Edward Feser's Blog, page 63

McGinn on mind and space

Thoughts and experiences seem to lack spatial location.  It makes sense to say of a certain cluster of neurons firing that they are located several centimeters in from your left ear.  But it seems to make no sense to say that your experience of feeling nervous, or your thought about the Pythagorean Theorem, is located several centimeters in from your left ear.  After all, no one who opened up your skull or took an X-ray of your head would see the thought or the experience, nor would either be detectible through any other perceptual means.  In his book The Mysterious Flame: Conscious Minds in a Material World , Colin McGinn defends this commonsense supposition that mental states and processes are not locatable in space.This is one reason McGinn does not subscribe to any of the standard versions of materialism (though he is not a dualist either).  Material things and processes are spatially locatable, so that it cannot, in any straightforward sense, be said that a thought or experience is identical to a material thing or process.  Or at least, this conclusion seems to follow, in McGinn’s view, unless we come up with some alternative conception of space.

Putting aside for purposes of the present post what McGinn has to say about the possibility of an alternative conception of space, let’s consider a speculation that he develops on the basis of the ordinary notion of space.  Time and space as we know them now came into being, it is commonly held, with the Big Bang.  McGinn suggests that the Big Bang must have had a cause.  Not being a theist, he does not think of this as a divine cause.  But he does think that, since it was the cause of the existence of space, it must itself be non-spatial. 
Now, the problem that mind and space pose for materialism, in McGinn’s view, is that it is difficult to see how matter, which is spatial, can give rise to mind, which is non-spatial.  Yet the example of the Big Bang, he suggests, shows that the causal relation can go in the other direction.  That is to say, the non-spatial can give rise to the spatial.  How this works is not something McGinn claims to understand.  His claim is only that it does seem to happen.  Furthermore, there is, he acknowledges, an obvious causal relation of somesort between mental events and material events in the brain.  So, if it is reasonable to think that the non-spatial can give rise to the spatial, it seems no less reasonable to think that the spatial can give rise to the non-spatial.  In McGinn’s view, there is arguably some kind of natural process by which one gives rise to the other and vice versa.
The idea is reminiscent of Plato’s cyclical argument in the Phaedo, which holds that things arise out of their opposites (though McGinn does not deploy the idea to argue for the soul’s immortality, as Plato does).  If the spatial and non-spatial can give rise to one another, then maybe, McGinn suggests, what is happening when brain events give rise to mind is a kind of miniature and partial reversal of the process that caused the Big Bang.  McGinn is well aware that this sounds pretty weird.  But he is just “spit-balling” rather than putting it forward as a settled opinion, and he thinks that accounting for the mind is in any case bound to require entertaining some unusual possibilities.
Now, McGinn treats the non-spatial as if it were distinct from the mental.  He seems to suppose that, just as space may or may not contain some particular material object, so too the non-spatial, whatever it is like, may or may not contain mental states and processes.  His proposal seems to be that the non-spatial reality that preceded the Big Bang was non-mental, and that when the brain gives rise to the mind, what happens is that it generates a non-spatial reality to which mental features are somehow at the same time added.
But why suppose that this is what is going on?  It is, after all, controversial whether space could exist in the absence of any matter whatsoever.  Space could exist whether or not chairs or trees exist, but it is not so clear that it could exist if there were no physical objects at all.  So, by analogy, why suppose that non-spatial reality could exist in the absence of any mentalfeatures whatsoever?  Why not suppose instead that for the non-spatial to exist is ipso facto for something mental to exist?  As far as I can tell, McGinn gives no explicit reason for denying this.  He just takes it for granted that some kind of non-spatial reality could exist completely apart from the mental.
To be sure, McGinn does note that numbers are examples of things that do not exist in a spatial way.  You can perceive the numeral “3,” but you cannot perceive the number 3.  So might McGinn not argue that numbers and other mathematical objects provide a model for what it would be for a non-spatial reality to exist apart from anything mental?
But there are a couple of problems with this suggestion.  First, abstract objects like numbers are generally understood to be causally inert.  The number 3, for example, can’t do anything.  Yet the non-spatial kind of reality McGinn posits is supposed to be causally efficacious.  It can cause the Big Bang, for example.  So, what McGinn needs to show is that there could be something that is non-spatial, non-mental, and causally efficacious all at the same time.  Numbers and other abstract objects don’t provide examples of that.
Another problem is that it is debatable whether numbers and other abstract objects really can exist apart from minds in the first place.  Aristotelian realists argue that they cannot.  Abstract objects, on their view, exist only in intellects which abstract them from concrete individuals.  The universal TRIANGULARITY, for example, exists only in intellects which abstract that pattern from concrete individual triangles.   THREENESS is another abstraction that exists only in an intellect that abstracts that pattern from concrete individuals.  And so forth.  (See chapter 3 of my book Five Proofs of the Existence of God for a defense of this view – or to be more precise, for a defense of the Scholastic realist variation on the Aristotelian view.)
Suppose, then, that McGinn is wrong, and that any concrete and causally efficacious non-spatial reality would be mental in its nature.  Then, for one thing, when brains generate minds (as he says they do), there aren’t two things going on here, viz. the generation of something non-spatial and then a separate act of addition to this non-spatial reality of mental properties.  Rather, there is just one thing, the generation of a non-spatial-cum-mental reality.  For another thing, and perhaps more momentously, for the Big Bang to have been generated by a non-spatial reality would ipso facto for it to have been generated by a mind of some sort. 
Would this amount to a theistic scenario – to God’s creating the universe at the Big Bang?   No, not necessarily, and certainly not without further argumentation.  For one thing, there is nothing in the cyclical scenario described by McGinn that would entail that the non-spatial cause of the Big Bang is infinite in nature, or something that exists of absolute necessity, or that it has the other divine attributes.  It could be a merely finite (if still impressive) mind of some sort.
For another thing, the cyclical process posited by McGinn would in fact if anything point away from a truly theistic scenario.  He thinks of the non-spatial giving rise to the spatial and vice versa.  He also thinks of the spatial as giving rise to finite, human non-spatial minds.  So, even if he were to accept that the cause of the Big Bang was a mind of some sort, his model would seem to entail (by analogy with the spatial to non-spatial direction of causation) that it might be a merely finite mind, and a mind that itself arose from some previous spatial reality.  Those are not conclusions that are compatible with genuine theism (certainly not classical theism).
If McGinn’s supposition that the non-spatial reality that he speculates may have caused the Big Bang would be non-mental is motivated by a desire to avoid theism – though I hasten to add that he does not say or imply that it is – then he needn’t have worried.  Though McGinn’s speculations go well beyond anything most materialists would be comfortable with, they are still pretty firmly within a naturalistframework, broadly construed.  McGinn advocates expanding our conception of the natural world, even radically.  But that is a different thing from the view that there is something beyond the natural world.  (McGinn’s naturalism is more like Thomas Nagel’s than like Alex Rosenberg’s, but it is still naturalism.)

