals” trivialize human beings.
As I have also said many times, the problem with the slogan “God is a person” is not the word “person” but the word “a.”  There are two main reasons why this word is problematic, one philosophical and one theological.  The philosophical reason is that the slogan suggests that God is a member of the genus person, in his own species alongside the species human person and the species angelic person.  And that cannot be right, because God is not in any genus at all.  If he were, then he would be composite – he would have a genus, and a differentia that marks his species out from other species in the genus – and thus would not be absolutely simple.  And if he’s not absolutely simple, then he would have potentiality in need of actualization, would require a cause of his own, and would not be unique or ultimate in principle, but at most contingently.  He would not be God, but merely one creature-like entity among others.
The problem, again, is not the word “person.”  After all, Thomists also often object to assertions like “God is a being.”  And the problem here, too, is not the word “being” but the word “a.”  God is not a being; rather, as Aquinas says, God is subsistent being itself.  “Abeing” merely participates in being, whereas that which is subsistent being itself is that in which the various individual “beings” that there are all participate.  To call God “a being” thus trivializes his mode of existence.
Now, when Thomists make this point, no one ever accuses them of denying God’s existence.  No one says “If you deny that God is a being, you must be saying that he lacks being and is therefore unreal!”  Even critics of Thomism understand that that is in no way what the Thomist is saying.  Yet for some reason, when the Thomist objects, on the very same grounds, to the formulation “God is a person,” some critics immediately soil their pants and in high dudgeon accuse the Thomist of making God out to be something impersonal.  The Thomist is doing nothing of the kind.
The second reason the formulation “God is a person” is problematic is, again, theological.  No orthodox Christian can possibly maintain that the assertion “God is a person” is strictly correct.   And the reason is that God is a Trinity of Persons.  A person of the sort we are familiar with in everyday life is a substance.  Hence if you’ve got three persons of the ordinary sort – Mike, Carol, and their son Bobby, say – you’ve got three distinct substances.  But Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are not like that.  They are three Persons in one substance.  
Now, if you go around indignantly insisting on formulations like “God is a person” – a formulation which, as Brian Davies has pointed out, is of historically relatively recent vintage and foreign to the orthodox Christian tradition – then you are bound to raise in your listener’s mind questions like: “Oh, he’s a person, is he?  So exactly which of the three Persons you Christians always talk about is he?”  Naturally, the answer that suggests itself is that he is the Father, specifically.  But then it sounds like the Son and the Holy Spirit, being distinct from the Father, must not be God.  Or maybe the Father is God with a capital “G,” and the Son and the Holy Spirit are lower-case “g” gods.  Or maybe there are three Gods with a capital “G.”  But all of these suppositions are heretical.
You might respond: “But I don’t believe any of that!  That’s not what I mean when I say ‘God is a person’!”  Good, but in that case, you are going to have to very seriously qualify this misleading assertion that “God is a person.”  And when you qualify it in all the ways you will need to in order to avoid heresy, you are going to find that you agree with the Thomist after all.  In which case, why are you so attached to this misleading slogan?  It’s no good to answer: “Because I don’t want to reduce God to something impersonal,” because neither does the Thomist.  
Here, Tugwell would insist, is where negative theology can be especially helpful.  If you are attached to this slogan “God is a person,” carefully consider all the aspects of “persons” in the ordinary sense that you will have to negate in order to maintain orthodoxy and philosophical coherence.  You may find, at the end of the exercise, that you differ from the Thomist only verbally rather than substantively. 

Five Proofs on radio

Last week I appeared on The Drew Marshall Show to discuss Five Proofs of the Existence of God .  You can listen to the episode here.Links to other recent radio and television interviews can be found here.

