Edward Feser's Blog, page 81

Cross on Scotus on causal series

Duns Scotus has especially interesting and important things to say about the distinction between causal series ordered accidentally and those ordered essentially -- a distinction that plays a key role in Scholastic arguments for God’s existence.  I discuss the distinction and Scotus’s defense of it in Scholastic Metaphysics , at pp. 148-54.  Richard Cross, in his excellent book, Duns Scotus , puts forward some criticisms of Scotus’s position.  I think Cross’s objections fail.  Let’s take a look at them.First, a brief review of the distinction.  As longtime readers are aware, the key difference between the two kinds of causal series has to do with whether their members have their causal power in a derived or underived way.  Consider the causal sequence: x → y → z.  The series is essentially ordered if, in the very act of causing z, y borrows from x the power to do so.  Hence, in the stock example, the stick pushes the stone only insofar as it derives from the hand the power to push it.  A series is accidentally ordered if, in the act of causing z, y does not borrow from x the power to do so.  Hence, in the stock example, a son can beget a son of his own whether or not his own father is still alive.  (I’ve discussed this distinction at greater length in earlier posts, such as this one, and in various books and articles.  Again, see Scholastic Metaphysicsfor detailed discussion.)

Cross labels an essentially ordered series of causes an “E-series,” and an accidentally ordered series of causes an “A-series.”  His main criticism of Scotus’s use of the notion of an E-series is contained in the following passage:
In the late Reportatio (closely paralleled in the Ordinatio) Scotus argues from the following premise: “In essentially ordered causes… each second cause, in so far as it is causing, depends upon a first.”  Put in this way, it follows straightforwardly that there must be a first member of an E-series.  But the premise is question-begging, and I can see no reason for wanting to accept it.  It requires that a first cause is necessary as well as sufficient for any effect in an E-series.  But this is not so… [I]n any causal series there is a sense in which the existence of earlier causes is necessary for the existence of later causes.  But we cannot infer from this that a first cause is necessary for some effect.  There are sometimes many different ways in which the same effect can be produced.
Taking account of this objection, we could loosely reformulate the premise as follows: “In essentially ordered causes, any later cause, in so far as it is causing, depends upon an earlier cause.”  Put thus, the premise looks wholly plausible.  But there would be no problem with an infinite E-series thus construed.  Howsoever many prior causes there were, any one of them would be logically sufficient for any later effect. (p. 19)
There are several things to say about this.  To begin with, note that there are two senses in which something might be characterized as “first.”  We might mean that it comes at the head of some sequence.  This is what we have in mind when we say that Fred was first in line for the movie, or that Ethel was the first to arrive at the party.  We mean first as opposed to second, third, fourth, fifth, etc.  Let’s use “firsts” when what is intended is this sequential sense of the word.  But we might mean instead, when we characterize something as “first,” that it is in some way more fundamental or essential relative to other things, or that in some respect it has a higher status.  This is what we have in mind when we characterize something as being “of the first rank,” when we describe someone as “first among equals,” or when we give the title “First Lady” to the wife of the President of the United States.  We mean first in the sense of principal or primary as opposed to secondary.  Let’s use “firstf” when what is intended is this sense of the word, which involves some kind of fundamentality or eminence.
Now, something can be firsts without being firstf, and something can be firstf without being firsts.  The U.S. Army Chief of Staff would be the firstf soldier in the Army even if he were not the firststo join the Army, indeed even if he were the last to join.  And in theory a certain Army private could be the firsts soldier insofar as he joined before any other living soldier did, even though he has never gotten any further in rank and thus is far from being firstf.  The FirstfLady of the United States is obviously not the firsts lady ever to have lived in the United States.  Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy is not concerned with the firsts philosophy ever devised by a philosopher (Thales, say) but rather with firstfphilosophy, i.e. that branch of philosophy which deals with the most fundamental philosophical issues.  When First Comics was founded in the 1980s, the company was not claiming to be the firsts comic book company, but rather aspiring to be the firstf comic book company.  And so forth.
Now, suppose that when Scotus or some other Scholastic says that “in essentially ordered causes… each second cause, in so far as it is causing, depends upon a first,” what is meant is firsts.  Then it is easy to see why Cross would raise the objections he does.  For why should a second (or third, or fourth) cause require a firsts?  If Scotus were just stipulating that you couldn’t have a second, third, fourth, etc. cause without a firstscause, then he would be begging the question (as Cross accuses him of doing), since Scotus’s critic doesn’t see why a firsts cause is needed and hasn’t been given a reason to change his mind.  And if Scotus reformulates his position as the claim that “in essentially ordered causes, any later cause, in so far as it is causing, depends upon an earlier cause,” then (as Cross indicates) even if this is true, it will not entail that there is a firsts cause. 
The problem, though, is that this is simply notwhat Scotus and other Scholastics mean.  In the proposition that “in essentially ordered causes… each second cause, in so far as it is causing, depends upon a first,” what is mean is firstf, not firsts.  In particular, the claim is that in essentially ordered causal series, causes which have their causal power in a merely secondary or derivative way require a cause which has its causal power in a primary or underivative way.  And there is nothing question-begging about that, even if the point needs greater spelling out than Scotus gives it in that one quoted sentence considered in isolation. 
When I point out that a stick cannot move a stone by itself but requires something else to impart to it the power to move stones and other things, I am not begging any questions but rather saying something that no one would deny, not only because we all know from experience that sticks don’t move stones by themselves but also because it is evident from the nature of sticks that the reason they don’t in fact move other things by themselves is that they can’t do so.  For they simply don’t have the built-in power to do so.  Neither am I begging any questions when I point out that the same thing is true of the arm which movies the stick.  Like sticks, arms all by themselves not only never do move other things but couldn’t do so given their nature. 
Nor am I begging any questions when I go on to conclude that such a series of causes requires something which imparts the power to move things without deriving it from anything else -- for example, a human being, who can use his arm to move the stick to move the stone, without the need for someone else to pick him up and move him while he does so.  Here too I am saying something which is not only obvious from experience, but also evident from reflection on the natures of the causes involved.  For one thing, human beings have by nature a built-in power of movement that sticks, stones, and arms do not.  For another thing, in general what is derivative presupposes that from which it is derived.  Even Scotus’s critic would have to admit that the stick’s movement of the stone cannot be accounted for unless we appeal to something from which the stick derives its causal power, such as the arm.  And the critic would have to admit that accounting for the arm’s movement requires a similar appeal, for the same reason.  But any further member we posit which, like the stick and the arm, lacks built-in power, will just raise the same problem all over again.  So, we cannot account for the motion we started out with -- that of the stick as it moves the stone -- until we get to something which does have built-in or underivative causal power.
Positing an infinite regress of derivative causes is no alternative.  Suppose I owe you money, you demand that I pay up immediately, and I offer you an IOU instead.  Suppose you refuse to accept it on the grounds that you doubt I’ll ever be able to back it up with real money.  Suppose that, in order to ease your doubts, I offer you a second IOU to back up the first.  Naturally, you refuse that IOU too, and on the same grounds.  Now it would be absurd to suppose that if I go on ( Dumb and Dumber style ) to offer you an infinite series of IOUs, each backing up the previous one, then you will suddenly have a reason to abandon your doubts and accept my IOUs.  Similarly, it is absurd to suppose that positing an infinite regress of causes having merely derivative causal power somehow solves the problem that positing one, two, three, etc. derivative causes was unable to solve. 
In any event, even if someone were for some reason to try to resist this line of argument, there is nothing question-begging about it, and neither does it fail to offer a reason for thinking that there must be a cause with built-in or underived causal power.  So, Cross’s charge that Scotus either begs the question or fails to give any reason for supposing that an E-series requires a first member cannot be maintained, at least if what Scotus has in mind (as he surely does) is a firstfcause and not merely a firsts cause.
What about Cross’s point that “we cannot infer… that a first cause is necessary for some effect [since] there are sometimes many different ways in which the same effect can be produced”?  The idea here seems to be that even if in the case of the stick moving the stone (say), the stick does so only because a person moves the stick with his arm, there are nevertheless other ways in which the stick might be moved.  For example, it could be tied to some machine which moves it about, and by which it is able to move a stone.  But the problem with this objection is that it shows only that, in the E-series in question, this or that particularfirstf cause is not necessary.  It does not show that some firstfcause or other is not necessary in any E-series.
Cross raises a couple of further objections in an endnote.  First, he suggests that:
We might be inclined to argue that, if there were no first cause to an E-series, we could not find the real cause of any effect… Richard Swinburne notes that this argument falls victim to what he labels the ‘compIetist fallacy’: if y causes z, then it really does explain the existence of z, even if y itself requires explanation. (pp. 161-62; Cross is referring to remarks made by Swinburne in the second edition of his book The Existence of God)
The trouble with this objection is that to say that something is not a “complete” cause is simply not the same thing as to say that it is not a “real” cause, and to say that something is not a “complete” explanation is simply not the same thing as saying that it is not a “real” explanation.  Does the stick in our example reallymove the stone?  Of course.  Does its motion really explain the motion of the stone?  Yes indeed.  But is the stick the completecause of the motion of the stone?  Of course not.  And neither does its motion completely explain that of the stone, precisely because it would have no power to move the stone at all if it did not derive it from the person who uses it to move the stone. 
Finally, Cross says:
Scotus's argument is made more complicated by his claim that even if per impossibile there were an infinite series of causes, each one would have to depend on some first cause that was outside the series… But this just blurs the distinction between an E-series and an A-series.  On Scotus's initial definitions, an E-series will be self-sufficient; it will not depend on any cause outside itself. (p. 162)
The reason Cross thinks this blurs the distinction between an E-series and an A-series, it seems, is that Scotus and other Scholastics hold that an A-series need not have a first member, whereas an E-series must have one.  But Scotus’s allowing for the sake of argument that an E-series might regress infinitely will seem to blur the distinction between an E-series and an A-series only if we fail to keep in mind the distinction between a firsts cause and a firstfcause.  When Scotus allows for the sake of argument that an E-series might regress infinitely, he is not saying, even for the sake of argument, that an E-series might lack a firstfcause.  Rather, he is allowing for the sake of argument that it might lack a firsts cause, and saying that even if it lacked one, it would still require a firstf cause. 
For example, suppose the stone was being pushed by a stick, which was being pushed by another stick, which was being pushed by yet another stick, and so on ad infinitum.  Such a series would not have a firstsmember.  But there would still have to be a firstf member outside the series to impart motion to it, because of themselves a mere series of sticks, however long, would have no power to move at all.
So, Cross’s objections all fail.  But someone might still wonder how all this supports an argument for God’s existence.  For of course, Scotus, like Aquinas and other Scholastics, intends to argue for a single and divine first cause.  Yet a person who moves a stone with a stick is only one firstf cause alongside many others, and a non-divine one at that. 
But pointing out that an E-series must have a firstf member, and illustrating the idea with the stick example, is by no means the whole of a First Cause argument for God’s existence.  It is only part of a much larger line of argument.  For one thing, while a person who moves a stone with a stick is a firstf cause relative to that particular series, it does not follow that he is a firstf cause absolutely, full stop.  Indeed, relative to other E-series, he will himself be an effect.  For example, his existence at any moment depends upon the existence and proper configuration of his micro-level material parts.  And in a metaphysically more fundamental way, it depends on his substantial form being conjoined with prime matter, and his essence being conjoined with an act of existence.  The regress this entails will be vicious unless it terminates in a cause which is purely actual and thus need not be actualized by anything else.  And a purely actual cause turns out on analysis to have the divine attributes.
But that’s a whole other story (for which see chapter 3 of Aquinas and several of the essays on natural theology in Neo-Scholastic Essays ). 