Radio activity

Today on his Daily Wire podcast, Ben Shapiro kindly recommended my book The Last Superstition , characterizing it as “really fantastically written” and “rare for a philosophy book, really readable and lucid.”  His comments on the book can be heard about 38 minutes into the show.
Speaking of The Daily Wire, I will be interviewed this week on The Andrew Klavan Show . 
Last week I was interviewed on Catholic Answers Liveon the subject of my latest book Five Proofs of the Existence of God .  You can listen to the show here.I will be discussing Five Proofs this Friday, September 15, on Bill Martinez Live at 8:06 am PT.  And on Tuesday, Sept. 19, at 5:17 pm PT, I will be on Forte Catholic to discuss By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed .  Further media appearances forthcoming.  Stay tuned.

Walter Becker (1950 – 2017)

The Steely Dan sound is well known to anyone who has heard even one or two of the band’s best known songs, and founders Donald Fagen and Walter Becker contributed equally to it.  Fagen’s is the voice we associate with that sound.  What we might call the Steely Dan attitude, however, derives in large part from Becker, who died earlier this week.That attitude might be described as detached, absurdist, mordant, and anthropological.  It is anthropological insofar as the typical Steely Dan song represents some character type, usually hapless, disreputable, or marginal – the cuckold of “Everything You Did,” the boozer of “Daddy Don’t Live in That New York City No More,” the all-around losers of “Deacon Blues” and “What A Shame About Me,” the scheming lovers of “Gaslighting Abbie,” the perverts of “Everyone Goes to the Movies” and “Cousin Dupree,” and so on.

The attitude is mordant insofar the approach to this subject matter is always bitingly comical.  Rarely quite to the point of mean-spiritedness, however.  And that’s where the absurdism comes in.  Human foibles are magnified in a Steely Dan song – the better, not so much to mock them as simply to facilitate a good laugh.  As Brian Sweet writes of “Gaucho,” one of the funnier Dan tunes: “Becker and Fagen… said that when they were listening back to one of their songs, if it didn't make them howl with laughter, they regarded it as a failure.”
That brings us to detachment.  Several commentators on Becker’s death have characterized Steely Dan’s music as “subversive.”  That’s not exactly right.  That term suggests engagement, or (heaven help us) “social relevance.”  Steely Dan’s music has the wide and lasting appeal it does precisely because it is not like that.  Fagen and Becker are not the kids organizing protests.  They are the kids in the back of the classroom making smart-ass remarks about the other kids, including the ones organizing the protests.
The unsentimental edge to the overall product came from Becker.  Fagen’s first two solo albums, while they certainly exhibit the humor and observational acumen of a Steely Dan record, also manifest an optimism (even if a disappointed optimism) that you don’t hear in the Dan oeuvre.  By contrast, the edge remained, for the most part, in Becker’s first solo disc 11 Tracks of Whack . 
In his statement on Becker’s death, Fagen noted that:
Walter had a very rough childhood – I’ll spare you the details… He was cynical about human nature, including his own, and hysterically funny.  Like a lot of kids from fractured families, he had the knack of creative mimicry, reading people’s hidden psychology and transforming what he saw into bubbly, incisive art.
End quote.  During the recording of Gaucho, Becker was hit by a car and seriously injured.  His girlfriend also died of a drug overdose at the time.  That suffering would come through in Becker’s music is not surprising.  What is noteworthy, and admirable, is the degree to which it was expressed with humor rather than bitterness.
Even the most jaded human being loses his cynicism when it comes to his children, and Becker was no exception, as Kyle Smith observes in his piece on Becker at National Review.  This paternal softness comes through even in a couple of the songs on 11 Tracks.  Nor was Becker’s pessimism ever total in the first place.  Smith quotes him as saying: “Perhaps being fatalistic about things or being cynical about them in a way expresses the deepest kind of optimism: that you’re still disappointed that things are the way they are.”  But then, a complete cynic couldn’t be as funny, or as devoted to the highest standards of musicianship, as Becker and Fagen were.
Tragicomedy set against a background of musical sublimity.  That’s Steely Dan, and it’s pretty much life.  R.I.P.
Further reading:
Steely Dan contra Roger Scruton
Jazz-funk phenomenologist