Fallacies physicists fall for

In his essay “Quantum Mechanics and Ontology” in his anthology Philosophy in an Age of Science , Hilary Putnam notes that “mathematically presented quantum-mechanical theories do not wear their ontologies on their sleeve… the mathematics does not transparently tell us what the theory is about.  Not always, anyhow” (p. 161).  Yet as Putnam also observes:
The reaction to [such] remarks of most physicists would, I fear, be somewhat as follows: “Why bother imposing an ‘ontology’ on quantum mechanics at all?... [Q]uantum mechanics has a precise mathematical language of its own.  If there are problems with that language, they are problems for mathematical physicists, not for philosophers.  And in any case, we know how to use that language to make predictions accurate to a great many decimal places.  If that language does not come with a criterion of ‘ontological commitment,’ so much the worse for ‘ontology.’”…
[But] to say “We physicists are just technicians making predictions; don’t bother us with that ‘physically real’ stuff” is effectively to return to the instrumentalism of the 1920s.  But physical theories are not just pieces of prediction technology.  Even those who claim that that is all they are do so only to avoid having to think seriously about the content of their theories; in other contexts they are, I have observed, quite happy to talk about the same theories as descriptions of reality – as, indeed, they aspire to be.  (pp. 153-4)
The problem is not confined to the interpretation of quantum mechanics.  The metaphysical implications of relativity theory, or indeed of any theory in physics, is something the physics itself does not reveal.  Then there are more general philosophical questions about science which science itself does not and cannot answer.  For example, what is the relationship between the abstract mathematical representation of nature afforded by physical theory and the concrete reality that it represents?  Is there more to nature than mathematical representations can capture?  What demarcates science from non-science?  What is a law of nature?  Why is the world law-governed in the first place?  And so on.

The tendency of those beholden to scientism, including professional scientists who are beholden to scientism, is to dismiss such questions on the grounds that the only thing worth talking or thinking about is whether the predictions pan out – which entails positivism, or instrumentalism, or some other form of anti-realism.  And yet, when pressed about this implication, or when presenting the findings of science to the layman, the same people will usually insist on a realist understanding of scientific theories – apparently blithely unaware of the contradiction.  And this is an equal-opportunity form of cognitive dissonance, afflicting everyone from whip-smart Ph.D.’s down to the dumbest combox troll.  

You can’t have things both ways.  If you insist that nothing worthwhile can be said about any matter that is not susceptible of experimental testing, then you have indeed ruled out of bounds philosophical questions like the ones just referred to.  But you have also thereby ruled out a realist interpretation of theoretical entities, because realism is not susceptible of experimental testing.  That’s the whole point of the debate between realism and anti-realism – that the experimental results would come out the same whether or not theoretical entities are real or just useful fictions, so that the dispute has to be settled on other grounds.

Indeed, you can’t have things even one way.  For suppose the physicist or the combox troll beholden to scientism sees the problem and, to be consistent, adopts an across-the-board instrumentalism.  He avoids philosophical issues like the ones mentioned, and he also refrains from endorsing realism.  The problem here, of course, is that even instrumentalism itself is a philosophical thesis and not a scientific one – again, the dispute between realism and anti-realist views like instrumentalism cannot be settled experimentally – so he is not really being consistent after all.  

Scientism is simply not a coherent position.  You cannot avoid having distinctively philosophical and extra-scientific theoretical commitments, because the very attempt to do so entails having distinctively philosophical and extra-scientific theoretical commitments.  And if you think that these commitments are rationally justifiable ones – and of course, anyone beholden to scientism thinks his view is paradigmatically rational – then you are implicitly admitting that there can be such a thing as a rationally justifiable thesis which is not a scientific thesis.  Which is, of course, what scientism denies.  Thus scientism is unavoidably self-defeating.

The fallacy is simple, and blindingly obvious once you see it.  So why is it so common?  Why do so many otherwise genuinely smart people (as well as people who merely like to think they are smart, like combox trolls) fall into it? 

Part of the reason is precisely because it is so common and so simple.  Again, as Putnam complains, even many professional scientists (by no means all, but many) commit the fallacy.  So, when you call someone out on it, there is a strong temptation for him to think: “If my critic is right, then I and lots of other scientists have been committing a pretty obvious fallacy for a very long time.  Surely that can’t be!”  They think that there must be some way to avoid the contradiction, even if they are never able to say what it is, and always end up doing exactly what they claim to be avoiding, viz. making extra-scientific philosophical claims.  Paradoxically, the very obviousness and prevalence of the fallacy keeps them from seeing it.  As Orwell famously said, “to see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

Then there is the element of pride.  You have to be smart to do natural science.  Combox trolls usually are not very smart, but they think of themselves as smart, because they at least have the capacity to pepper their remarks with words like “physics,” “science,” “reason,” etc. as well as to rehearse whatever science trivia they picked up from Wikipedia.  So, suppose you are either a scientist or a combox troll who has gotten your head full of scientism.  You are convinced that philosophers and other non-scientists have nothing of interest to say.  Then one of them points out that you are committing a fallacy so simple that a child can see it.  That can be very hard to swallow.  And if the person pointing out the self-defeating character of scientism happens to be religious, the blow to one’s pride can be absolutely excruciating.  “Some religiousnut is going to catch me out on a blatant fallacy?  No way in hell!  I refuse to believe it!”  One’s pride in one’s presumed superiorrationality locks one into a deeply irrational frame of mind.