Review of Wilson and Scruton

In the Spring 2015 issue of the Claremont Review of Books, I review Edward O. Wilson’s The Meaning of Human Existence and Roger Scruton’s The Soul of the World . 

Neo-Scholastic Essays

I am pleased to announce the publication of Neo-Scholastic Essays , a collection of previously published academic articles of mine from the last decade, along with some previously unpublished papers and other material.  Here are the cover copy and table of contents:
In a series of publications over the course of a decade, Edward Feser has argued for the defensibility and abiding relevance to issues in contemporary philosophy of Scholastic ideas and arguments, and especially of Aristotelian-Thomistic ideas and arguments.  This work has been in the vein of what has come to be known as “analytical Thomism,” though the spirit of the project goes back at least to the Neo-Scholasticism of the period from the late nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface
Acknowledgments
Metaphysics and philosophy of nature
1. Motion in Aristotle, Newton, and Einstein
2. Teleology: A Shopper’s Guide
3. On Aristotle, Aquinas, and Paley: A Reply to Marie George
Natural theology
4. Natural Theology Must Be Grounded in the Philosophy of Nature, Not in Natural Science
5. Existential Inertia and the Five Ways
6. The New Atheists and the Cosmological Argument
7. Between Aristotle and William Paley: Aquinas’s Fifth Way
8. Why McGinn is a Pre-Theist
9. The Road from Atheism
Philosophy of mind
10. Kripke, Ross, and the Immaterial Aspects of Thought
11. Hayek, Popper, and the Causal Theory of the Mind
12. Why Searle is a Property Dualist
Ethics
13. Being, the Good, and the Guise of the Good
14. Classical Natural Law Theory, Property Rights, and Taxation
15. Self-Ownership, Libertarianism, and Impartiality
16. In Defense of the Perverted Faculty Argument

Religion and superstition

The Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy of Religion , edited by Graham Oppy, has just been published.  My essay “Religion and Superstition” is among the chapters.  The book’s table of contents and other details can be found here.  (The book is very expensive.  But I believe you should be able to read all or most of my essay via the preview at Google Books.) 

Aristotle watches Blade Runner

You can never watch Blade Runner too many times, and I’m due for another viewing.  In D. E. Wittkower’s anthology Philip K. Dick and Philosophy , there’s an article by Ross Barham which makes some remarks about the movie’s famous “replicants” and their relationship to human beings which are interesting though, in my view, mistaken.  Barham considers how we might understand the two kinds of creature in light of Aristotle’s four causes, and suggests that this is easier to do with replicants than with human beings.  This is, I think, the reverse of the truth.  But Barham’s reasons are not hard to understand given modern assumptions (which Aristotle would reject) about nature in general and human nature in particular.Barham suggests that, where replicants are concerned, a four-cause analysis would look something like this: their efficient cause is the Tyrell Corporation and its engineers; their material cause is to be found in the biological and mechanical constituents out of which they are constructed; their formal cause is the human-like pattern on which the Tyrell Corporation designed them; and their final cause is to function as human-like slave laborers. 

