Edward Feser's Blog, page 65

Briggs on By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed

At One Peter Five, Matt Briggs, statistician to the stars, kindly reviews By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment .  From the review:
[A] book so thorough and so relentless that it is difficult to imagine anybody reading it and coming away unconvinced by the lawfulness and usefulness of capital punishment…
Experts on this subject may be assured that Feser and Bessette have covered every facet with the same assiduity of a lawyer preparing a Supreme Court brief.

Capital punishment on the radio (UPDATED)

Joe Bessette and I will be doing a number of radio interviews in connection with our new book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment .  Yesterday I appeared on Kresta in the Afternoon, and you can find the interview here.  Today I appeared on The Mike Janocik Show to discuss the theological side of the issue.  Joe will appear on the show next week to discuss the social scientific aspects of the issue. 
Many further radio appearances are scheduled for next week and beyond.  Stay tuned.Interested readers will find links to past interviews, radio appearances, and video here.

UPDATE 7/9: For readers who might be interested, here are the appearances scheduled this week for Feser and/or Bessette:
Monday, July 10:
The Kyle Heimann Show , 8:30 am (Feser)
Tuesday, July 11:
Catholic Connection with Teresa Tomeo, 6:39 am (Feser)
Catholic Answers , 9:30 am (Feser)
A Closer Look with Sheila Liaugminas, 3 pm (Bessette)
Wednesday, July 12:
Morning Glory with Brian Patrick, 7:30 am (Feser)
Live Hour with Todd Sylvester, 8:00 am (Feser)
Friday, July 14:
Bill Martinez Live , 8:06 am (Feser and Bessette)
America Talks Live , 11:00 am (Feser)
The Drew Mariani Show , 2:00 pm (Feser debate with Msgr. Stuart Swetland)
After this week, Bessette is scheduled for Meet the Author with Ken Huck at 12:00 pm on Thursday, July 27, and Feser will be appearing on The Patrick Coffin Show later this summer.  Stay tuned for news of further appearances.

Capital punishment on the radio

Joe Bessette and I will be doing a number of radio interviews in connection with our new book By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment .  Yesterday I appeared on Kresta in the Afternoon, and you can find the interview here.  Today I appeared on The Mike Janocik Show to discuss the theological side of the issue.  Joe will appear on the show next week to discuss the social scientific aspects of the issue. 
Many further radio appearances are scheduled for next week and beyond.  Stay tuned.Interested readers will find links to past interviews, radio appearances, and video here.

Taking Aquinas seriously

At First Things, Connor Grubaugh interviews me on the subject of Thomas Aquinas and Analytical Thomism.Some other interviews I’ve given can be found here.

It’s the next open thread

Here is your latest opportunity to converse about topics that have not arisen in the course of other combox discussions at this here blog.  From neo-Kantianism to neo-conservatism, from mortal sin to imported gin, from the dubia cardinals to the Doobie Brothers – discuss whatever you like, within reason.  Keep it civil, but for once you needn’t keep it on topic.By the way, you need not address comments or questions to me personally, because more likely than not I will not have time to respond.  This is not an “Ask Ed anything” post, sorry.  Talk amongst yourselves.

Fr. Z on By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed

The esteemed Fr. John Zuhlsdorf kindly calls his readers’ attention to By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment , my new book co-written with Joseph Bessette.  Fr. Z writes:
Anything written by Edward Feser is reliable and worth time… This is a good book for the strong reader, student of Catholic moral and social teaching, seminarians and clerics.

Arguments from desire

On his radio show yesterday, Dennis Prager acknowledged that one reason he believes in God – though not the only one – is that he wantsit to be the case that God exists.  The thought that there is no compensation in the hereafter for suffering endured in this life, nor any reunion with departed loved ones, is one he finds just too depressing.  Prager did not present this as an argument for the existence of God or for life after death, but just the expression of a motivation for believing in God and the afterlife.  But there have, historically, been attempts to develop this idea into an actual argument.  This is known as the argument from desire, and its proponents include Aquinas and C. S. Lewis.An obvious objection to any such argument would be that it is manifestly delusional to suppose that something is real simply because we want it to be.  After all, the frustration of desire happens all the time – unrequited love, failed careers, empty stomachs, and so forth.  Yet you might suspect that, precisely because this objection is soobvious, it must be missing something – that proponents of the argument from desire are not in fact reasoning in so crude and manifestly fallacious a way.  And if so, you’d be right. 