A third factor is that, though the fallacy is pretty simple, you have to have at least a rudimentary understanding of certain philosophical concepts – realism, instrumentalism, self-contradiction, etc. – and a basic willingness to think philosophically, in order to be able to see it.  Now, suppose you not only don’t know much about philosophy, but are positively contemptuous of it (as those beholden to scientism often are).  Then you are not going to know very much about it, and you are not likely to be able to think very clearly about even the little bit you do know.  Your prejudices keep getting in the way.  You are bound to be blind even to obvious fallacies like the one in question.

The bottom line is that if you cannot help doing philosophy – for again, the very act of denying that one needs to do it itself involves one in a philosophical commitment – but at the same time also refuse to do it, then you are inevitably both going to do it and do it badly.  

The clueless reactions I have seen to these simple points over the years only reinforce their validity.  For example, many defenders of scientism will, in response to the claim that extra-scientific philosophical commitments are unavoidable, demand that you produce an operational definition for this or that philosophical concept, or experimental evidence for this or that philosophical thesis – thereby adding begging the question to the list of fallacies of which they are guilty.  For of course, such demands presuppose the correctness of scientism, which is exactly what is at issue.

My favorite response is the suggestion that a philosopher who criticizes scientism has gotten too big for his britches.  “How dare you suggest that scientists don’t know everything!  How arrogant!”  Scientism, it seems, kills irony along with basic critical reasoning skills.

In his recent book Enlightenment Now , Steven Pinker summarizes some cognitive science research on bias, and notes that there is a special kind of bias to which those who detect bias in others are prone.  He calls it “bias bias” (p. 361).  The idea is that when you are keen to ferret out biases in others, you are often blind to the biases that influence you as you do so.  As Pinker also points out, people who are well-informed about a subject are also often prone to certain biases, precisely because the interest in the subject that leads them to learn a lot about it also makes it more difficult for them to be objective about it.  As Pinker writes:

[A] paradox of rationality is that expertise, brainpower, and conscious reasoning do not, by themselves, guarantee that thinkers will approach the truth.  On the contrary, they can be weapons for ever-more-ingenious rationalization.  (p. 359)

Pinker also judges, absolutely correctly in my view, that “the major enemy of reason in the public sphere today … is not ignorance, innumeracy, or cognitive biases, but politicization” (p. 371).  When you turn an idea into a political cause to promote, with allies to the cause needing to be recruited and enemies of the cause needing to be defeated, etc., then you are bound to let reason give way to rhetoric, to lose the capacity for dispassionate evaluation, and so forth.

These factors account for why defenders of scientism are often so dogmatic and nasty in their dealings with critics, often prone to ridicule and ad hominem attacks rather than the calm and rational discourse you’d think their purported commitment to reason and science would commend to them.  Scientism has become a political cause, and those beholden to it tend to delude themselves into thinking that their loud condemnations of cognitive bias and rationalization somehow make them immune to these very foibles.  There is no one in greater danger of irrational and unscientific thinking than the fanatic who screams “Reason!” and “Science!” in your face at the top of his lungs.

Scientism is, by the way, self-defeating in more than just the way already identified.  Consider that scientific methodology involves both the construction of mathematical representations of nature, and the experimental testing of those representations.  If you think carefully about either of these components – including even the second one – you will see that it cannot be correct to say that we can have no rationally justifiable belief in what cannot be experimentally tested.  

This is most obvious in the case of mathematics.  Even those beholden to scientism will typically admit that even those parts of mathematics that do not have application within empirical science constitute genuine bodies of knowledge.  And even the parts of mathematics that do have application within science operate in part by distinctively mathematical rules of reasoning rather than being evaluated solely by experimental testing.  

Now, defenders of scientism are often willing to expand their conception of what counts as “science” to include mathematics.  But there are two problems with this.  First, once they do this, then they can no longer consistently criticize philosophical claims for not being susceptible of experimental testing.  For their admission of mathematics into the fold concedes that there are rational forms of discourse that don’t involve empirical testability.  Second, the thesis that empirical science and mathematics exhaust the genuine forms of knowledge is not itself a proposition of either empirical science or mathematics.  Admitting mathematics into the science club simply does not suffice to save scientism from self-refutation.