Flew on Hume on miracles

Having looked recently at David Hume on induction and Hume on causation, let’s take a look at Hume’s famous treatment of miracles.  To be more precise, let’s take a look at Hume’s argument as it is interpreted by Antony Flew in his introduction to the Open Court Classics edition of Hume’s essay Of Miracles.  This being Hume, the argument is, shall we say, problematic.Hume, as Flew emphasizes, intends to make an epistemological point rather than a metaphysical one.  He isn’t saying that miracles are not possible (though, of course, he doesn’t think they ever actually occur).  Rather, he is saying that we can’t ever be justified in believing that a miracle has occurred.

The reason, Hume says, is that a miracle is supposed to involve the overriding of a law of nature.  Yet any evidence that some regularity really is a law of nature is ipso facto evidence that it has not been overridden, whereas any evidence that it has been overridden is ipso facto evidence that it is not really a law of nature.  Hence, the notion of a miracle as the overriding of a law of nature, though metaphysically coherent, is not epistemologically coherent.  We couldn’t ever have good reason to think that any regularity is both a law and also has been overridden.
One problem with this argument noted by Flew is that it is hard to reconcile with the rest of Hume’s philosophy.  For the argument presupposes that a law of nature holds as a matter of objective necessity.  The idea is that it is naturally impossible for a resurrection from the dead to occur (for example), so that a supernatural cause is required in order to make this happen.  Yet Hume is committed to the view that there are no objective necessities in nature.  That is the upshot of his account of causation.  As far as the objective facts are concerned, anything in principle might occur: The bread that once nourished us may poison us the next time we eat it, water might freeze at 900 degrees Fahrenheit, etc.  Our conviction that these sorts of things can’t happen is grounded only in subjective habits of expectation, not in the objective facts.  So, why shouldn’t we judge that miracles might occur, given Hume’s account of causation?  Indeed, if someone is convinced by that account, shouldn’t he be more inclined to think that miracles sometimes occur?
Flew’s way of dealing with this problem is to propose simply ignoring it for purposes of evaluating the argument about miracles.  That may seem brazen, but a case could be made for doing so.  One could say: “Believers in miracles and other non-Humeans believe in objective necessities, so they should find Hume’s argument a challenge, whatever Hume himself thought about objective necessities.”  I don’t think a Humean could say this, though.  A consistent Humean line on causation, it seems to me, would require giving up Hume’s argument about miracles, precisely for the reason given above.  If you’re going to make necessity observer-relative, then to be consistent you’d better be prepared to agree that all kinds of weird stuff might plausibly happen in mind-independent reality, including divine interventions in the ordinary course of things. 
So, salvaging Hume’s argument about miracles would require giving up his view about causation and admitting that there are after all objective necessities in nature.  However, this brings us to a second problem with Hume’s argument, which Flew does not address.  Hume presupposes that to characterize something as a law of nature is to regard it as an absolutely exceptionless natural regularity.  That is to say, if I say that it is a law of nature that A’s are followed by B’s, then what that entails (Hume thinks) is that, in the natural order of things, in every single case an A will be followed by B.  That is why he thinks there is a conflict when someone says both that there is evidence that something is a law andthat there is evidence that it has been overridden.  For evidence that it has been overridden is ipso facto evidence that it is not absolutely exceptionless after all.
But one need not believe in absolutely exceptionlessregularities in order to believe in objective necessities and laws of nature.  A claim like A‘s are followed by B’s could instead be interpreted as saying that A’s have a causal power to produce B’s which is necessarily triggered if certain conditions obtain but not otherwise.  If those conditions are very common, then A’s will indeed usually be followed by B’s, but that is compatible with there being exceptions.  In that case, though, there will be no incoherence in thinking both that there is strong evidence that it is a law of nature that A’s are followed by B’s and that there is evidence that in some particular case an A was not followed by a B.  Of course, on this interpretation of laws, B might not follow even if there is no miracle.  But that only reinforces the point that there is no epistemic incoherence in claiming both that a certain regularity is a law and that it doesn’t always hold, whether that claim is made by a defender of miracles or by anyone else.
There is a third problem with Hume’s argument.  Flew, following Hume, makes a big deal of the point that in evaluating historical claims, we need to make use of our background knowledge about how the world works.  Hence if we know that in general, dead people stay dead, then we ought to factor this knowledge in when evaluating some historical claim to the effect that a resurrection has occurred.  In particular, if we know independently that dead people tend to stay dead, then that gives us reason to be skeptical about some report to the effect that a certain person rose from the dead.  This, Flew thinks, is Hume’s main insight.
That is all well and good as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go nearly as far as Flew and Hume think it does.  They seem to think that this point suffices to justify a completely general skepticism about miracle claims.  But it does no such thing.  It all depends on what is included in the body of background knowledge about how the world works. 
Hence, suppose we have no independent reason whatsoever to believe that there is a God who can cause miracles, no reason to believe that there is an incorporeal aspect to human nature that survives the death of the body, etc.  Suppose further that we encounter in some historical text a claim to the effect that such-and-such a person rose from the dead, but where the account provides no context that would make this alleged event in any way intelligible.  For example, suppose there are no records of people widely believing that this resurrection occurred, no record of the person in question having predicted that he would rise from the dead, no record of any corroborating evidence such as a missing corpse, etc.   Suppose, in short, that the account gave the impression that the purported resurrection was just a random anomalous event that had no significant impact on later events and was not preceded by anything that would in any way lead us to expect that it might occur.