With human beings, Barham says, things are different.  Here, he thinks, the analysis looks like this: their efficient cause is, proximately, their parents, and remotely, evolution; their material cause is the biochemical matter out of which they are constituted; and their formal cause is the “blueprint” to be found in their DNA.  But with human beings, Barham says, it’s not so clear what their final cause is.
Now, you might think that his reason for saying this has something to do with attributing our remote origin to evolution rather than divine creation.  You might think, in other words, that he is supposing that if God didn’t make us, then we must not have a purpose or final cause.  But that is not Barham’s reason -- and it’s a good thing, since that would not be a good reason for saying it.  For Aristotelians, at least where true substances are concerned -- water, lead, gold, copper, trees, birds, spiders, human beings, etc. -- you don’t need to know anything about their remote origins in order to know their teleological features or final causes, any more than you need to know their remote origins in order to know their formal or material or (immediate) efficient causes. 
For example, you don’t need to know whether God made acorns in order to know that they are “directed at” or “point toward” becoming oaks.  You don’t need to know whether God made trees in order to know that their roots are “for” taking in water and nutrients and giving the tree stability.  You don’t need to know whether God made spiders in order to know that their webs have the function of allowing them to catch prey.  You don’t need to know whether God made copper in order to know that copper has a tendency to conduct electricity.  Etc.  All you need to do is to observe how birds and spiders tend to act when in their mature and healthy state, what acorns and copper tend to do under various circumstances, etc.  The causal powers a thing exhibits are the key to understanding its finality or “directedness.”  (Recall that, contrary to the standard caricature, most finality or teleology in nature involves nothing as fancy as biological function.  It typically involves just a mere “directedness” or “pointing” toward a certain standard outcome or range of outcomes.) 
Barham is aware that for Aristotle, to know a natural object’s teleological features, one needs to observe how it characteristically behaves, and that this is as true of human beings as it is of anything else.  He is also aware that for Aristotle, what is characteristic of human beings is that they exhibit rational powers, so that living in accordance with reason is, for Aristotle, our final cause. 
So far so good.  But now comes Barham’s mistake.  He thinks Aristotle’s answer faces the following difficulties.  First, Barham thinks that there are alterative candidates for our final cause or natural end that are no less plausible than rationality.  His examples are agency, the capacity for morality, and love.  Second, he notes that we often act irrationally and suggests that replicants can be no less rational than human beings are -- in which case rationality is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a human being.  Third, he seems to think that a problem with any proposed characteristic (rationality, moral behavior, love, or whatever) is that there are instances of human beings who don’t exhibit it -- so that (Barham seems to conclude) none of them can be the final cause of human beings as such.  (In fairness to Barham, in some cases it’s not clear whether these are objections Barham himself endorses, or merely objections he thinks are implicit in Blade Runner.)
Longtime readers no doubt know already how I would respond to objections of this sort.  (They will also be familiar with the Aristotelian and Scholastic notions to be deployed below -- notions I’ve spelled out and defended in many places, and most systematically in Scholastic Metaphysics .) 
First, that we often act irrationally does not entail that we are not rational.  Indeed, you cannot act irrationally unless you are rational, in the relevant sense of “rational.”  To be irrational is not the same thing as to be non-rational.  Rather, to be irrational is to reason badly, or to let one’s emotion cloud one’s reason, or to be impaired somehow (by mental illness or brain damage, say) so that one is prevented from exercising one’s reason -- all of which presupposes that one does indeed have reason.  Contrast a spider, say, which is not irrational precisely because it does not even rise to the level of reasoning badly.  A spider is instead non-rational.
Second, agency, morality, and love are not really in competition with rationality as candidates for our characteristic activity, certainly not on the analysis an Aristotelian like Aquinas would put forward.  For these are all themselves just special cases of rationality.  Consider Aquinas’s view that will follows upon intellect. Will is “rational appetite,” the tendency to be drawn toward what the intellect sees to be good.  To be “rational,” then, is for Aquinas to have a will as well as an intellect.  Now, agency, in the sense here in question, is just the capacity to behave in light of reason -- that is to say, to have a will.  Morality is just a matter of an agent’s pursuing what the intellect perceives to be good for him and avoiding what it perceives to be bad.  Loving a thing is just willing what is good for it.  So, the Aristotelian can take Barham’s alleged alternatives not to be true alternatives to rationality at all, but indeed to be instances of rationality. 
Third, that some human being doesn’t actually exhibit one of the features in question -- for example, that there are sociopaths unmoved by moral considerations, or that severely brain damaged people cannot exercise reason -- doesn’t entail that these features are not part of the nature of all human beings after all.  To appeal to one of my stock examples, dogs are of their nature four-legged, even if there are occasional dogs which, due to injury or genetic defect, are missing a leg.  For to say that dogs are of their nature four-legged does not mean, on an Aristotelian understanding of the nature or essence of a thing, that every single dog will in fact have four-legs.  It means that any dog in its mature and undamaged state will have four legs.  Even three-legged dogs by nature have four legs -- that is to say, being four-legged is what they naturally tend toward.  It’s just that in a three-legged dog this tendency has been frustrated.
Similarly, a human being who is so severely brain damaged that he can no longer reason, or so psychologically aberrant that he is utterly unmoved by the demands of morality, is still someone who by nature tends toward rational activity and a sense of guilt at doing evil.   It’s just that, as with the damaged dog, the manifestation of the natural tendencies has been blocked.  (Note that this does not make them any less human, any more than a three-legged dog is any less a dog.  An imperfect or damaged dog is in no way a non-dog, and an imperfect or damaged human being is in no way non-human.  You have actually to be an X in the first place in order to count as an imperfect or damaged X.)
What about the suggestion that Blade Runner’s replicants, like humans, have rationality?  Here things are a little more complicated, but only because replicants are, of course, fictional.  There is no “fact of the matter” about what a replicant is; hence it’s not entirely clear what to say about them.  What we are told about them makes the situation highly ambiguous.  On the one hand, superficially they seem to be like robots or androids.  And in that case I would say that they are metaphysically on all fours with computers, clocks, toaster ovens, etc.  That is to say, they have mere accidental forms rather than substantial forms, and are thus not true substances.  On the other hand, on closer consideration they are far more human-like than the stereotypical android or robot is.  Not only are they at least partially made out of biological material, but they are so close to human beings in their appearance that it seems that a physical inspection (including an X-ray or the like) wouldn’t reveal something to be a replicant.  Hence Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) has to administer a complex psychological test to determine whether Rachael (Sean Young) is a replicant.  But then replicants seem to have an organic unity that indicates that they have substantial forms rather than merely accidental forms, and thus are true substances.  (I have discussed the difference between substantial and accidental form in many places, such as here, here, and here.  For the full story, see chapter 3 of Scholastic Metaphysics.) 
Now, either way we interpret them, replicants will not be true counterexamples to the Aristotelian claim that what is distinctive about human beings is that they are rational animals.  For suppose that replicants have only accidental forms, and thus are not true substances.  They are in this case merely mechanical systems, like computers running software or clocks which have been designed to display the time.  And in that case, for reasons I’ve stated many times (e.g., recently, here) they would from the Aristotelian point of view no more literally have rationality than a statue of a man literally has eyes.  They would merely behave as if they had it.  The rationality would all be observer-relative -- a projection of the human programmers of the replicant’s imitation brain, rather than something really in the replicant itself.
Suppose instead, though, that replicants have substantial forms and thus are true substances.  Then it is much more plausible to say that they have genuine rationality, as well as true sensation, appetite, locomotion, and the other functions we share with non-human animals.  But in that case they would be rational animals -- in which case they would be human beings.  True, they would be human beings with very exotic origins, but that is a question of where they came from, and that is a different question from the question of what they are.  On this scenario, they would be more like clones of human beings (even if not exactly like clones) than they would be like robots or androids, and clones of human beings would certainly be human beings.  But if replicants are just exotic human beings, then, once again, they are not counterexamples to the claim that being rational is what is distinctive of human beings.
Of course, all of this presupposes the Aristotelian metaphysics of substance, but the point is that, contrary to what Barham implies, that metaphysics has ample resources to deal with the purported counterexamples he thinks Blade Runner is offering us.