Hence, consider Aquinas’s argument from desire for the immortality of the soul.  One version can be found in Summa Theologiae I.75.6:
[E]verything naturally aspires to existence after its own manner.  Now, in things that have knowledge, desire ensues upon knowledge.  The senses indeed do not know existence, except under the conditions of "here" and "now," whereas the intellect apprehends existence absolutely, and for all time; so that everything that has an intellect naturally desires always to exist.  But a natural desire cannot be in vain.  Therefore every intellectual substance is incorruptible.
Another, longer version can be found in Summa Contra Gentiles II.55.13.
Now, notice first that Aquinas does not say that just any old desire is bound to be satisfied.  What he says is that “a natural desire cannot be in vain.”  Let’s consider both of the italicized parts of this statement.
First, by a “natural” desire, Aquinas means a tendency toward some end that a thing has just by virtue of being the kind of thing it is – that is to say, by virtue of its essence.  (To put the point in more technical terms, he is talking about immanent final causes grounded in substantial forms.)  So, consider a tree’s tendency to sink roots into the ground so as to take in water.  That would be an example of the sort of thing Aquinas has in mind, and as that example indicates, a “desire” of the sort he is talking about needn’t be conscious.  For a tree is not conscious, but it still “desires” water in the sense that by virtue of its nature it will send out roots so as to acquire it.
Human beings, of course, do consciously desire things, and sometimes what we consciously desire is some end toward which our nature moves us.  Water would be an example here too.  Given our animal nature, we need water and will seek it out.  Some of our desires, however, are not “natural” in the relevant sense.  For example, suppose I desire a copy of Captain America Comics #1.  That would not be an unnatural desire, to be sure, but neither is there anything in my nature that directs me toward that particular end.  Simply qua human being, I will not be directed toward the end of acquiring a copy of that comic book, in the way that I am qua human being directed toward the end of acquiring water.
However, some desires can also be positively unnatural.  A strong desire not to drink water would be an example -- illustrated by the woman in the movie Ed Wood who claims to be allergic to it.  A real-life and only slightly less bizarre example would be the woman with a compulsion to eat household cleanser.  Less extreme examples of strange compulsions, habituated vices, etc. are familiar from everyday life.  As such cases illustrate, that a desire is very strong and deep-rooted does not suffice to make it “natural” in Aquinas’s sense.
What does Aquinas mean when he says that a natural desire cannot be “in vain”?  He can’t mean that such desires are always in fact satisfied, because he is as aware as his readers are that they are very often not satisfied.  For example, trees, people, and other plants and animals die of thirst all the time.  What he means is that a thing couldn’t naturally be directed toward some end unless that end were real.  Such desires can be fulfilled at least in principle even if they are not always fulfilled in fact.  Hence if trees, human beings, and other plants and animals are naturally directed toward seeking out water, there must really be water out there for them to seek (even if they don’t always find it).  If there were not, the desire for water would be in vain.
So, to refute the key premise that Aquinas’s argument rests on, it will not suffice to find examples of unfulfilled desires, or even unfulfilled natural desires – which are, of course, so easy to come by that it should be obvious even to the hostile reader that that is not what Aquinas had in mind.  What one would need is an example of a desire that is both “natural” in Aquinas’s sense and also “in vain” in the sense of being unfulfillable in principle because its object is unreal.  And examples of that sort of thing are far from obvious.
Indeed, even people who would not think of themselves as sympathetic to Aristotelianism or Thomism will essentially apply Aquinas’s principle without realizing they are doing so.  For example, if a paleontologist digs up the remains of a heretofore unknown species of animal and finds that it has many long, sharp teeth, he will suppose that there must have been living in this animal’s environment other kinds of animal that it preyed upon, even if the paleontologist has no independent evidence of such other animals.  For otherwise, the animal’s possession of such carnivorous teeth would be in vain.  (And even if it were finally judged that the carnivorous teeth are vestigial, this doesn’t affect the basic point, because even in that case they would have originally existed for meat-eating purposes.)
Now, what Aquinas does in his argument from desire is to add to this premise about natural desires a further consideration about human nature, specifically.  Other animals have only sensory knowledge, which is directed toward the here and now.  Human beings, by contrast, are rational animals, and their sort of knowledge – intellectual knowledge, which involves the grasp of universal concepts and universal truths – is directed beyond the here and now, indeed toward “all time.”  But whatever is like this, Aquinas says, “naturally desires always to exist.”  In the Summa Contra Gentiles passage, he says that creatures with intellects “know and apprehend perpetual being [and] desire it with natural desire” (emphasis added).  Hence we must have perpetual being, or our desire for it would be in vain.