In that case, when we factor in our general knowledge that dead people tend to stay dead, it is certainly very reasonable to conclude, as Flew and Hume would, that the resurrection story is bogus and can safely be dismissed out of hand by historians.  So far so good.
But suppose instead that we have independent and very solid grounds to believe that God exists, that we have independent very solid grounds to think that human beings have immortal souls that survive the deaths of their bodies and could in principle be reunited with those bodies if God acted specially to make this happen, and so on.  Suppose also that we not only come across a claim that a resurrection has occurred, but also find that the person who was purportedly resurrected is said to have predicted that this would happen, that many people at the time believed that he really had been resurrected and were even prepared to lay down their lives on the basis of this belief, that the tomb in which his corpse was laid was found to be empty, etc.  Given all this background knowledge, it would notbe reasonable to dismiss out of hand this miracle claim.  It might still be false, but one would have to consider all the evidence very carefully before drawing that conclusion, and could not justifiably rule it out peremptorily, as Hume and Flew want to do.
Flew considers something like this objection, and his reply is that, if someone appealed to divine revelation in order to justify the background assumption that there is a God who might cause miracles, etc., then this would land the defender of miracles in a circular argument.  He would be using the miracle claim as evidence that a divine revelation has occurred, and using the claim that a divine revelation has occurred as evidence for believing that the miracle really happened.
This position would indeed be circular, but the problem is that in making this reply, Flew is attacking a straw man.  Or at least, the defender of miracles certainly need not appeal to some purported divine revelation in order to justify the background knowledge claims in question.  On the scenario I was describing, the appeal would be instead to purely philosophical arguments for the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, etc.  As long as that is the kind of background information that the defender of the miracle claim makes use of, then there is no circularity at all.  (Of course, the philosophical arguments in question would have to work, and whether such arguments succeed is controversial.  I think they do work, but the point for the moment is just that there would be no circularityin appealing to them.)
To be sure, some apologists do try to defend the resurrection of Jesus without first setting out this kind of background argumentation in natural theology and philosophical anthropology.  In my opinion, that is a mistake, at least as a general approach to Christian apologetics.  As I have discussed elsewhere, the traditional approach to apologetics, which in my view is the correct approach, is to begin by doing a great deal of work of a purely philosophical nature – regarding the existence and nature of God, the immortality of the soul, the natural law approach to morality, etc. – before getting to specifically Christian claims.  Only in the context of the former can the force of the latter be properly understood. 
I’m not claiming that there is no context in which one might proceed in some alternative fashion.  To take only the most obvious sort of example, if some philosophical naturalist literally saw a rotted corpse sit up in front of him, saw its flesh reconstituted before his very eyes and the body start walking and talking, etc., it would of course be silly for him to say: “Hmm, well, this might really be happening, but before deciding let me first go read some books about natural theology and see if there are any good arguments for God’s existence.”  Somerethinking of his convictions would obviously be called for just on the basis of that bizarre experience itself.
However (and needless to say) very few people are ever in a situation remotely as dramatic as that.  Hence, where general work in apologetics is concerned, the right approach is to begin by setting out, on purely philosophical grounds, a general metaphysical picture of the world that would make miracles intelligible and plausible. 
In any event, it is only if we presupposenaturalism that Hume’s argument could have the completely general force against miracle claims that Flew thinks it has.  If we have independent philosophical reason to think that naturalism is false, then that force is undermined and we have to consider the evidence for various miracle claims on a case-by-case basis rather than dismissing them wholesale the way Hume wanted to do.
(For more on the nature of miracles, and on the background metaphysical context in terms of which miracle claims should be evaluated, see chapter 6 of Five Proofs of the Existence of God .)

The latest on Five Proofs and By Man

Some early reactions to Five Proofs of the Existence of God : At Catholic Answers Live, Karlo Broussard describes it as “a phenomenal book” and “the Bible of natural theology.”  At The B.C. Catholic, Christopher Morrissey judges it “a significant, original philosophical contribution to the scholarly discipline of natural theology” and his “favourite book among [his] summer reading.”Meanwhile, at Catholic Culture, Jeffrey Mirus recommends By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment , calling it a “heavyweight book” and a “well-researched study.” 

Hey, kids! Links!

Philosophy Now interviews Raymond Tallis about his major new book on the philosophy of time.  At The Guardian, Tallis on how he writes.
More justice, less crime.  Joseph Bessette on “mass incarceration” as a consequence of mass crime, at the Claremont Review of Books.
Catholic Heraldreports that Dominican theologian Fr. Aidan Nichols has proposed that canon law may require the inclusion of “a procedure for calling to order a pope who teaches error.”  Commentary from canon lawyer Ed Peters.
The Guardian on the triumph of F. A. Hayek.Margaret Atwood on Ray Bradbury, in The Paris Review.