D. B. Hart and the “terrorism of obscurantism”

Many years ago, Steven Postrel and I interviewed John Searle for Reason magazine.  Commenting on his famous dispute with Jacques Derrida, Searle remarked:
With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he's so obscure.  Every time you say, "He says so and so," he always says, "You misunderstood me."  But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that's not so easy.  I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism).  We were speaking French.  And I said, "What the hell do you mean by that?"  And he said, "He writes so obscurely you can't tell what he's saying, that's the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, 'You didn't understand me; you're an idiot.'  That's the terrorism part."
Now, David Bentley Hart is hardly as obscure as Derrida, and I would hardly call him a “terrorist.”  (Foucault’s expression here is characteristically over-the-top.)  Still, I can’t help but think of Searle and Foucault’s description of Derrida’s method of dealing with his critics when reflecting on the way Hart tends to respond to his critics.
First example: Take Hart’s now notorious attack on natural law theory of two years ago.  As I showed in my initial reply to Hart, there are a number of serious problems with that piece.  But as I have also by now pointed out many times, the most serious -- indeed, the fatal problem -- is that Hart relentlessly conflates “new natural law” theory and “old natural law” theory.  His central thesis, which he not only presented in his original article but has reiterated in several follow-up pieces, is that natural law theorists both (a) appeal to formal and final causes inherent in nature but also (b) are blithely unaware of the fact (or at least downplay the fact) that most of the modern readers they are trying to convince firmly reject the very idea of formal and final causes.  And the trouble is that there are no natural law theorists of which this is true.  For (a) is not true of “new” natural law theorists, and (b) is not true of “old” natural law theorists.  Hart is thus attacking a straw man. 