Turn now to the notion of experimental testing.  Obviously, this presupposes that we have experiences.  Now, the fact that we have experiences, and certain very general features of experience, are themselves known through experience.  However, these particular facts are not susceptible of experimental testing.  The reason is that experimental testing – and in particular, the possibility of falsification – requires that experience can go in one direction or another.  We predict that it will go in direction A rather than B – that we will observe this rather than that – and then try to set up an experiment or observational scenario in which we can see whether this prediction pans out.

But not everything that is true of experience is testable in this way, not even in principle.  To take an example beloved of us Aristotelians, consider the proposition that change occurs.  We know this is true from experience.  But that does not mean that it is empirically testablein the sense of falsifiable.  It is notfalsifiable.  For the very possibility of testability or falsifiability presupposeschange.  You predict that you will have such-and-such an experience and see whether it happens, and that procedure itself involves change.  You go from thinking “Let’s see if this happens” to thinking “Ah, it did happen” or “Oh, it didn’t happen,” and either way a change will have occurred.  The thesis that change occurs is, accordingly, not falsifiable or empirically testable.  And yet we know it from experience, and the very possibility of empirical testing presupposes it.  Any appeal to empirical testability thus presupposes that we know at least some things that are not empirically testable (such as the reality of change).  Which is precisely what scientism denies.  Hence, once again, scientism is self-refuting.

Those beholden to scientism don’t see this because they conflate empirical with experimentally testable.  And these are not the same thing.  Again, the proposition that change occurs is empirical in the sense that we know it via experience, but it is not experimentally testable or falsifiable.  Aristotelian philosophers like Andrew van Melsen and Henry Koren characterize propositions like this as grounded in “pre-scientific experience.”  They are grounded in experience in the sense that we know them empirically rather than a priori.  They are pre-scientificin the sense that science involves empirical testability or falsifiability, and these propositions concern facts about experience that are deeper than, and presupposed by, anything testable or falsifiable.  

Hume’s Fork famously holds that all knowable propositions concern either matters of fact or relations of ideas.  The logical positivists drew a similar dichotomy between analytic and synthetic propositions, and contemporary naturalists often claim that all significant propositions concern either empirical science or conceptual analysis.  These are all variations on the same basic idea, and scientism typically appeals to one or another of them.  But as I have argued elsewhere, they are all self-refuting.  Hume’s Fork is not itself true either by virtue of relations of ideas or by virtue of matters of fact.  The positivist’s principle of verifiability is not itself either analytic or synthetic.  The naturalist’s dichotomy of empirical science and conceptual analysis is not itself knowable either by way of empirical science or conceptual analysis.  Like the adherent of scientism caught in his self-refutation, none of the adherents of these related views has much more to offer in response than a shit-eating grin.

Anyway, propositions of mathematics, propositions grounded in “pre-scientific experience,” and philosophical propositions (such as the thesis of scientism itself, which is philosophical rather than scientific) fall into a third (and indeed, perhaps a fourth, a fifth, etc.) category beyond the two that these self-defeating views are willing to recognize.

Metaphysics, as Gilson said, always buries its undertakers.   Or it would do so if those untertakers weren’t so busy burying themselves.