At National Review, Elliot Kaufman on the New Atheists versus Islam. 
Materialist philosophers Daniel Dennett and David Papineau duke it out at The Times Literary Supplement.
Los Angeles Review of Books on Peter Adamson’s new history of Islamic philosophy.
Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen on touring with twentysomethings.  Donald is not a fan of The Donald. 
An interview with philosopher Thomas Ryckman about his book Einstein , a volume in the Routledge Philosophers series.
The man who made the superhero genre what it is: Jack Kirby’s centennial is this year.  Wired comments.  An exhibition at Cal State Northridge.  100 comic book creators honor Kirby in a special volume.  Naturally, DC and Marvel have their own commemorations. 
Philosopher Dennis Bonnette on metaphysical first principles, at Strange Notions. Also, Bonnette on metaphysical naturalism.
Jay Nordlinger interviews conservative philosopher Roger Scruton at National Review.  Review of The Religious Philosophy of Roger Scruton at the Journal of Biblical and Theological Studies.
More on Pope Francis and Amoris Laetitia: Theologian Nicola Bux says that the Church is facing “a full crisis of faith.”  Philosopher Josef Seifert wonders whether Amoris“has the logical consequence of destroying the entire Catholic moral teaching.”  Theologian Alexander Lucie-Smith fears a catastrophe.  Cardinal Burke indicates that “formal correction” of the pope is “now necessary.”
The Tablet profiles Yale computer scientist and conservative writer David Gelernter.
Angelo Codevilla reviews Arthur Herman’s new book on General Douglas MacArthur, at the Claremont Review of Books.
In Philosophia Christi, Timothy Hsiao defends the perverted faculty argument.
New books: The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism , by Thomas Joseph White; Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Hypostatic Union , by Michael Gorman; Thomas and the Thomists , by Romanus Cessario and Cajetan Cuddy; The Immortal in You , by Michael Augros; and The Atlas of Reality: A Comprehensive Guide to Metaphysics by Robert C. Koons and Timothy Pickavance.
3:AM Magazine interviews philosopher Michail Peramatzis on the subject of Aristotelian metaphysics.
At Public Discourse, Anthony McCarthy on artificial wombs.
A tale of two Normans: The Smart Set on Mailer and Podhoretz.
Theologian Christopher Malloy explains why he loves the work of Thomas Aquinas, at Rorate Caeli.
Also at Public Discourse, philosopher David Hershenov on some bad arguments in defense of abortion.  Quartzon the “disturbing, eugenics-like reality unfolding in Iceland.”
Vanity Fair on the left and political violence.
Lapham’s Quarterly on the Third Reich’s nutjob occultism.
At The Regensburg Forum, Catholic philosopher Thomas Pink and Protestant pastor Steven Wedgeworth debate Vatican II and religious liberty.

At Eclectic Orthodoxy, Kimel versus Tuggy on the Trinity.

Five Proofs is out (Updated)

UPDATE 8/22: Some readers will be interested to learn that Ignatius Press is now offering an electronic version of the book.

My new book Five Proofs of the Existence of God is now available.  You can order it from Amazonor direct from Ignatius Press.  Brandon Vogt, friend of this blog and creator of the Strange Notionswebsite, is kindly hosting a Q and A about the bookat the site. 
Here’s the book’s back cover copy:
This book provides a detailed, updated exposition and defense of five of the historically most important (but in recent years largely neglected) philosophical proofs of God's existence: the Aristotelian, the Neo-Platonic, the Augustinian, the Thomistic, and the Rationalist.It also offers a thorough treatment of each of the key divine attributes – unity, simplicity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, and so forth – showing that they must be possessed by the God whose existence is demonstrated by the proofs. Finally, it answers at length all of the objections that have been leveled against these proofs.

This work provides as ambitious and complete a defense of traditional natural theology as is currently in print.  Its aim is to vindicate the view of the greatest philosophers of the past – thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, and many others – that the existence of God can be established with certainty by way of purely rational arguments. It thereby serves as a refutation both of atheism and of the fideism that gives aid and comfort to atheism.
“A watershed book.  Feser has completely severed the intellectual legs upon which modern atheism had hoped to stand.”  
- Matthew Levering, James N. and Mary D. Perry Jr. Chair of Theology, Mundelein Seminary
“A powerful and important book. The concluding chapter, where Feser replies to possible objections to his arguments, is a gem; it alone is worth the price of this excellent work.” 
- Stephen T. Davis, Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy, Claremont McKenna College
“Edward Feser is widely recognized as a top scholar in the history of philosophy in general, and in Thomistic and Aristotelian philosophy in particular.  This book is a must-read for anyone interested in natural theology.  I happily and highly recommend it.” 
- J. P. Moreland, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Biola University 
“Refutes with devastating effect the standard objections to theistic proofs, from David Hume to the New Atheists.”
- Robert C. Koons, Professor of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin
“Yet another fine book by Edward Feser.  He replies to (literally) all of the objections and shows convincingly how the most popular objections (the kind one hears in Introduction to Philosophy courses) are very often completely beside the point and, even when they’re not, are ‘staggeringly feeble and overrated’.
- Alfred J. Freddoso, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame
You can find more information about the book here. 