Needless to say, even given the qualifications I’ve made, this argument needs further spelling out if it is to be convincing.  And an objection raised by John Duns Scotus might seem at first glance to torpedo it.  He writes:
As for the proof that man has a natural desire for immortality because he naturally shuns death, it can be said that this proof applies to the brute animal as well as to man. ( Philosophical Writings , p. 159)
Scotus’s point is that if such a proof would fail in the case of brute animals (which it certainly would in Aquinas’s view, since he denies that such animals have immortal souls), then it must fail in the case of human beings as well.
Now, a non-human animal will, no less than a human being, be inclined as long as it exists to try to keep itself in existence.  Scotus is right about that.  But it doesn’t follow that brute animals have the same desire that Aquinas is attributing to human beings.  To see why not, you need to get your Scotus on and draw a distinction.  Consider the two claims:
(1) X always has a desire to preserve itself.
(2) X has a desire to preserve itself always.
(1) is true of brute animals, but (1) does not entail (2) and (2) is what Aquinas says is true of human beings but not true of brute animals.  It is only if we blur the distinction between (1) and (2) that brute animals will seem to have the same desire Aquinas attributes to us. 
But Scotus also raises a more challenging objection.  In order to know that a thing has a natural desire to preserve itself always, we first have to establish that it has a natural capacity for perpetual existence.  And if we knew that, we would already know that it is immortal, which would make an argument from desire redundant (Philosophical Writings, pp. 158-9). 
Scotus is, I think, correct that a natural desire D presupposes a natural capacity C.  But once again – the Subtle Doctor would be pleased – we need to draw a distinction.  Even if the existence of D presupposes the existence of C, it doesn’t follow that knowledge of the existence of D presupposes knowledge of the existence of C.  That is to say, the presupposition in question is metaphysical but need not be epistemological. 
Consider, once again, the paleontology example.  The existence of carnivorous teeth presupposes, in a metaphysical sense, the existence of prey who might be eaten.  The former would not exist unless the latter did, whereas the latter could exist whether or not the former did.  But it doesn’t follow that our paleontologist would first have independently to establish the existence of the relevant sort of prey in the environmental niche in question before judging that the teeth serve a carnivorous end.  His general knowledge of the kinds of teeth there are suffices for that.  Hence, if all he knows at first is that a certain environmental niche was populated by a kind of animal having carnivorous teeth, he can go on to conclude that there must also have been prey of the relevant sort living in that niche.  He does not have to remain agnostic on that question pending direct evidence.  The presupposition in question is not an epistemological one. 
In the same way, Aquinas can argue that there is a natural desire for perpetual existence – and he does so on the basis of the nature of intellectual (as opposed to merely sensory) knowledge – and then go on to conclude that there must be a natural capacity for such existence.  Knowledge of the desire can be prior to knowledge of the capacity, even if the capacity itself is metaphysically prior to the desire.
So, does Aquinas’s argument work?  I think that when all the relevant metaphysical background theses and the subsidiary arguments are spelled out thoroughly – and I haven’t addressed all of that here – it plausibly does work.  However, anyone who is convinced of the soundness of that larger body of philosophical claims is also likely already to be convinced of the immortality of the soul by other and more straightforward Thomistic arguments.  So, while Aquinas’s argument from desire is a useful and illuminating part of the overall Thomistic view of things, it isn’t the most effective standaloneargument for immortality. 
Compare the situation with Aquinas’s Fourth Way of arguing for God’s existence.  I defend the Fourth Way, along with the rest of the Five Ways, in my book Aquinas .  But one has to do so much general metaphysical stage-setting in order properly to understand how the argument works that, for purposes of establishing God’s existence, it is much more efficient to use a relatively more streamlined argument like one of the other Ways.  Once one is independently convinced of the overall Thomistic system, the Fourth Way provides a very important and illuminating part of the story.  But it’s not a good way to break into the system.
Or at least this is the case given the situation that happens to exist in contemporary philosophy.  In a context where broadly classical (Platonic or Aristotelian) metaphysical presuppositions were widely accepted, arguments like the argument from desire or the Fourth Way would be much more plausible standalone arguments.  But when those larger background presuppositions are not taken for granted and are even treated with some hostility, it is generally more effective to make use of other arguments.