Certainly Hart has, in the original piece, in three different follow-up pieces now, and in two further brief references to the debate, failed to offer a single example -- not one -- of a natural law theorist whose work actually fits his description of natural law theory.  Indeed, he has explicitly refused to name any names, even though doing so would instantly defuse the main objection his critics have raised against him.
(For the record, these follow-up pieces are: Hart’s first reply to his critics in his column in the May 2013 First Things, to which I responded at Public Discourse; Hart’s lengthy further response to his critics in the letters pageof the same issue, to which I responded here at the blog; and what he characterized as his final response in his August 2013 column in First Things, to which I also responded here at the blog.  Hart then briefly revisited the debate in his column in the March 2015 First Things, to which I responded here; and he briefly referred to it yet again in his June/July 2015 First Things column, to which I recently responded at Public Discourse.)
Even more bizarrely, though Hart has addressed other objections head on, he has, in those three lengthy follow-up pieces and two briefer remarks -- five occasions total -- not even acknowledged, much less directly responded to, the central objection just summarized, even though it has been repeatedly raised against him.  He could very easily say: “I have been accused of conflating new and old natural law theory, but here is why that charge is mistaken…,” or: “Let me give you a specific example of a natural law theorist who is guilty of doing what I say natural law theorists in general are guilty of.”  But he doesn’t.  Why not?  It can’t be because he has judged that answering his critics is somehow not worth his time; again, he has revisited the debate five times now.  So, obviously he does want to try to answer his critics.  And yet he never acknowledges or directly responds to their central criticism.  Why is that?
Then there is the obscurity in what Hart doessay in reply to his critics.  If you read my responses, linked to above, to his three lengthier attempts to reply to those critics, you will see that I there show -- documenting my analysis with many quotes from Hart -- how difficult it is to find a clear and consistent position in what he says.  As I demonstrate in those pieces, just when you think you’ve finally nailed down what Hart means, he says something else that conflicts with that reading.  Hart himself confesses in one place to some “obscurity,” and in another that he “may have been guilty of a few cryptic formulations” and “should have been clearer.”
And yet despite admitting himself to being sometimes “obscure” and “cryptic,” and despite failing repeatedly even to acknowledge much less answer the main objection leveled against him -- where, if only he would do so, he might finally clarify things in a single stroke -- Hart claims that it is my criticismsof his remarks on natural law that are “confused,” “simplistic,” and guilty of “fallacies,” and that our dispute over natural law “largely involved Feser furiously thrashing away at what he imagined I was saying” (where the latter remark was embedded in the larger context of ad hominemremarks about my purportedly robotic and dogmatic adherence to “The System” of “Baroque neoscholasticism,” “manualism,” “two-tier Thomism,” etc.).
Now that, I submit, comes pretty close to what Foucault and Searle call “the method of… [the] terrorism of obscurantism.”
Second example: Hart’s March 2015 column in First Things is primarily devoted to the question of the relationship between faith and reason.  As I noted in my March 13 blog post commenting on that column:
Hart objects to the charge that he is a fideist, arguing that both fideism and rationalism of the seventeenth-century sort are errors that would have been rejected by the mainstream of the ancient and medieval traditions with which he sympathizes.  With that much I agree. 
I also noted several other things Hart says in the column with which I agree, and indeed I said that they are “points whose importance cannot be overemphasized.” 
I also noted, however, that certain other things Hart says there seem, whatever his intentions, to imply a kind of fideism.  For example, he says that even reason “arises from an irreducibly fiduciary movement of the will” (emphasis added), and indicates that he rejects the view that reason is “capable of discerning first principles and deducing final conclusions without any surd of the irrational left over” (emphasis added).  That certainly makes it sound as if he thinks that in all our attempts rationally to justify our beliefs, there is always at bottom some “surd of the irrational” and that it is “the will,” in an “irreducibly fiduciary movement,” which decides upon first principles.  And that is a view of the sort that would commonly be regarded as a kind of fideism.  Still, I did not say that Hart is a fideist, full stop.  I said that his position is ambiguous and can be read in different ways. 
Incidentally, you’ll find a similar ambiguity in Hart’s recent book The Experience of God.  On the one hand, he argues (quite rightly in my view), that any materialist account of our rational thought processes can be shown to be self-undermining, and that the very logic of explanation when pushed through consistently leads inevitably to affirming the existence of a divine necessary being as the only possible explanation of why the world of contingent things exists.  That certainly evinces a very optimistic view of what reason can accomplish vis-à-vis the dispute between theists and philosophical naturalists. 
On the other hand, Hart also says in that book that he has “begun to vest less faith in certain forms of argument” (p. 84), and that it is good to “let all complexities of argument fall away as often as one can” in favor of a “moment of wonder, of sheer existential surprise” (p. 150).  He suggests that “our deepest principles often consist in nothing more -- but nothing less -- than a certain way of seeing things” and that “every form of philosophical thought is itself dependent upon a set of irreducible and unprovable assumptions” (p. 294).  He wants to remind us of “the limits of argument, and of the degree to which our most cherished certitudes are inseparable from our own private experiences” (Ibid.).
Does this mean that all attempted rational justifications come down at the end of the day to “private experiences,” “moments of wonder,” or the like?  Is there, after all, no common ground by which the theist might rationally demonstrate to the naturalist that the latter’s position is mistaken?  Are there just irreducibly different possible “movements of the will,” any of which involves a “surd of the irrational”?  If so, why wouldn’t this amount to fideism?  Or is there some other way to read Hart’s remarks here?  The problem is not the way Hart answers these questions.  The problem is that Hart doesn’t even addressthem, much less answer them, at least not in The Experience of God or in the column on faith and reason.  It just isn’t clear what he would say.
Now, a reader recently called my attention to a recent combox discussion at Eclectic Orthodoxy, to which Hart contributed and in the course of which he made the following remark:
[W]e are all so prone to thinking in the rather arid categories of (for want of a better word) analytic correspondence that we regard the entire tacit dimension of knowledge (which is the foundation of all knowledge) as somehow either merely inchoate or merely emotional. If one is not careful, one ends up with the barren dialectic of “rationalism” or “fideism,” and one ends up like a certain popular Thomist I know of, unable to think in any other terms than that.
Well, I’m sure we’re all wondering who the “popular Thomist” in question is.  But one good reason for thinking that it isn’t me -- or rather, for thinking that it shouldn’tbe me -- is that my views simply don’t correspond to those attributed by Hart to this “popular Thomist.”  For one thing, and as I explicitly said in my post on Hart’s faith and reason column, like him I reject what he called, in the column, “the Scylla and Charybdis of ‘rationalism’ and ‘fideism’ [which] seems like such a tarnished relic of the seventeenth century (or thereabouts).”  For another thing, I have written quite a bit, and quite sympathetically, on the “tacit dimension of knowledge.”  (See, for example, my defense of Burke’s and Hayek’s account of the indispensable role that tradition, habit, and inexplicit rules play in moral and social knowledge.)  It’s just that I don’t think that this tacit knowledge has anything to do with “movements of the will,” a “surd of the irrational,” or the like. 
Now, if some man assures us with vehemence that he is not a bachelor, but also denies with equal vehemence that he is or ever has been married, never explains to us how both these things can be true but also dismisses with contempt our suggestion that maybe he really is a bachelor after all (accusing us of applying “arid categories” and a “barren dialectic,” no less)… if someone does all that, then weare hardly the ones being unreasonable.  Nor would it be reasonable for his defenders breathlessly to protest “But he said he’s not a bachelor!  You’re not interpreting him charitably!” 
Similarly, though Hart insists that he is not a fideist, but nevertheless also says things that would normally be taken to be fideistic positions, and does not explain how he can reconcile these claims while at the same time dismissing his critics as being simplistic and misunderstanding him… well, once again, that seems pretty close to what Foucault and Searle call “the method of… [the] terrorism of obscurantism.”
Diagnosis: So, just what is Hart’s deal, anyway?  Why this resort to obscurantisme terroriste?  Let’s consider the following:
Item one: As a stylist and a thinker, Hart’s strengths and predilections lie in rhetoric rather than rigor, and he has a clear animus against writers of the opposite tendency.  Hence his confessionthat he “delight[s] in casual abuse of Thomists,” and his regular glib dismissals of anything he takes to smack of “neoscholasticism.”  Hence his equally condescending remarks about analytic philosophers in The Experience of God.  Hence his explicit refusal, in the same book, actually to set out and defend in any detail the arguments against materialism and for the existence of God that he endorses.  Explicit, step-by-step arguments, the dispassionate weighing of lists of possible objections and possible replies to those objections, the making of fine distinctions and careful definitions of key terms, and so forth -- the sort of thing typical of a Scholastic or an analytic philosopher -- are not the sort of thing for which Hart seems to have much patience.
What Hart really likes are grandiloquent pronouncements and the big picture.  A sense of his style and interests is given by the titles and subtitles you’ll typically find in a Hart book or article: “Being, Consciousness, Bliss,” “The Veil of the Sublime,” “The Mirror of the Infinite,” “A Glorious Sadness,” “The Practice of the Form,” “The Terrors of Easter,” “The Doors of the Sea,” “The Violence of Metaphysics and the Metaphysics of Violence”… that kind of stuff.  The sort of thing sure to prompt an “Oooh!” or an “Aaaaah!” as you dip into Hart while sipping brandy.  Grand Rhetoric and Grand Themes, and hold the argumentational minutiae please.  That’s Hart’s shtick, and he’s shtickin’ with it.  You can see how an analytical Thomist who posts comic book panels on his blog might get under his skin.
Item two: Whether or not you want to call it “fideism,” the view that what we take to be rational argument always comes down at the end of the day to “movements of the will,” “personal experiences,” “ways of seeing things,” “moments of wonder,” and the like tends inevitably to put the accent on the character of a person giving an argument rather than on the argument itself.  If your conclusions are mistaken, perhaps that’s because you haven’t had a “moment of wonder,” or have had the wrong “personal experiences,” so that your overall “way of seeing things” is off kilter.  Or perhaps the “movements of your will” are simply corrupt. 
Of course, sometimes the problem really is with the character of the person giving an argument.  Sometimes people really are arguing in bad faith.  Furthermore, Hart’s view doesn’t entail that all errors are a consequence of some deficiency of character.  It is consistent with some errors just being a result of mistaken inferences or getting the facts wrong. 
Still, if you are someone who is inclined to emphasize “the limits of argument,” and the role that “movements of the will” and the having of the right “personal experiences” play in ensuring a sound overall “way of seeing things,” then there is bound to be a strong temptation to jump too quickly to the ad hominem, to look straightaway for a deficiency in your critics and not just in their criticisms. 
And Hart does indeed sometimes suggest that deficiencies of background experience or personal motivation underlie his critics’ resistance to his views.  Hence, in his most recent response to me in First Things, Hart laments that “Feser [was not] fortunate enough to be catechized into Orthodoxy rather than The System.”  And rather than focusing on the actual arguments I gave against there being animals in Heaven (which was the subject of our dispute), he put the emphasis on what he alleged were my true motives for taking the view I did (viz. to uphold “The System”). 
Kidding on the square, Hart also suggests in The Experience of God that a preference for analytic philosophy reflects “some peculiarity of temperament or the tragic privations of a misspent youth” (p. 344). 
Furthermore, in one of his replies to critics of his article on natural law, Hart says:
I am in the end quite happy for believers in natural law theory to continue plying their oars, rowing against the current (so long as they do so in keeping with classical metaphysics), but I do not think they are going to get where they are heading; so I shall just watch from the bank for a while and then wander off to the hills (to look for saints and angels).
And in reply to one critic in particular, he says:
As to what “other approach” he should take to “modern moral life,” I encourage Mr. Kainz to pursue classical natural law theory (which was not the topic I addressed), if he likes. The Great Commission also comes to mind. (Do what you think best.)
The insinuation is obvious.  If what motivates you is Christ’s Great Commission and if you value the teachings of saints and angels over those of worldly men, then you’ll agree with Hart.  And if you don’t agree with Hart, well…
(I say more about these two passages in my analysis from two years ago of the piece from which they are quoted.)
So, with this in mind, consider the scenario in which Hart not infrequently finds himself.  A Grand Man makes a Grand Point about a Grand Theme, in Grand Style.  And then some yutz analytic philosopher or neoscholastic comes along logic-chopping and ruining the moment.  The temptation is strong to conclude that there’s got to be something wrong with the critic and not just with whatever his silly criticism is.  He just hasn’t got the character or education to see all the Grandness. 
Conclusion: On the one hand, then, we have a strong predilection for rhetoric and an impatience with rigorous argumentation.  That’s a recipe for the first half of obscurantisme terroriste.  And on the other hand, we have a strong tendency to look for volitional, experiential, moral, and spiritual deficiencies -- personal deficiencies -- in those who have the wrong opinions.  That’s a recipe for the second half of obscurantisme terroriste.  Thus, a temptation to deal with critics via what Searle and Foucault call “the method of… [the] terrorism of obscurantism” is, I would suggest, bound to be an occupational hazard of the Hart style of theology.
And this is an analysis even Hart should love.  “The Terrorism of Obscurantism” sounds just like a Hart chapter title, no?

