Edward Feser's Blog, page 89

SCOTUS and Oderberg

Today, with Burwell v. Hobby Lobby , the Supreme Court of the United States has partially redeemed itself after its disgraceful 2012 Obamacare ruling.  Readers of this blog will be particularly interested to learn that the work of the esteemed David Oderberg (specifically, his article “The Ethics of Co-operation in Wrongdoing”) is cited in footnote 34 of the decision.  Also cited are two other, older works of traditional Thomistic natural law theory: Thomas Higgins’ Man as Man: The Science and Art of Ethics and Henry Davis’s Moral and Pastoral Theology.

Pagden on the Enlightenment

Prof. Anthony Pagden’s recent book The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters has much to say not only about the Enlightenment itself but also about the Scholasticism against which it reacted.  My review of the book appears today at Liberty Fund’s Online Library of Law and Liberty website.

The last enemy

There are two sorts of people who might be tempted to think of death as a friend: those who think the nature of the human person has nothing to do with the body, and those who think it has everything to do with the body; in short, Platonists and materialists.  Protestant theologian Oscar Cullmann summarizes the Platonist’s position in his little book Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? as follows:
Our body is only an outer garment which, as long as we live, prevents our soul from moving freely and from living in conformity to its proper eternal essence. It imposes upon the soul a law which is not appropriate to it. The soul, confined within the body, belongs to the eternal world. As long as we live, our soul finds itself in a prison, that is, in a body essentially alien to it. Death, in fact, is the great liberator. It looses the chains, since it leads the soul out of the prison of the body and back to its eternal home… [T]hrough philosophy we penetrate into that eternal world of ideas to which the soul belongs, and we free the soul from the prison of the body. Death does no more than complete this liberation. Plato shows us how Socrates goes to his death in complete peace and composure. The death of Socrates is a beautiful death. Nothing is seen here of death’s terror. Socrates cannot fear death, since indeed it sets us free from the body. Whoever fears death proves that he loves the world of the body, that he is thoroughly entangled in the world of sense. Death is the soul’s great friend. So he teaches; and so, in wonderful harmony with his teaching, he dies… (pp. 19-21)
Cullman sharply contrasts the death of Socrates with the death of Christ, and Plato’s attitude toward death with the Christian attitude:

In Gethsemane He knows that death stands before Him, just as Socrates expected death on his last day… Jesus begins ‘to tremble and be distressed’, writes Mark (14:33). ‘My soul is troubled, even to death’, He says to His disciples… Jesus is afraid, though not as a coward would be of the men who will kill Him, still less of the pain and grief which precede death. He is afraid in the face of death itself. Death for Him is not something divine: it is something dreadful… He was really afraid. Here is nothing of the composure of Socrates, who met death peacefully as a friend… [W]hen He concludes, ‘Yet not as I will, but as thou wilt’, this does not mean that at the last He, like Socrates, regards death as the friend, the liberator. No, He means only this: If this greatest of all terrors, death, must befall Me according to Thy will, then I submit to this horror. (pp. 21-22)
For the Christian, death, as St. Paul famously put it, is “the last enemy” (1 Corinthians 15:26).  And victory over it comes with the resurrection. 
Now, Cullmann overstates the contrast between the two ideas referred to in his title.  He speaks of “the Greek view of death” when what he’s really talking about is a Greek view, the Platonic view.  It is not the same as the view of the Aristotelian, for whom the human soul is the form of the body -- or, more precisely, the form of something which has corporeal as well as incorporeal operations.  Hence, while a human being is not annihilated at death -- his intellect, which is incorporeal and operates partially independently of the body even during life, is not destroyed when the bodily organs are -- he persists only in a radically diminished state.  That the soul persists as the form of this radically reduced substance is what makes resurrection possible, because there needs to be some continuity between the person who dies and the person who rises if they are to be the sameperson.   But until the resurrection actually occurs, it is not the dead person who in the strictest sense survives, but only a part of him, albeit the highest part.  As Aquinas says (contra the Platonist), “I am not my soul.”  Thus, to Cullmann’s question “Immortality of the soul or resurrection of the dead?”, Christian Aristotelians like Aquinas answer: “Both.” 
In a blog post not too long ago, I responded to an objection to the effect that a Cartesian view of human nature (which is a modern riff on the Platonic view) is better in accord with the Bible than the Aristotelian-Thomistic view.  The critic in question even quoted St. Paul, of all people, in defense of this claim.  In that post I explained at some length what is wrong with this suggestion, and one problem with it is that it cannot account for why death is, in scripture, indeed an enemy, and why St. Paul puts so much emphasis on the resurrection.  This is intelligible only if the body is integral to human nature in a way the Platonic-Cartesian view cannot account for.  Death is your enemy and resurrection your hope because you are radically incomplete without your body -- so incomplete that there is a sense in which you are gone after death and return only with the resurrection.  (Thus does Aquinas suggest that if we were to speak strictly, we would say “Soul of St. Peter, pray for us” rather than “St. Peter, pray for us.”)
The way in which the materialist might see death as a friend is, of course, very different from the Platonist’s way.  Indeed, it might seem that the materialist would be even more inclined than the Christian to see death as an enemy, since he rejects even the Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of the soul -- not to mention the resurrection -- and thus (short of some science-fiction style upload of the “software” of the mind onto a new “computer”) regards death as the end, full stop.  (“Christian materialists” would accept the resurrection, but I will put their odd view to one side for present purposes and confine my attention to atheistic materialists.)   
But on reflection it is easy enough to see how a materialist might look at death in positive light.  If he’s lived an immoral life and is even mildly troubled at the thought that all that damnation stuff could turn out to be true, the idea of annihilation might bring relief.  Or, just as atheists often operate with too crudely anthropomorphic a conception of God, so too do they often operate with too crudely this-worldly a conception of what an afterlife would be like.  Hence, like Bernard Williams, a materialist might conclude that immortality would be a bore and judge death a rescue from endless tedium.  To Cullmann’s two exemplars we could therefore add David Hume, reclining cheerfully on his deathbed, as famously recounted by Boswell.
Then there is the suffering that often attends death.  As I noted in a recent post, for Christian apologists of the Neo-Scholastic stripe, it is not just God’s existence but also divine providence which can be known via purely philosophical arguments.  Hence, even apart from special divine revelation, we can know that God allows evil in the world only insofar as he draws greater good out of it.  These truths of natural theology are crucial to a complete natural law argument against the permissibility of suicide and euthanasia.  (See e.g. the account of the immorality of suicide and euthanasia in Austin Fagothey’s always useful Right and Reason .) 
To be sure, I think the traditional natural law theorist’s account of the good suffices to show that it cannot be good intentionally to end one’s own life or that of another innocent person, quite apart from questions of divine providence.  But even if one sees the power in these arguments, if one is also convinced that there is neither a soul that persists beyond death nor a God who can draw a greater good out of any suffering, the arguments can seem awfully dry and theoretical compared to the intense suffering that can attend death.  There will seem to be no upside to enduring the suffering other than respect for abstract principle.  Hence the temptation in such cases to regard death as a friend, whose arrival one should intentionally hasten.
As always, the Aristotelian-Thomistic philosopher’s talent for finding the sober middle ground saves the day.  The body is integral to you while not being the whole of you.  By avoiding both the Platonist’s error and the materialist’s error we see death for the enemy that it is.

Summer web surfing

My Claremont Review of Books review of John Gray’s The Silence of Animals is now available for free online.
Keith Parsons has now wrapped up our exchange on atheism and morality at The Secular Outpost.
The latest from David Oderberg: “Could There Be a Superhuman Species?”  Details here.
Liberty Island is an online magazine devoted to conservatism and pop culture.  Music writer extraordinaire (and friend of this blog) Dan LeRoy is on board. 
James Franklin asks “What is mathematics about?”  (See also his new book An Aristotelian Realist Philosophy of Mathematics .)
Mary Midgley’s new book Are You an Illusion? takes aim at scientism and eliminativism.  Some praise from The Guardian and an interview in Financial Times.