Surf dat web

A lecture by David Oderberg answering the question: Should there be freedom of dissociation?
Philosopher of physics Tim Maudlin defends the reality of time and change, at Quantamagazine.
At The Weekly Standard, Camille Paglia on Trump, transgenderism, and terrorism.
Why is there more disagreement in philosophy than in science?  Maybe because philosophy is just harder, suggests David Papineau in the Times Literary Supplement.Ross and Kripke revisited: In a YouTube video, Peter Dillard responds to my recent post responding to his ACPQarticle.

Joshua Hochschild on Jean-Paul Sartre’s La Nausée, at First Things.
The Dialogos Institute is hosting a colloquium on the doctrine of Limbo in Ramsgate, England later this month.
The continuing travails of Marvel Comics: Social justice warriors are burning their comics.  A politically driven series is cancelled due to poor sales.  Bad business decisions are taking a toll across the line.
The Guardian asks: What was it like to be Richard Wagner? 
And what about his buddy Friedrich Nietzsche?  Times Literary Supplement on some recent books.
At City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple on Paul Hollander on why so many intellectuals love dictators. 
In the International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Ben Page proposes an answer to the Euthyphro dilemma.
Politico on why liberals aren’t as tolerant as they think they are.
In related news: Duke theology professor Paul Griffiths, facing disciplinary action for calling diversity training a waste of time, has resigned. 
More related news: Mark Steyn on the poisoning of Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer by social justice warriors.
Yet more related news: At Bleeding Heart Libertarians, Jason Brennan on the latest attack on free expression within academic philosophy.
Raymond Tallis on time and physics, Daniel Robinson, Luciano Floridi, and Murillo Pagnotta on information, Stephen Talbott on evolution and purpose, and more in the latest issue of The New Atlantis.
At Public Discourse, philosopher John Skalko on why there are only two sexes.
Michael Pakaluk on Trump, Pope Francis, and the Paris climate agreement: How should Catholics respond?
Gregory Reichberg’s Thomas Aquinas on War and Peace is reviewed atNotre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
Boston Review on a new book on the obsessions of Hitchcock, Welles, and Kubrick.
Quartz asks: Was Descartes’ most famous idea anticipated by St. Teresa of Avila?
Every Catholic theologian and philosopher should own a copy.  At Rorate Caeli, Peter Kwasniewski reports on a new reprint of Scheeben’s classic work of Thomistic theology.
At the APA blog, video of a discussion with philosopher Nancy Cartwright and physicists George Ellis and Michael Duff on causality and unexplained events.
According to Catholic World Report, Thomas Aquinas College is looking to open a campus in Massachusetts. 
The sexual revolution eats its own.  Maggie Gallagher at The Stream on a new controversy over Lou Reed’s “Walk on the Wild Side.”
At First Things, Matthew Schmitz argues that Pope Francis is burying Pope Benedict.
At Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Tom Christiano reviewsJason Brennan’s Against Democracy.
At Thomistica.net, Robert Barry on how to listen to heretics before burning them.
Graham Oppy on William Lane Craig’s God Over All: Divine Aseity and the Challenge of Platonism, at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.