Crane and French on science and Aristotelianism

I called attention recently to the new anthology Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science , edited by William Simpson, Robert Koons, and Nicholas Teh, to which I contributed an essay.  (If the price of the print version puts you off, you might consider the much more affordable electronic version.)  Tim Crane reviews the book in the latest First Things.  As I also noted recently, Steven French has reviewed it at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Crane’s review does not actually say much about the essays in the book, but rather gives an overview of some aspects of the neo-Aristotelian revival that has occurred in contemporary analytic philosophy in recent years.  This is a reasonable approach to take given the audience Crane is addressing – namely, educated general readers rather than professional philosophers.  General readers won’t have the knowledge of contemporary analytic metaphysics that the essays presuppose, and may be surprised to learn that there even is such a thing as a neo-Aristotelian revival within academic philosophy.  Hence it is not a bad idea to focus on bringing them up to speed.
French does discuss the essays in some detail (and of course, his audience does consist of professional philosophers).  He is not sympathetic to the overall project of the volume, but he engages with it seriously and raises some interesting points.  
French’s main reservations have to do with the extent to which Aristotelian metaphysics departs from naturalism, and the Aristotelian notions of potentiality and substantial form are what give him greatest pause.  It seems to me that, at least to some extent, French’s concerns here are question-begging.  For the naturalist, a sound metaphysics is one that is implicit in natural science, with natural science interpreted in a mechanistic way (which, these days, essentially means a way that is non-teleological and that gives ontological priority to the microphysical level).  Philosophical concepts are considered well-articulated and well-motivated when they can be assimilated to this naturalistic framework.
But of course, the Aristotelian rejects this set of assumptions.  For the Aristotelian, the methods to which modern science confines itself give us only what C. B. Martin has called a “partial consideration” of nature, and must be supplemented by, and interpreted within, a metaphysical framework which at least to some extent stands or falls independently of anything the natural sciences have to say.  So, a criticism of Aristotelian metaphysics on the grounds that it does not conform to the strictures of naturalism simply assumes precisely what is at issue between the naturalist and the Aristotelian.
However, it would not be fair to French to attribute all of his reservations to a begging of the question in favor of naturalism.  He also judges that the metaphors or analogies some of the volume’s authors use to elucidate notions like substantial form are insufficiently clear or helpful.  Suppose for the sake of argument that French is right about this.  How significant would that be?
French takes it to be fairly significant, no doubt because he is skeptical about Aristotelian notions like substantial form and is looking for reasons to take them seriously.  He interprets the metaphors and analogies in question as purported reasons of the sort he is looking for and, finding them wanting, concludes that the authors haven’t made their case.
I don’t myself take the (alleged) deficiency of these particular metaphors and analogies to be very significant, though, because I think there are already ample independent philosophical grounds to endorse notions like substantial form – grounds of the sort one can find set out at length in my book on general Aristotelian metaphysics, or Oderberg’s book on the subject, or in some of the essays in anthologies like the Tahko volume, or the Groff and Greco volume, or the Novotny and Novak volume.  
Mind you, I am not blaming French for not engaging here with such books – he’s simply writing a book review, and on another book, after all.  The point is just that if he is looking in the present volume for a general defense of notions like substantial form (and maybe he’s not), I think he is looking in the wrong place.  I don’t see the Simpson, Koons, and Teh volume as primarily concerned with that.  Rather, I take it that its aim is primarily to take general Aristotelian notions that have already been defended at length elsewhere in the neo-Aristotelian literature, and apply them to specific issues that arise in the context of natural science.  That’s a more limited aim, and the book should be judged in light of that aim.
And to some extent that is exactly what French does – as, for example, in his remarks about Alex Pruss’s essay on the “traveling forms” interpretation of quantum mechanics.  It’s a great essay, and anyone interested in the relationship between Aristotelian philosophy of nature and quantum physics should study it.  (They should also study Rob Koons’s excellent recent work on this, including Rob’s essay in the volume under discussion.)  French suggests, however, that working out the “traveling forms” model might entail significant revisions of traditional Aristotelian views about material substance.  (That is also a concern of mine.  But I don’t think Alex is as old-fashioned an Aristotelian as I am, so I don’t think such revisionism would bother him much.)
Commenting on my own essay on Aristotelianism and relativity, French notes that I endorse an epistemic structural realist view of physics, on which there is more to the nature of physical reality than physics can tell us – which opens the door to the Aristotelian metaphysician, who claims to fill in at least some of the gaps left by the physicist.  Not unreasonably, French asks:
[W]hy this kind of metaphysics and not some other?  Or why any such extra metaphysics at all in this particular case, given that various accounts of how the impression of temporal passage can be reconciled with relativity theory are currently 'on the table'?
But, for one thing, I thought I answered that in the essay.  I argue that change, as the Aristotelian understands it, cannot coherently be eliminated from our picture of nature.  At an absolute minimum, it cannot coherently be denied that the scientist himself qua conscious subject undergoes change in the Aristotelian sense.  But such change entails the distinction between actuality and potentiality; and in something embodied (as I take the conscious subject to be) the distinction between actuality and potentiality in turn entails the distinction between substantial form and prime matter.  So, I take the incoherence of denying change to lead, on analysis, to hylemorphism.  By itself that still leaves it open exactly how far the substantial form analysis can be applied within nature – here we have to go case by case – but that it has some application I take to be unavoidable on general metaphysical grounds.
For another thing, once we have real change, we also have (given the Aristotelian conception of time as the measure of change with respect to succession) temporal passage.  And I mean actual temporal passage, not merely what French calls “the impression of temporal passage.”  So, contrary to what French seems to imply, it is not enough for the non-Aristotelian to appeal to some account of how our “impression” that temporal passage is real can be reconciled with relativity.  An adequate metaphysics, and an adequate interpretation of physics, must account for the fact that there really is such a thing as temporal passage.
(Much, much more on all these matters to come in my forthcoming philosophy of nature book Aristotle’s Revenge.  Stay tuned.)