Stupid rhetorical tricks

In honor of David Letterman’s final show tonight, let’s look at a variation on his famous “Stupid pet tricks” routine.  It involves people rather animals, but lots of Pavlovian frenzied salivating.  I speak of David Bentley Hart’s latest contribution, in the June/July issue of First Things, to our dispute about whether there will be animals in Heaven.  The article consists of Hart (a) flinging epithets like “manualist Thomism” and “Baroque neoscholasticism” so as to rile up whatever readers there are who might be riled up by such epithets, while (b) ignoring the substance of my arguments.  Pretty sad.  I reply at Public Discourse.Previous installments of my various exchanges with Hart can be found here.

Lewis on transposition

C. S. Lewis’s essay “Transposition” is available in his collection The Weight of Glory , and also online here.  It is, both philosophically and theologically, very deep, illuminating the relationship between the material and the immaterial, and between the natural and the supernatural.  (Note that these are different distinctions, certainly from a Thomistic point of view.  For there are phenomena that are immaterial but still natural.  For example, the human intellect is immaterial, but still perfectly “natural” insofar as it is in our nature to have intellects.  What is “supernatural” is what goes beyond a thing’s nature, and it is not beyond a thing’s nature to be immaterial if immateriality just is part of its nature.)By “transposition,” Lewis has in mind the way in which a system which is richer or has more elements can be represented in a system that is poorer insofar as it has fewer elements.  The notion is best conveyed by means of his examples.  Consider, for instance, the way that the world of three dimensional colored objects can be represented in a two dimensional black and white line drawing; or the way that a piece of music scored for an orchestra might be adapted for piano; or the way something said in a language with many words at its disposal might be translated into a language containing far fewer words, if the relevant latter words have several senses.

As these examples indicate, in a transposition, the elements of the poorer system have to be susceptible of multiple interpretations if they are to capture what is contained in the richer system.  In a pen and ink drawing, black will have to represent not only objects that really are black, but also shadows and contours; white will have to represent not only objects that really are white, but also areas that are in bright light; a triangular shape will represent not only two dimensional objects, but also three dimensional objects like a road receding into the distance; and so on.  In an orchestral piece adapted for piano, the same notes will have to stand for those that would have been played on a flute and those that would have been played on a violin.  In a translation into a less rich language, words that have one meaning in one context will have to bear a different meaning in another context.  In general, the relationship between the elements of a richer system and the elements of the poorer system into which it is transposed is not one-to-one, but many-to-one.
You cannot properly understand a transposition unless you understand something of both sides of it, as Lewis illustrates with a vivid example.  He asks us to consider a child born to a woman locked in a dungeon, who tries to teach the child about the outside world via black and white line drawings.  Through this medium “she attempts to show him what fields, rivers, mountains, cities, and waves on a beach are like” (p. 110).  For a time it seems that she is succeeding, but eventually something the child says indicates that he supposes that what exists outside the dungeon is a world filled with lines and other pencil marks.  The mother informs the child that this is not the case:
And instantly his whole notion of the outer world becomes a blank.  For the lines, by which alone he was imagining it, have now been denied of it.  He has no idea of that which will exclude and dispense with the lines, that of which the lines were merely a transposition… (Ibid.)
(Though Lewis does not note it, the parallel with Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is obvious.)
Now, transpositions in Lewis’s sense do not exist merely where we are trying to represent something (in words, drawings, music, or whatever).  Lewis points out that a similar relationship holds between emotions and bodily sensations.  The very same sensation -- a twinge of excitement felt in the abdomen around the diaphragm, say -- may in one context be associated with romantic passion and be taken to be pleasant, and in another context be associated with a feeling of distress and be taken to be unpleasant.  Very different emotions can be transposed, as it were, onto one and the same bodily sensation in something like the way very different meanings might be associated with the same word.  And as with the other sorts of transposition, you will not understand what is going on if you look to the lower medium alone.  In this case, you will not know what emotion is being felt, or even what an emotion is, if you look to the bodily sensation alone.
As Lewis points out, the notion of transposition is useful for understanding the relationship between mind and matter and the crudity of the errors made by materialists.  Lewis, like Aristotelians and Thomists, is happy to acknowledge that “thought is intimately connected with the brain,” but, also like them, he insists that the conclusion “that thought therefore is merely a movement in the brain is… nonsense” (p. 103, emphasis added).  As I have argued many times (at greatest length and most systematically here), there is no way in principle that the conceptual content of our thoughts can be accounted for in materialist terms, because concepts have an exact or determinate content that no material representation or system of representations can have, and a universal reference that no material representation or system of representations can have.  The relationship between thought and brain activity is accordingly somewhat analogous to the relationship between the meaning of a written sentence and the physical properties of the ink marks that make up that sentence.  If the ink marks are damaged or destroyed, it will be difficult or impossible for the sentence to convey its meaning.  But of course it doesn’t follow that the meaning of the sentence is reducible to or knowable from the physical properties of the ink marks alone.  Similarly, if the brain is damaged, then thought is impaired, but it doesn’t follow that thought is reducible to brain activity.  (I do not say that the analogy is perfect, only that it is suggestive.)
Now, suppose someone noted that sentences are always embodied in some physical medium or other -- ink marks, pixels, sound waves, etc. -- and concluded that the meaning of a sentence must therefore be reducible to or deducible from the physical and chemical properties of ink marks, pixels, sound waves, etc. alone.  He would be conflating the two sides of a transposition, and in particular trying to reduce the richer system (the system of meanings) to the poorer system (the system of physical marks or noises).  He would be like the child in the dungeon who thinks that the outside world must be “nothing but” what can be captured in black and white line drawings, or like someone who thinks that the richness of an emotional state can be reduced to a mere bodily sensation, or like someone who thinks that the most complex orchestral piece must really be “nothing but” whatever noises can be made on a piano.
Now, anyone who seriously thinks that thought can be reduced to brain activity, or who suggests (as an eliminative materialist, as opposed to a reductive materialist, would) that the notion of thought can be eliminated entirely and replaced by the notion of brain activity, is like that.  Actually, he is much worse than that.  He is not like the child in the dungeon who has never seen the outside world and thus makes an innocent, though egregious, error in supposing that it must be reducible to what can be captured in a line drawing.  The materialist is more like the woman, if we imagine that for some bizarre reason she somehow talks herself into believing that the outside world contains nothing more than what is in a black and white pencil drawing -- even though she has actually seen the outside world and thus knows better.  The materialist knows full well that thought is real, and that the conceptual content of thought is as different from the physical properties of brain activity -- electrochemical properties, causal relations, etc. -- as apples are from oranges.  It is only an ideological fixation on one side of the transposition involved here that leads him to insist otherwise.  Suppose the reason the woman fell into a delusion like the one in question is because she had spent so long a time in the dungeon that she came to love it, and could barely remember the outside world.  The materialist has so fixated upon and fallen in love with the less rich side of the transposition (brain activity) that, at least in his philosophical moments, he can barely keep in mind what the richer side (thought) is really like.
This error of conflating the two sides of a transposition is rife within reductionist philosophical theorizing.  Think, for example, of Hume’s claim that concepts are “nothing but” impressions or mental images, or Berkeley’s claim that physical objects are “nothing but” collections of the perceptions we have of them, or subjectivist theories of value that claim that judgments about what is good or bad are “nothing but” expressions of various sentiments.  Whenever we consciously entertain some concept, we tend to form a mental image of some sort.  For example, when we entertain the concept triangularity, we form a mental image of a triangle or of the written or spoken word “triangle.”  But it doesn’t follow that the concept is to be identified with such mental images, and indeed (and contra Hume) it cannot be.  The concept, being completely abstract and universal, is richer than any mental image or set of mental images, which are always concrete and particular.  What the mind does when it makes use of mental imagery as an aid to thought is to transpose, in Lewis’s sense, the richer conceptual order into the poorer order of mental imagery.  Similarly, in perception, the mind transposes the richness of physical substances (the full nature of which can be grasped only by the intellect and not by sensation or imagination) into the poorer medium of sense images.  Berkeley’s idealism in effect collapses that richer order into the poorer one.  And in conscious acts of moral judgment, our grasp of something as good is associated with a feeling of approval, while our judgment that something is bad is associated with a feeling of disapproval.  The mind transposes the former, cognitive order into the latter, and very different, affective order.  The subjectivist theorist of value makes the mistake of collapsing the former into the latter.
As Lewis notes, however, it isn’t just materialists and other reductionists who are guilty of confusion where transpositions are concerned.  Religious believers are prone to it as well to the extent that they collapse the supernatural into the natural.  For example, Lewis notes the danger of confusing one’s emotional state with one’s spiritual state.  Obviously there is a rough and ready correlation here.  Being close to God and morally upright is often associated with a feeling of well-being.  But feelings are fickle things and subject to distortion.  A scrupulous person takes his feelings of guilt to be a sign that he has sinned, when in fact he has not.  A lax person takes the absence of any feelings of guilt as evidence that he has not sinned, when in fact he has.  Highly emotional styles of worship seem to some to be evidence of genuine devotion, whereas more sedate forms of worship might seem spiritually arid.  But the former sort of devotion can also be superficial and fleeting, and the latter deeper and more enduring.  Pop spirituality tells us “Don’t think, feel!” but the reverse is much closer to the truth. 
(Notice that I say only that it is closer to the truth, not that it is the truth, full stop.  I do not for a moment deny that feelings have a role in the religious life, and I think Lewis would not deny it either.  We are, after all, feeling creatures by nature, not bloodless Cartesian intellects trapped in bodies.  The point is just that feelings are the lower, poorer side of the transposition, whereas the intellect -- which alone can ultimately judge one’s true spiritual state -- is the higher, richer side.  Here as in every other aspect of life, the affective tail must not be allowed to wag the cognitive dog.)
Lewis also notes how religious people are prone to mistake the earthly images of Heaven for the real thing, and sometimes feel let down when they are told that this is a mistake.  How could Heaven be eternal bliss without eating, drinking, and (my example, not Lewis’s) playing Frisbee with Fido?  Deleting such earthly pleasures from our picture of Heaven seems to leave nothing in its place.  Heaven comes to seem arid, bleak, and boring.  But this is precisely the wrong lesson to draw, comparable to the error the child in the dungeon makes when he is told by his mother that the world outside the dungeon lacks pencil lines.  As Lewis writes:
The child will get the idea that the real world is somehow less visible than his mother’s pictures. In reality it lacks lines because it is incomparably more visible.
So with us. “We know not what we shall be”; but we may be sure we shall be more, not less, than we were on earth. Our natural experiences (sensory, emotional, imaginative) are only like the drawing, like pencilled lines on flat paper. If they vanish in the risen life, they will vanish only as pencil lines vanish from the real landscape, not as a candle flame that is put out but as a candle flame which becomes invisible because someone has pulled up the blind, thrown open the shutters, and let in the blaze of the risen sun. (pp. 110-11)
Descriptions of Heaven that make use of earthly images are transpositions of a higher, richer order into a lower, poorer one.  The religious believer who cannot understand how Heaven can lack earthly delights is like the materialist who cannot understand how thought could be more than brain activity, or the subjectivist ethical theorist who cannot understand how judgments of moral goodness and badness can be anything more than the expression of feelings.
I would say that a similar mistake is made by many of those who resist classical theism in favor of the more anthropomorphic “theistic personalist” conception of God.  When told by Thomists that we have to understand language about God in an analogical sense, they think that this entails thinking of God in a cold, abstract, and impersonal way.  (One mistake they sometimes make is to think that the Thomist is saying that descriptions of God are merely “metaphorical.”  That is notwhat the Thomist is saying.  Not all analogical use of language is metaphorical.  The Thomist takes talk about God’s power, knowledge, goodness, etc. to be literal, and thus not metaphorical.  The claim is rather that such talk is not to be understood in a univocal way.  For discussion of the Thomist theory of analogy, see pp. 256-63 of Scholastic Metaphysics .) 
In fact, to think of the God of classical theism as cold, abstract, and impersonal is as clueless as the child in the dungeon thinking that the world outside must be very cold and abstract if it does not contain the pencil lines he sees in his mother’s drawings.  Just as the world outside the dungeon is in fact far morewarm and concrete than the pencil drawings, so too is the God of classical theism infinitely more “personal” than the lame man-writ-large “God” of theistic personalism.  The theistic personalist is like the boy who comes to prefer the drawings to ever leaving the dungeon, or the like the denizen of Plato’s cave who thinks it insane to believe tales of a world more real than the shadows on the wall.  Or if you prefer a more earthy biblical analogy, he is like Esau, trading his birthright for a mess of pottage and thinking he’s gotten the better deal.