Five Proofs is out

My new book Five Proofs of the Existence of God is now available.  You can order it from Amazonor direct from Ignatius Press.  Brandon Vogt, friend of this blog and creator of the Strange Notionswebsite, is kindly hosting a Q and A about the bookat the site. 
Here’s the book’s back cover copy:
This book provides a detailed, updated exposition and defense of five of the historically most important (but in recent years largely neglected) philosophical proofs of God's existence: the Aristotelian, the Neo-Platonic, the Augustinian, the Thomistic, and the Rationalist.It also offers a thorough treatment of each of the key divine attributes – unity, simplicity, eternity, omnipotence, omniscience, perfect goodness, and so forth – showing that they must be possessed by the God whose existence is demonstrated by the proofs. Finally, it answers at length all of the objections that have been leveled against these proofs.

This work provides as ambitious and complete a defense of traditional natural theology as is currently in print.  Its aim is to vindicate the view of the greatest philosophers of the past – thinkers like Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, and many others – that the existence of God can be established with certainty by way of purely rational arguments. It thereby serves as a refutation both of atheism and of the fideism that gives aid and comfort to atheism.
“A watershed book.  Feser has completely severed the intellectual legs upon which modern atheism had hoped to stand.”  
- Matthew Levering, James N. and Mary D. Perry Jr. Chair of Theology, Mundelein Seminary
“A powerful and important book. The concluding chapter, where Feser replies to possible objections to his arguments, is a gem; it alone is worth the price of this excellent work.” 
- Stephen T. Davis, Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy, Claremont McKenna College
“Edward Feser is widely recognized as a top scholar in the history of philosophy in general, and in Thomistic and Aristotelian philosophy in particular.  This book is a must-read for anyone interested in natural theology.  I happily and highly recommend it.” 
- J. P. Moreland, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, Biola University 
“Refutes with devastating effect the standard objections to theistic proofs, from David Hume to the New Atheists.”
- Robert C. Koons, Professor of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin
“Yet another fine book by Edward Feser.  He replies to (literally) all of the objections and shows convincingly how the most popular objections (the kind one hears in Introduction to Philosophy courses) are very often completely beside the point and, even when they’re not, are ‘staggeringly feeble and overrated’.
- Alfred J. Freddoso, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame
You can find more information about the book here. 

Jacobs on By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed

At Crisis magazine, philosopher James Jacobs reviews By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment .  From the review:
The arguments are offered in a lucid and systematic manner so that they are accessible to those with no background in philosophy, theology or law.  For example, the opening chapter has an admirably clear introduction to the natural law, and the second chapter elucidates the relative authority of various theological sources.  They support their argument with copious examples, citing a profusion of authorities, ancient and modern.  Conversely, they engage a wide range of objections to their position with great dialectical subtlety…The final chapter examines how since 1974 the American Bishops have tended to condemn capital punishment as intrinsically opposed to Catholic teaching, making it equivalent to abortion and euthanasia.  The bishops cite three arguments in defense of this position: it fails to achieve the goals of punishment; it is inconsistent with Gospel values; and, it is applied in a discriminatory fashion.  The authors reply by showing that each of these arguments is indefensible when considered in light of the constant Tradition of the Church and contemporary studies.  They also offer an examination of capital punishment as a deterrent, citing empirical data showing that it inculcates a repugnance to crime in general…

[The book argues] that the Church’s position on capital punishment has always been that it is not intrinsically evil, but it is rather a matter of prudential decision about which there can be valid disagreement.  This argument is completely convincing, given the abundance of evidence from philosophy, Scripture, and Tradition.

Rucker’s Mindscape

In his book Infinity and the Mind   (which you can read online at his website), Rudy Rucker puts forward the notion of what he calls the “Mindscape.”  He writes:
If three people see the same animal, we say the animal is real; what if three people see the same idea?
I think of consciousness as a point, an “eye,” that moves about in a sort of mental space.  All thoughts are already there in this multi-dimensional space, which we might as well call the Mindscape.  Our bodies move about in the physical space called the Universe; our consciousnesses move about in the mental space called the Mindscape.Just as we all share the same Universe, we all share the same Mindscape.  For just as you can physically occupy the same position in the Universe that anyone else does, you can, in principle, mentally occupy the same state of mind or position in the Mindscape that anyone else does.  It is, of course, difficult to show someone exactly how to see things your way, but all of mankind’s cultural heritage attests that this is not impossible.