Laws of nature at Fermilab

Recently I spent a day at Fermilab and gave a talk on the topic ”What is a Law of Nature?”  I had a wonderful time and thank the kind folks at Fermilab for their hospitality.  You can now watch the video of the talk at the Fermilab website.  Abstract of the lecture here.  The handout to which I refer in the course of the lecture can be found here. Links to video of other public lectures and the like can be found at my main website.

The ad hominem fallacy is a sin

An argumentum ad hominem (or “argument to the man”) is the fallacy committed when, instead of addressing the merits of an argument someone presents you with, you attack the person himself – his motives, some purported character defect, or the like.  This disreputable tactic has, of course, always been common in public controversies, but resort to the fallacy seems these days nearly to have eclipsed rational public discourse.  A large segment of the country has made it a matter of policy never to engage its political opponents at the level of reason, but only ever to demonize them and shout them down.  Even in the Church, recent years have seen the ad hominem routinely deployed against even the most respectful and scholarly critics of Pope Francis’s doctrinally problematic statements concerning divorce and remarriage, capital punishment, and other matters. This is not a mere foible in those prone to it, or merely a regrettable aesthetic defect in a polity.  It is sinful, sometimes gravely so.
 What the ad hominem fallacy is (and is not)  To see why, it is important first to understand what an ad hominem fallacy is – and what it is not.  As all logicians know, and as I explained at length in a post several years ago, merely calling someone a name, or calling attention to his character defects, is notan ad hominem fallacy and it is not necessarily morally objectionable.  Sometimes a person merits a nasty description, and sometimes what is at issue is precisely his moral character.  There is no ad hominem fallacy in judging someone to be dishonest, or feckless, or incompetent, or simply a scumbag, and then going on to say so.  Those may just be the facts, and there is nothing necessarily wrong with calling attention to such facts.
An ad hominem fallacy is committed when what is at issue is not a person or his character, but rather the truth or falsity of something he said or the cogency of some argument he gave, and instead of addressing that, you attack him or his character.  If I call Charles Manson a murderous, sadistic, and lying scumbag, I have not committed an ad hominem fallacy, but simply stated the facts.  If Charles Manson gives me an argument purporting to show (for example) that Amoris Laetitia is hard to reconcile with Christ’s teaching on marriage or that immigration laws need to be enforced, and in response to that argument all I do is call him a murderous, sadistic,  and lying scumbag, then I have committed an ad hominem fallacy.  
The ad hominem fallacy can take different forms.  The best known is the abusive ad hominem, which involves simply flinging invective at someone rather than addressing the merits of his claim or argument.  Again, it is not the invective per se that is fallacious.  Invective may or may not be appropriate, and even when it is wrong, the reason, sometimes, is not that it involves an ad hominemfallacy but rather a lack of charity, or discretion, or whatever.  What is fallacious is substituting invective when rational analysis and argumentation are what is called for.  Hence, if someone tries to give you an argument for some claim and in response you merely label him with an epithet like “bigot,” “fascist,” “Nazi,” “racist,” “homophobe,” “sexist,” “commie,” “cuck,” “neocon,” etc. and pretend that the alleged appropriateness of the label suffices to show that his argument can be dismissed, you are guilty of a textbook example of the abusive ad hominem.  
Sometimes people who are aware of the nature of the fallacy try to rationalize committing it by looking for legalistic loopholes.  Academic philosophers and other intellectuals sometimes do this when engaging opponents in non-academic contexts, such as Facebook exchanges, combox discussions, blog posts, etc.  Suppose I routinely demonize a certain opponent or group of opponents without ever addressing the substance of their arguments, and you accuse me of committing an ad hominem fallacy.  Suppose I respond by saying: “But I wasn’t even trying to address the arguments, so I’m not guilty of the fallacy.  I’m just expressing my low opinion of these people.”  The problem with this is that even if I am not explicitly claiming to address the arguments, my behavior does have an implicatureto the effect that the arguments are somehow bad.  I am “sending the message” that the arguments of the people I am demonizing should not be listened to, even though all I’ve really done is thrown abuse at them rather than explaining what is wrong with those arguments.  So I am still guilty of an ad hominem fallacy, even if I have not committed it in a blatant way by explicitly saying something of the form: “You are a [bigot, Nazi, commie, etc.], therefore your argument is no good.”
Another form the ad hominem can take is the tu quoque fallacy, which involves rejecting someone’s claim or argument merely because he does not himself behave in a way that is consistent with it.  An enormous amount of online “debate” amounts to nothing more than this endless, dreary flinging back and forth of accusations of hypocrisy.  Now, accusing someone of hypocrisy is not in itself fallacious.  What is fallacious, again, is the pretense that such an accusation suffices to refute a claim or argument that the person has given.  If you assert that p is true and in response I point out that you nevertheless behave in a way that seems to imply not-p, that does not by itself show that you are wrong.  It may be that p really is true, and that the problem is not that you believe that p, but rather that you don’t practice what you preach.  Or it may be that there is another way to interpret your behavior so that it is compatible with your belief that p, and that you are not in fact guilty of inconsistency.  I would have to provide arguments to rule these alternatives out before I could claim to have refuted you.  Merely flinging an accusation of hypocrisy does not cut it.
A third form the ad hominem can take, and one that is also depressingly common in online discussion, is the poisoning the well fallacy.  This is committed when, instead of addressing the merits of an opponent’s claim or argument, you question his motivation for giving it.  The reason this is a fallacy is that the truth or falsity of a claim and the cogency of an argument by themselves have nothing whatsoever to do with the motives of the person giving it.  A person whose motives are bad can nevertheless give a good argument, and a person whose motives are good can nevertheless give a bad argument.  