A linkfest

My review of Charles Bolyard and Rondo Keele, eds., Later Medieval Metaphysics: Ontology, Language, and Logic appears in the May 2015 issue of Metaphysica.
At Thomistica.net, Thomist theologian Steven Long defends capital punishment against “new natural lawyer” Chris Tollefsen.
In the Journal of the American Philosophical Association, physicist Carlo Rovelli defends Aristotle’s physics.
At Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, Christopher Martin reviews Brian Davies’ Thomas Aquinas's Summa Theologiae: A Guide and Commentary .John Searle’s new book Seeing Things as They Are is reviewed in The Weekly Standard.

At The Critique, Graham Oppy on academic atheist philosophers of the last 60 years.
The Institute of Thomistic Philosophy will hold its first Aquinas Summer School in August of 2016.  Details here.
What makes Pope Francis tick?  Ross Douthat investigates at The Atlantic.
Irish atheists disassociate themselves from New Atheist buffoon P. Z. Myers.
James Franklin’s An AristotelianRealist Philosophy of Mathematics is reviewed in Philosophia Mathematica.  (Full text here.)   And there’s lots of content to be found at Franklin’s Academia.edu website as well as at his university website.
Conservative philosopher Roger Scruton is interviewed at The Spectator.
The New York Review of Books on F. A. Hayek on John Stuart Mill.
Philosopher Anthony McCarthy discusses gender ideology in a talk at the Pontifical University of John Paul II in Krakow.
The Washington Post reports on the indomitable Ryan T. Anderson’s fight against “same-sex marriage.”  Predictably, the forces of reason and tolerance don’t want to reason with or tolerate him.
Philosopher of physics Tim Maudlin on why physics needs philosophy.
At The Stream, Catholic writer John Zmirak defends capital punishment.
At Vox, Alex Abad-Santos reports on how he attended the 29-hour Marvel movie marathon and emerged “a broken man.”
The European Conservative magazine has a website.
Some friends of this blog debate classical theism and theistic personalism.  On the theistic personalist side there’s Dale Tuggy (hereand here), and on the classical theist side Bill Vallicella (here, here, and here) and Fr. Aidan Kimel (here, here, and here).
Bonus audio: Tuggy interviews Vallicalla in two parts, hereand here.
And on video: Fr. Robert Barron on Aquinas and why the New Atheists are right.