Just as a rock is already in the Universe, whether or not someone is handling it, an idea is already in the Mindscape, whether or not someone is thinking it.  A person who does mathematical research, writes stories, or meditates is an explorer of the Mindscape in much the same way that Armstrong, Livingstone, or Cousteau are explorers of the physical features of our Universe.  The rocks on the Moon were there before the lunar module landed; and all the possible thoughts are already out there in the Mindscape.
The mind of an individual would seem to be analogous to the room or to the neighborhood in which that person lives.  One is never in touch with the whole Universe through one’s physical perceptions, and it is doubtful whether one’s mind is ever able to fill the entire Mindscape.  (pp. 35-36)
When Rucker speaks of “thoughts” all preexisting in the Mindscape, he is evidently using the term the way Gottlob Frege does in his classic essay “The Thought,” viz. to refer to what contemporary philosophers prefer to call propositions.  (Though he also seems to have concepts in mind.)  A proposition is what is expressed by a declarative sentence, but is distinct from any sentence.  To take a stock example, the English sentence “Snow is white” expresses the proposition that snow is white, but that proposition is not identical to the sentence.  For one thing, the same proposition could be expressed instead in the German sentence “Schnee ist weiss.”  For another, the proposition would remain true even if no sentences in English, German, or any other language existed.  Notice, however, that the proposition would also remain true even if no human mind ever entertained it.  Propositions (or “thoughts” in Rucker’s and Frege’s sense) transcend not only language, but also any individual human mind or collection of human minds.  They are not to be confused with particular psychological episodes occurring in such minds.
They also transcend the material world, in Rucker’s account as in Frege’s.  Mathematical propositions would remain true even if no material world had ever existed.  Some propositions about the material world would remain true even if it went out of existence tomorrow (e.g. it would still be true that Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March).  Even if there were no material world, so that the proposition that chairs exist was false, even that proposition would in some sense be real.  (By way of analogy, think of the way that a picture or sentence which misrepresents things still exists qua representation.)
For this reason, it is probably best to understand Rucker’s term “consciousness” in a loose sense.  At least much of what we think of as falling under the category of conscious experience has an essentially bodily character – pains and other sensations, visual and auditory experiences reflecting a specific point of view in time and space, etc.  If the Mindscape is distinct from the material world, then the aspect of the mind that accesses it does not do so by way of perceptual experiences tied to bodily organs like eyes, ears, and the like.  What Rucker regards as that which “moves” through the Mindscape is thus presumably the intellect, specifically, as opposed to the senses or the imagination (understood as that faculty whereby we form mental images of a visual, auditory, tactile, or other sort). 
The Mindscape, then, is essentially the collection of all the propositions and concepts that might possibly be grasped, entertained, affirmed, denied, etc.  The Pythagorean theorem would be an example of a denizen of the Mindscape.  When you entertain the theorem and I do not, you are accessing a part of the Mindscape that I am not, at least at that moment, accessing.  When we are both entertaining it, we are accessing the same part of the Mindscape.  But the theorem was there before either of us accessed it and will remain there long after we are gone.  The same is true of every other proposition or concept.  They are all out there waiting to be accessed, as it were. 
This is a very attractive idea, not only for metaphysical reasons – to which I will return in a moment – but also for moralreasons of a sort.  We are all familiar with the notion of the mind as a redoubt that even the jailer or torturer cannot reach.  “Do what you will to my body,” the prisoner might say to himself, “my soul remains my own.”  The comfort this provides can be pretty cold, though, if this refuge is thought of as a Cartesian prison.  The idea of the Mindscape makes of the mind a gateway to a whole other world, rather than a mere private cell into which one’s tormenter cannot trespass.  One can escape rather than simply hole up – escape into the very same world of thought to which every other mind has access.  This is perhaps what Winston Smith tries to reassure himself with when, in Orwell’s 1984, he meditates on the fact that 2 + 2 = 4regardless of what the Party says or tortures him into saying. 
A natural way to interpret the Mindscape is as a Platonic “third realm” distinct not only from the material world but from any mind whatsoever.  Indeed, this seems to be more or less how Rucker understands it, just as it is more or less how Frege understood the “thoughts” he spoke of.  But there are other ways to interpret it.
Is a materialist interpretation possible?  It might seem that Jorge Luis Borges’ famous fantasy of “The Library of Babel” would provide a model for such an interpretation.  In this infinite library, every possible combination of the characters of an alphabet (at least within a certain page length) is said to exist in one of the library’s books.  It might seem, then, that any proposition or concept that exists in the Mindscape would have an analogue somewhere in Borges’ library.  Since the library and its books are material things, it might therefore seem that we essentially have the Mindscape in a physical form.
But this is an illusion, and the reason is not just that the Library of Babel doesn’t really exist.  Even if it did exist, it would not be relevantly like the Mindscape, and neither would any other material system made up of physical representations parallel to those in the library.  For one thing, many of the combinations of letters in books to be found in the library would be entirely random gibberish, expressing no proposition or concept at all.  There is nothing in the Mindscape comparable to that. 
To be sure, Borges tells us that none of the combinations of characters in the library would in fact be “absolute nonsense,” because there is always going to be some possible language in which a given combination conveys a meaning.  That is true, but it brings us to the deeper problem that the meaning of the combinations of symbols in any language, including that of Borges’ volumes, is entirely conventional.  That is to say, the symbols have meaning only insofar as we impart meaning to them, so that there must already be some independent realm of meanings we first grasp before imparting them to the symbols.  In effect, the Library of Babel presupposes the Mindscape, so that we cannot coherently reduce the Mindscape to the Library of Babel.  (Related to this is the problem that no physical symbol or system of symbols can have the sort of determinate or unambiguous content that a thought can have, so that a thought cannot be reduced to any set of physical symbols.  I have developed this line of argument in several places, most fully here.)