Here too it is important properly to understand the nature of the fallacy.  Calling attention to someone’s motives is not by itself fallacious.  Sometimes we should consider someone’s motives.  For example, if our only reason for believing that Smith committed a certain crime is that Jones said so, and we know that Jones has long had a vendetta against Smith, then we have good reason to doubt Jones’s testimony.  What is at issue in this case is precisely Jones’s veracity, so that consideration of his motives is appropriate.  A fallacy of poisoning the well is committed when what is at issue is not a person’s veracity or some other aspect of his character, but rather the truth or falsity of some claim he makes or the cogency of some argument he gives, and instead of addressing that, we change the subject by accusing him of having bad motives.
A version of the poisoning the well fallacy that is extremely common today is the tactic of dismissing the arguments of an opponent on the grounds that they are allegedly motivated by “hatred.”  You think Amoris Laetitia is problematic?  You must be motivated by hatred of Pope Francis!  You disapprove of homosexual behavior?  You must be motivated by hatred of homosexuals!  You favor border enforcement?  You must be motivated by hatred of immigrants!  And so on.  Part of the problem here, of course, is that hatred is notnecessarily the motive in any of these cases.  But the reason that poisoning the well is fallacious is that, even if hatred were a person’s motivation, that would be completely irrelevant to whether his claims are true and his arguments cogent.  Logically speaking, motives don’t matter.
Why the fallacy is sinful
One reason the ad hominem is morally problematic is that it is a sin against truth.  It may turn out that an opponent is right, so that if you dismiss what he says on ad hominem grounds, you will be blinding yourself, and others too (to the extent that they are influenced by your ad hominem attacks), to truths that might otherwise have been seen.  When the tendency to resort to the ad hominem fallacy becomes habitual, the probability that the one committing it will fall into error is, naturally, significantly increased.  
Consider too that ad hominem fallacies are often committed when one is angry at an opponent.  Therefore, someone who exhibits the vice of wrath – a habitual tendency toward anger that is disordered either in its intensity or its object – is bound to fall into the ad hominem fallacy quite often, and therefore bound to fall into error quite often.  In short, a person who is constantly angry and constantly vituperative with opponents is likely to be frequently wrong, though for that very reason he is also unlikely to see that he is frequently wrong.  Spiritually and cognitively, this is a very dangerous condition to be in.
A second reason the ad hominem is morally problematic is that it can involve sinful presumption.  No human being can have infallible knowledge of another person’s motives or spiritual state.  Of course, we can often form plausible opinions about such things.  Again, there is nothing wrong with judging that Charles Manson was an evil person, because his behavior quite clearly and consistently pointed in that direction.  However, if someone is to all appearances sincerely trying to engage with you at the level of sober rational argumentation, it is, morally and spiritually speaking, very dangerous glibly to dismiss that as a cover for some hidden evil motive.  It is, accordingly, especially regrettable that such “well poisoning” has today become routine in certain Catholic circles.  What could be a clearer violation of Christ’s command: “Judge not, lest you be judged”?  
This brings us to a third reason that the ad hominemfallacy is morally problematic, which is that it dehumanizes one’s opponents.   
Human beings are by nature rational animals.  What distinguishes us from other animals is that our activity is ultimately guided by intellect rather than merely by sensation, the appetites, or the passions.  Even when we pursue something that is pleasing to these faculties, that is only because our intellects grasp it as such.  Even when we act irrationally, we do not act non-rationally.  The intellect is malfunctioning, but that is different from not functioning at all.  
This is not only Aristotle’s teaching.  It is the teaching of the Catholic Church, and the reason the Church rejects fideism, voluntarism, and other forms of irrationalism.  In Libertas Praestantissimum , Pope Leo XIII writes:
[W]hile other animate creatures follow their senses, seeking good and avoiding evil only by instinct, man has reason to guide him in each and every act of his life…
[T]he will cannot proceed to act until it is enlightened by the knowledge possessed by the intellect.  In other words, the good wished by the will is necessarily good in so far as it is known by the intellect; and this the more, because in all voluntary acts choice is subsequent to a judgment upon the truth of the good presented, declaring to which good preference should be given.  No sensible man can doubt that judgment is an act of reason, not of the will. (Sections 3 and 5)
Similarly, in his famous Regensburg address, Pope Benedict XVI approvingly quotes Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus’s remark that “whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly,” and endorses the emperor’s view that (as Benedict paraphrases Manuel) “not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God’s nature.”  
Accordingly, when dealing with other human beings, we must always appeal to their reason as far as we can, because to fail to do so would be contrary to what is good for them given their nature.  Of course, sometimes this is not possible – for example, with a person who is literally insane, or with an attacker intent on inflicting bodily harm.  But it obviously is possible with an opponent who himself makes an effort at rational engagement.  
When, in response to such engagement, we resort to fallacious ad hominem rhetoric – when we ignorean opponent’s attempts to reason with us, when we respond to his arguments with mockery and contempt, when we try to shout him down and intimidate him into silence rather than persuading him – we treat him as something less than a rational animal, and therefore as less them human.  We are acting contrary to his nature, contrary to his human dignity.  This cannot fail to be sinful.  And the more greatly it contributes to sowing discord within society or the Church, the more gravely sinful it is.
Related posts:
What is an ad hominem fallacy?
Meta-bigotry
Meta-sophistry
Self-defeating claims and the tu quoque fallacy