Stroud on Hume

David Hume, as I often argue, is overrated.  But that’s not his fault.  It’s the fault of those who do the overrating.  So, rather than beat up on him (as I have done recently), let’s beat up on them for a change.  Or rather, let’s watch Barry Stroud do it, in a way that is far more genteel than I’m inclined to.The problem, as I’ve often pointed out, is this.  Hume’s most famous conclusions – his skepticism about induction, his treatment of causality, his subjectivism about value, and so forth – are widely celebrated by contemporary philosophers.  Even those philosophers who don’t agree with these conclusions tend to regard them as formidable.  Yet few if any of these philosophers would accept the basic philosophical presuppositions on which Hume’s conclusions all rest.  For example (and as I often complain), Hume conflates concepts with mental imagery.  That is a very crude philosophical error, it has been known to be a crude error since at least Plato and Aristotle, and it has been known to contemporary philosophers to be a crude error since at least Wittgenstein.  There is very little if any “punch” left to Hume’s philosophy once this error is exposed.  Yet his conclusions continue to be taken seriously long after such underpinnings have collapsed.  They are like a ghost that continues to walk the earth long after the death of the body. 

In his book Engagement and Metaphysical Dissatisfaction: Modality and Value , Stroud raises a similar complaint.  Contemporary philosophers take Hume’s doubts about causality as a feature of mind-independent reality very seriously.  Yet they do not accept either the account of perception that these doubts rest on, or some of the other conclusions Hume draws from that account.  And it is not clear how they can consistently take the one without the others.  Stroud writes:
Many philosophers of more recent times remain in a broad sense followers of Hume on the status of causation without accepting such a severely restricted conception of the scope of perception.  They appear to hold that we can perceive and thereby have a conception of physical objects and other enduring things and states of affairs even though the idea of causal dependence between such things in the independent world remains problematic or metaphysically dubious.  The source of their doubts is not easy to determine.  One possible source is the assumption that we never perceive instances of causal connection or dependence.  A different but related possibility is that causal dependence is thought to be unperceivable because of the doubtful intelligibility of the idea of such a connection.  In any case, it certainly is still widely believed that we never perceive causal connections between things.  By now the view is hardly ever argued for.  The most that is usually offered in its support is a reverential bow in the direction of Hume, but with no acknowledgment of the restrictive theory of perception that Hume's own denial rests on. (p. 23)
Hume thinks of perception as the passive reception of “impressions” such as a sensation of color, a sharp pain, or a twinge of fear.  “Ideas” in turn, as he uses the term, are faint copies of such impressions – essentially mental imagery of a visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory, or gustatory sort, along with memories of emotions and the like.  Few philosophers today would endorse such a crude model of perceptual experience or concept formation.  Yet that model underlies Hume’s doubts about causation as an objective feature of reality.  We have a set of impressions (a succession of visual experiences of a round whitish patch, say) that we take to be the motion of a cue ball, followed by another set of impressions (a “knocking” sound followed by a succession of visual experiences of a round black patch) that we take to be the motion of an 8 ball.  But we have no impression of a causal power or force by which the first generatesthe second.  Hence we have no idea of such a force or causal power.  We just find that impressions of the former sort are constantly conjoined in our experience with impressions of the latter sort.  This leads us to expect the latter on the occasion of the former, and we projectthis subjective expectation onto the world.  But we have, Hume claims, no reason to think it really corresponds to any objective feature of the world.
(On the “skeptical realist” reading of Hume, he does not intend to undermine our commonsense belief that there really are such causal features in external reality, but merely denies that we can have any cognitive grasp of them.  But it’s hard to see how one could consistently push the latter point without ending up in essentially the more radical skeptical position traditionally attributed to Hume.  I cannot myself help wondering whether the recent heavy going about “skeptical realism” among Hume interpreters might be much ado about not a whole helluva lot.  But that’s neither here nor there for present purposes.) 
Since contemporary philosophers wouldn’t buy this story about our perceptual and cognitive faculties, it’s hard to see why they remain impressed by the conclusions about causation Hume draws from them.  That’s part of Stroud’s point.  The other part of his point is that Hume draws other lessons from the same account of perception and cognition, lessons that contemporary philosophers are not so impressed by.  In particular, Hume concludes that we have no idea of mind-independent physical objectseither, because he thinks we have no impression of such things.  We have, for example, only this fleeting impression of a round whitish patch, that other fleeting impression of a round whitish patch, a fleeting impression of a “knocking” sound, etc., but no impression of any substance that underlies and ties together these different impressions.  Here again we are in his view really just projecting onto the world something that is merely subjective, namely the brief relative stability of some of our impressions (where an impression is something essentially mental rather than mind-independent).  This is the origin of our belief in mind-independent objects, and it has no more sound a basis than our belief in objective causal connections.