How about Karl Popper’s World 3 concept as a way to model Rucker’s Mindscape?  This is much closer to the mark, but still not quite right.  Popper thinks of the occupants of World 3 as man-made, whereas the occupants of the Mindscape pre-exist our discovery of them.  World 3 is a like a building we erect, whereas the Mindscape is a terrain we explore. 
A better alternative to the Platonic realist model is an Aristotelian realist one.  On this view, there is no “third realm” over and above the material world on the one hand and the mind on the other.  Still, the universal patterns and truths we grasp when we entertain concepts and propositions are neither reducible to any collection of material things nor mere constructs of the human mind.  The universal triangularity, for example, cannot be identified with any particular triangle or collection of triangles, and it is something we discover rather than make out of whole cloth.  However, rather than existing in a Platonic realm, it exists in actual triangles themselves, mixed together, as it were, with all their individualizing features.  Qua universal, it exists when an intellect abstracts it out of individual triangles by ignoring their diverse individualizing features and focusing its attention on what is common to all of them.
On this interpretation, the occupants of the Mindscape, though they are not reducible to or identifiable with anything in the material world, might nevertheless be thought of as embedded in the material world until the intellect pulls them out, as it were. 
The body of mathematical truths (which is Rucker’s special concern) is, however, a tricky one to fit into the Aristotelian realist scheme.  The reason is that the material world is finite and mathematics is concerned with infinities.  This brings us to a third brand of realism which claims to capture the strengths of both the Platonic and Aristotelian brands – namely, Scholastic realism.  For the Scholastic realist, Aristotle is correct to say that there is no third realm additional to the realms of matter and mind.  But Plato is correct to say that the ultimate ground of the truths and concepts we grasp must lie both beyond the material world and beyond finite minds.  It is to be located in the infinite, divine mind.  This is an idea that Scholastic thinkers like Aquinas inherited from Augustine, who in turn adapted it from the Neo-Platonic tradition.  (See chapter 3 of the forthcoming Five Proofs of the Existence of God for a detailed exposition and defense of Scholastic realism.)
How does Rucker’s Mindscape relate to Scholastic realism, then?  Here it seems there are at least two possible interpretations.  One might identify the Mindscape with the divine intellect.  On this interpretation, when the human mind explores the Mindscape, it is as if we are thinking God’s thoughts after him.  Or it is as if we are “streaming” content from the divine server, the way one might stream content from Netflix or Amazon on one’s computer. 
To the extent that this sort of idea is defensible at all, however, it would require thinking of the divine intellect more in Neo-Platonic terms than in strictly Scholastic terms.  For Neo-Platonism, the divine intellect is really a second divine hypostasis rather than God full stop.  It hasto be, because God – the One – is absolutely simple or non-composite, and thus does not have within him anything like the distinctness that thoughts in a human intellect have.  Hence if the Mindscape is a divine intellect, it is something like the second divine hypostasis of Neo-Platonism, and not anything in God strictly speaking.  (Cf. the Averroist conception of the human intellect.)
Now, the Scholastic realist agrees that God is absolutely simple or non-composite.  But he rejects the notion of any second divine hypostasis a la Neo-Platonism.  Hence when universals, propositions, and the like are identified by the Scholastic realist with ideas in the divine mind, he means both that they are in God himself rather than in any secondary divine reality, but also that they are not in God in the manner in which the Neo-Platonist takes them to exist in a secondary divine hypostasis (viz. as distinct entities).
Here the Thomist doctrine of the analogical nature of theological language is indispensable.  When we say that universals and the like exist as ideas in the divine mind, we are not using “ideas” in either a univocal or equivocal way, but in an analogical way.  There is something in God that is analogous to our idea of triangularity, something in him analogous to our idea of the Pythagorean theorem, etc.  But it is not strictly the same sort of thing as our ideas.  (I’ve discussed the nature of the divine intellect in a couple of earlier posts, here and here, but see Five Proofs – which should be out in a matter of weeks – for a more thorough discussion.) 
The Mindscape, then, cannot be identified with the divine intellect as the Scholastic understands it, because the latter is simple or non-composite and the former is not.  But again, how then does the idea of the Mindscape relate to Scholastic realism?
The answer, I think, is that the Mindscape should after all be interpreted in more or less the Aristotelian realist terms discussed above, but with a qualification that brings in the distinction between metaphysics and epistemology.  Metaphysicallyspeaking, universals, propositions, and the like are ultimately grounded in the infinite divine intellect rather than the finite material world.  But our knowledge of them is not acquired by directly accessing the divine intellect.  Rather, that knowledge is acquired by abstraction from the particular things of our experience, whose natures are reflections of the ideas pre-existing in the divine intellect.  The created world mediates our knowledge of God’s mind.
The Mindscape we know arises by way of this process of abstraction, and is a simulacrum of the divine Mindscape rather than identical with it.  Like any other simulacrum, it contains features which reflect, not the thing the simulacrum represents, but rather the nature of the simulacrum itself.  A black and white line drawing of a person may be extremely realistic and thereby convey much accurate information about its subject.  But the person himself is nevertheless not black-and-white, or two-dimensional, or surrounded by black lines the way that things in the image are.  Those features reflect the limits of the medium rather than the nature of the subject.  In the same way, the concepts and propositions to which we have access in the Mindscape reflect something which really is there in the divine intellect.  But the distinctness between the denizens of the Mindscape reflects the limitations of our own minds rather than the absolutely simple divine intellect itself.
Bonus link: Rucker’s essay “Memories of Kurt Gödel.”