Around the web

Stephen French reviews William Simpson, Robert Koons, and Nicholas Teh’s anthology Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Contemporary Science, at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
Sabine Hossenfelder’s Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray is reviewed in Nature.  Excerpt from the book at Scientific American.  An interview with Hossenfelder.
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Errol Morris contra Thomas Kuhn.  The Ashtray (Or the Man Who Denied Reality) is reviewed by Philip Kitcher at Los Angeles Review of Books.  An excerpt at Boston Review.
Ars Technica on Seattle’s Marvel Comics museum exhibit.
Interpreting quantum mechanics: Adam Becker’s What is Real? is reviewed by James Gleick at The New York Times.  Further commentary and links from Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong.
Jim Holt’s When Einstein Walked with Gödel is reviewed at The New York Times.  Interview with Holt at Medium.
Science and Faith: A Graphic Novel .  Available via Amazon.
Roger Scruton’s new book on conservatism is reviewed at National Review. 
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At Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Lloyd Gerson reviewsMor Segev’s Aristotle on Religion .
The Fifty-Fifty Martini is back, declares Punch.
Joseph Clifford Fenton’s What Is Sacred Theology? is the latest volume in Cluny Media’s Thomist Tradition book series.
The Stanford Prison Experiment was a sham, says Ben Blum at Medium.  
Ryan Wasserman’s Paradoxes of Time Travel is reviewed by John W. Carrollat Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
Joseph Trabbic on Catholic doctrine on the confessional state, at Public Discourse. 
Philosopher Robert Pasnau is interviewed at 3:AM Magazine.
At The Catholic Thing, Casey Chalk on the “Protestantization” of Catholic apologetics.  
Just crazy enough to work:  Weezer covers Toto.  Variety gets Steve Lukather’s reaction .
Joseph Epstein on Tom Wolfe on pseudo-intellectualism, at The Weekly Standard.
The Chronicle of Higher Education investigates what goes on at Tucson’s Science of Consciousness conference.
Wesley Yang on Jordan Peterson in The Tablet.  Chris Kaczor on Peterson at Public Discourse.
Better late than never.  Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the Eminent Philosophers is reviewed in The Washington Post.
At The Institute of Art and Ideas, philosopher Philip Kitcher on the pros and cons of pop science.
Santiago Ramos on Stephen Hawking and philosophy, at Commonweal.
At Aeon, Skye Cleary advises philosophers to engage with rather than ignore Ayn Rand.
The Thomistic Institute is bringing Aquinas to a campus near you.  The National Catholic Register reports .