Animal souls, Part II

Recently, in First Things, David Bentley Hart criticized Thomists for denying that there will be non-human animals in Heaven.  I responded in an article at Public Discourse and in a follow-up blog post, defending the view that there will be no such animals in the afterlife.  I must say that some of the responses to what I wrote have been surprisingly… substandard for readers of a philosophy blog.  A few readers simply opined that Thomists don’t appreciate animals, or that the thought of Heaven without animals is too depressing.Do I really need to explain what is wrong with this?  Apparently I do.  First, for one to deny that there will be non-human animals in the afterlife simply doesn’t entail that one must not appreciate the beauty of a horse or the cleverness of a dolphin or be capable of affection for dogs, cats, or other pets.  That’s a blatant non sequitur.  Second, that some might find the thought of Heaven without animals upsetting simply doesn’t entail that there will be animals in Heaven.  That’s a subjectivist fallacy -- a fallacy of mistaking one’s desire for something to be true for a reason to think it is true.  Third, I gave arguments in defense the claims that there will not be non-human animals in Heaven, and that this won’t bother us in the least when we’re in Heaven.  A rational and grown-up response would be to try to show what, if anything, is wrong with the arguments, rather than to pout and accuse Thomists of being mean.

Did I really need to explain that?
But there were more serious objections too.  For example, some readers pointed out that even if, as Thomists argue, the specific individual animals we know in this life cannot survive into the afterlife, it doesn’t follow that there will be no animals at all in heaven.  Now, this is true as far as it goes, though it’s hard to see how it could satisfy the emotions that lead many to want to believe there will be animals in Heaven.  If what you’re worried about is that you’ll never see your beloved dog Spot again, what does it matter if there’ll be some other dog in heaven, even one who looks and acts a lot like Spot?  You’d still never see Spot himself again.
But leave that problem aside, for there is another problem with the objection in question.  Even if there could in theory be non-human animals in Heaven, why should we suppose that there willin fact be any?  Some readers appealed to biblical passages in support of this supposition.  Hart did the same thing in his article, even accusing Thomists of placing the authority of Aquinas over that of scripture.  What he had in mind are passages like the reference in Isaiah 11 to wolves lying down with lambs, etc. 
But as Hart well knows, it is no use appealing to purported proof texts from biblical passages that are highly poetical in style, as that passage from Isaiah certainly is.  Otherwise we’d have to say, absurdly, that God literally has eyes and eyelids (as Psalm 11:4 would imply on a literal reading), nostrils and lungs with which he breathes (Job 4:9), and so on.  The same passage from Isaiah also speaks of babies and children frolicking with the animals.  So are we to suppose that there will be babies born, and children raised, in Heaven?  Yet as I pointed out in my Public Discourse article, Christ tells us that those in Heaven “neither marry nor are given in marriage” (Matthew 22:30).  So where are all these babies and children supposed to come from?  (I imagine Hart would agree that fornication wouldn’t be permissible in Heaven any more than it is in this life.) 
Obviously, the biblical references to animals, no less than to babies, children, and divine eyelids and nostrils, are intended as merely poetical descriptions.  They give us no reason to think that there will literally be animals in Heaven. 
And what would be the point of there being non-human animals in Heaven?  It can’t be that we will miss the animals otherwise, because if we’d miss any animals at all, it would be those to which we are especially attached in this life.  And again, the Thomist argues on metaphysical grounds that those particular animals certainly can’t exist in the afterlife.  Furthermore, as I pointed out in the Public Discourse article, Christ’s own teaching implies that we won’t miss romance, lovemaking, and the psychological and bodily pleasures that go along with them.  Those are not only much more intense pleasures than those we get from interaction with animals, but they are much higher pleasures, because of their interpersonal character.  Sexual love involves a unique fusion of our corporeal nature with our higher intellectual and social nature, by which the spiritual union of two rational souls can find an intimate bodily expression.  If we won’t miss even that, then it is quite absurd to think we’ll miss playing Frisbee with Spot.
Some readers suggested that the reason there would have to be animals in the afterlife is that animals are good, and that God would not fail to preserve what is good.  But there are a couple of serious problems with this argument.  First, it would prove too much.  In particular, it would entail that God will preserve forever anything that is good.  But we know that that is not the case.  Again, marriage is good, but we have it on Christ’s own authority that marriage will not exist in the afterlife.  So, if this good will not be preserved in Heaven, why would a lower good like non-human animals be preserved?
Second, the supposition that non-human animals constitute a good too great not to exist in Heaven seems to rest on sentimentality borne of contemplating too selective a diet of examples. One meditates on the beauty of a horse or the faithfulness of a Labrador and asks “How could these creatures not exist in Heaven?”  But suppose instead we meditate on a fly as it nibbles on a pile of fecal matter, or a tapeworm as it works its way through an intestine, or a botfly larva pushing its breathing tube through the human skin in which it has embedded itself, or lice or ticks or bacteria or any of the many other repulsive creatures that occupy our world alongside horses, dogs, and the like.  These creatures are, in their own ways, no less good than the ones we are prone to sentimentalize.  But one suspects that those who insist that horses and dogs will exist in Heaven would be less certain that these other creatures will make it.  Flies munching on feces just doesn’t seem heavenly.  But what principled reason could one give for the judgment that there will be dogs but not flies in Heaven, if the purported reason for supposing that the former will be there is that they are good and God will forever preserve whatever is good?
Nor is this merely a matter of competing intuitions about the relative goodness of different animals (and appeal to intuition is not an argument strategy I would ever recommend).  Which brings me to a third point.  Given their nature, the good of living things is achieved at the expense of the good of other creatures.  It’s bad for the gazelle when the lion kills it, but it’s good for the lion.  It’s bad for the lamb when a tapeworm gets into its intestines, but it’s good for the tapeworm.  It’s bad for an animal when tuberculosis bacteria infect its lungs, but it’s good for the bacteria.  And so forth. 
Of course, some will appeal once again to the biblical passage about the wolf lying down with the lamb, arguing that God will miraculously cause creatures to survive without having to harm other creatures in the process.  So, will the tapeworm also lie down with the lamb?  Will the tubercle bacillus lie down with the lung?  But what on earth will tapeworms and tuberculosis bacteria be doing for eternity if they can’t get themselves into any other creature’s intestines or lungs, respectively?  What would be the point of forever keeping these things in existence when they would be prevented from acting in accordance with their nature and thus prevented from realizing what is good for them? 
It is no good to respond that God will changethe natures of these things so that the activities in question won’t any longer be good for them.  This is muddleheaded, because the nature of a thing is what makes it the kind of thing it is, so that if you “change” its nature, you’re changing the kind of thing it is.   Hence if you “change the nature” of a tapeworm so that it no longer is naturally oriented toward invading intestines, you’re not really talking about tapeworms anymore, but some other kind of thing that only superficially resembles tapeworms.  In which case it isn’t really tapeworms that God would be preserving forever after all -- which defeats the whole purpose of the argument that God will preserve whatever is good.
So, the biblical passages in question, which are highly poetical anyway, should not be taken to be literal descriptions of the afterlife, any more than talk of God’s breath or nostrils should be taken literally.  And thus there simply are no good scriptural arguments, any more than there are good philosophical arguments, for judging that non-human animals will exist in the afterlife.