Now, contrary to what non-philosophers sometimes think, few contemporary philosophers really take seriously the idea that there are no mind-independent physical objects.  They may regard it as an interesting puzzle, but not as a live option.  The idea that objective causal power and necessity might not really exist is taken to be a live option, though.  And what Stroud is puzzled by is why that should be the case given that the other Humean skeptical conclusion is not taken seriously.
Nor in Stroud’s view is it just the common Humean foundationof these two kinds of skepticism that makes this combination of attitudes problematic.  That is to say, the problem is not just that Hume himself based his skepticism about causation and his skepticism about physical objects on the same flawed account of perception and cognition.  It’s also that, even apart from that, it is hard to see how one could consistently believe in mind-independent physical objects without also attributing to them real causal powers.  Stroud writes:
This raises a general question about how or whether a person could think about and understand the objects this view admits that we do see.  Could we have a conception of a world of visible, enduring objects at all if we could never see what any of those objects do, or see them doing it?  Hume's actual view does not face this difficulty.  He thinks not only that we never see a stone break a window, but that we never see a stone or a window either.  Hume acknowledges the need to explain how we get even so much as the idea of an enduring object from the fleeting perceptions we receive, and how we come to think of such things as perceivable.  But for those who think we can see an object and know what it is and where it is and what will happen if certain other things happen, but that we never see the object doing or undergoing any of the things it does, there is a special problem. (p. 24)
What Stroud is appealing to here is the thesis – common to (though spelled out in very different ways by) both Kant-inspired writers like P. F. Strawson and contemporary neo-Aristotelians and Thomists – that we cannot make sense of the notion of a world of independently existing substances except as causally related in various ways.  (Think of the Scholastic thesis agere sequitur esse or “action follows being” – that is to say, that how a thing acts reflects what it is.  If a thing does nothing, then it cannot be said to have being at all; and if it does have being, then it must be capable of doing something, which entails causal power.)
If that’s correct – and obviously it’s a claim requiring elaboration and defense – then skepticism about mind-independent objects and skepticism about causation stand or fall together.  As Stroud notes, Hume is at least consistent on this score, since he opts for skepticism in both cases.  It’s the selective skepticism (and selective Humeanism) of some contemporary philosophers that Stroud thinks dubiously coherent.
But it’s not a universal tendency.  Where causation is concerned, the Humean ghost is at long last being exorcised in some quarters, as evidenced by books like Mumford and Anjum’s Getting Causes from Powers and the neo-Aristotelian literature.  (Naturally, I’ve tried to do my part as well.)

Five Proofs is coming

Five Proofs of the Existence of God will be out this Fall.  You can pre-order at the Ignatius Press website and at Amazon.  Here’s the book jacket description:
Five Proofs of the Existence of God 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 proof, the Neo-Platonic proof, the Augustinian proof, the Thomistic proof, and the Rationalist proof.This book also offers a detailed 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 book offers 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 which gives aid and comfort to atheism.
More information here.  Some endorsements:
“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
“Edward Feser is widely recognized as a top scholar in the history of philosophy in general, and in Thomistic and Aristotelian philosophy in particular… Feser admirably achieves his goal, and Five Proofs of the Existence of God 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 
“Yet another fine book by Edward Feser… Feser 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’… Five Proofs of the Existence of God puts the lie to the common assumption among professional philosophers that natural theology was done in forever by the likes of Hume and Kant, never to rise again.”  Alfred J. Freddoso, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame
“Refutes with devastating effect the standard objections to theistic proofs, from David Hume to the New Atheists.  Feser draws on the best from both scholastic and modern analytic philosophy, including persuasive defenses of the real distinction in creatures between essence and existence, the absolute simplicity of God, and the continued importance of causation in a relativistic and quantum-mechanical world.” Robert C. Koons, Professor of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin
“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