The archives of Laval theologique et philosophiqueare available online.  Take a look at the Charles de Koninck material.
Our buddy Mike Flynn on science fiction writer Thomas Disch and Catholicism.
Is there anything that couldn’t be a mere social construct?  Yes: causation, says metaphysician Stephen Mumford.
Hilary Putnam has a blog.
A reader recently called my attention to Kenneth Sayre’s new history of the philosophy department at Notre Dame.  For us Catholic philosophy geeks, it’s a page turner.
Speaking of geeks, The Atlantic and The Guardian fret over Marvel’s forthcoming Dr. Strange movie.  But The Independent is jazzed. 
At The New Criterion, Steven Hayward on conservatives and higher education.
There’s been a lot of talk on this blog of late about classical theism versus theistic personalism and Aquinas versus Scotus.  Marilyn Adams combines the themes in “What’s Wrong with the Ontotheological Error?”
Churchland vs. McGinn at The New York Review of Books.  (HT: Bill Vallicella.)

Sullivan’s cavils

I thank The Smithy’s Michael Sullivan for his two spirited further installments (hereand here) in his series of posts on my book Scholastic Metaphysics .  (I responded to the first of his posts here.)  Sullivan says some very kind things about my book, which I appreciate.  He also raises some criticisms which, though I disagree with them, are reasonable.  But unfortunately, some of his remarks are unjust and intemperate.  Let me comment on those first.In his most recent post, Sullivan accuses me of “casually dismissing” brands of Scholasticism other than Thomism, comparing my treatment of them to the superficial objections to the cosmological argument one finds in New Atheist writers and of which I’ve often been so critical.  In the course of the combox discussion that followed my previous reply to him, he also speaks of my purported “dismissal of the genuine scholastic tradition,” and accuses me of holding that “there's no point in taking non-Thomism seriously.”  He even compares me to P. Z. Myers.  And of my treatment of one area of dispute between Thomists and Scotists, he writes:

There's… really no difference between what Feser does in this instance and Bertrand Russell saying in his history of philosophy that Aquinas wasn't really a philosopher because the Church told him what to think, so we needn't bother studying him.
This is all quite outrageous.  It is true, of course, that I am a Thomist, and that my book reflects that fact and takes a Thomist position rather than a Scotist or Suarezian one on issues where there is a disagreement between the schools of thought.  It is true that I do not treat the disputes between Thomists and other Scholastics in depth sufficient to convince advocates of those other schools (since, as I explained in my previous reply to Sullivan, the book is not about intra-Scholastic disputes but rather about the dispute between Scholasticism in what I take to be its strongest form on the one hand, and modern and contemporary philosophy on the other).  But though the rival views are neither agreed with nor treated at the length that would be required to turn a Scotist or Suarezian into a Thomist, they are nevertheless discussed respectfully.  There is no polemic whatsoever against Scotist and Suarezian views, nor the least suggestion that those views are unserious or unworthy of study.  This is all in Sullivan’s mind, not on the page. 
The reason it is not on the page is that it is simply not my view of Scotism and Suarezianism.  On the contrary, though I think some of their views are seriously wrong, I regard Scotus and Suarez with reverence, and highly recommend the study of their work and that of their followers.  I gave my book the title Scholastic Metaphysics rather than Thomistic Metaphysics precisely out of solidarity with other Scholastics, including non-Thomist Scholastics -- precisely to make it clear that Aquinas is not the only great figure in the tradition.
This brings me to something else that is entirely in Sullivan’s mind.  On the one hand he acknowledges that:
Feser admits in the book that scholasticism is more than Thomism and neo-Thomism, and… does in fact claim as part of the goal of the book to discuss non-Thomist ideas to the extent that they diverge from Thomism.
and:
[I]n the very first sentence of Feser's book he recognizes that Scholasticism is that tradition of thought which includes not only Aquinas, but Scotus, Ockham, Suarez, etc etc.
But then he also says that:
Once that recognition has been made it's already tendentious to go on to say that Scholaticism = Thomism and that those other thinkers are only worthy of mention when they "depart" from Thomism.
and:
[M]y main point, which I'm going to stop repeating ad nauseum, is that it's factually untrue that scholasticism = Thomism.
and:
[I]n practice he seems to waffle between the view that scholasticism=Thomism or that Thomism is the default or the only view worth considering on the one hand, and the view that Thomism is simply the best or most convincing of the scholastic systems on the other hand, but these two views are not at all the same.
But there is no “waffling” in the book at all, because nowhere in the book do I say or imply that “Scholasticism = Thomism,” nor does Sullivan quote any passage to that effect.  Indeed, as Sullivan admits, I explicitly say that that is not the case.  Rather, I merely maintain (as Sullivan puts it) that “Thomism is simply the best or most convincing of the scholastic systems.”  Thatis what is actually on the page, and Sullivan at least sometimes sees that that is what is on the page.  But when he is unhappy about some criticism I make of Scotus or Suarez, he projects onto the page the thesis that “Scholasticism = Thomism” and then invents an inconsistency.  The waffling between these views is not mine, but his.  He shifts between seeing what is on the page and seeing the “Scholasticism = Thomism” straw man that exists only in his mind. 
I think it is clear enough what is going on.  As I noted in my previous post, every so often one finds at The Smithy expressions of annoyance at the tendency to treat Aquinas as the Scholastic gold standard.  It is obvious from the history of that (excellent) blog and from various remarks in Sullivan’s latest posts that he has had one too many encounters with Thomists who are insufficiently respectful of or knowledgeable about Scotus and other non-Thomist Scholastics, or too quick to try to settle the dispute between Thomists and other Scholastics with an appeal to ecclesiastical authority.  While Sullivan says that he is not accusing me of such Thomist “triumphalism,” I think his long-standing grievances with other Thomists have nevertheless colored his perceptions of my book, and he’s decided to use his review as an opportunity to vent.  He’s got a bee in his bonnet; he’s got a hair trigger; he’s got issues.  He comes off like Robert Conrad in that old Eveready battery commercial, apparently keen to have the chip on the shoulder replace the dunce cap as the contemporary Scotist’s accessory of choice.
The problem is not really philosophical, then, but attitudinal.  And the remedy is as dry, bracing, and agreeable to a refined palate as a page of Scotus: I recommend to Sullivan a glass or two of good Scotch, in honor of the Subtle Doctor.  I’ll buy it for him if we’re ever at the same conference or the like. 
Some substantive issues
Let me now say something about Sullivan’s other criticisms.  One of them goes like this:
One general observation is a tendency throughout to present the Thomist position on a topic while putting off actually arguing for it. Over and over again the reader encounters remarks to the effect that "my position is this, but the reasons for it depend on something I'm going to say in a later chapter"; this gives the impression of getting the run-around, as though the good deep arguments are always just around the corner. I emphasize that Feser does not always do this; but he does it enough for it to be frustrating.
Here too I think Sullivan exaggerates.  “Over and over again”?  Not really.  But I do occasionally defer a more detailed treatment of an issue until later in the book.  The reason is that given the tight interconnections between many Scholastic notions, it is sometimes necessary to do a fair bit of exposition before one can set out the complete case for some particular claim or respond to all the objections a critic might raise against it.
What Sullivan does not do is offer an example of where I fail to make good on a promise later on to revisit the reasons for some claim.  The closest he comes is complaining that I do not provide arguments for all the many distinctions I draw in the section on “Divisions of act and potency” (subjective versus objective potency, first act versus second act, etc.).  That is true, but I also don’t promise to provide arguments for all of those distinctions.  The reason is that many of them are irrelevant to the specific metaphysical issues that the book does focus on and the debate between Scholastics and analytic philosophers that is its main concern.  That section is merely intended to give the reader a sense of how complex the theory of act and potency is when fully worked out.  You could write a book just on the divisions of act and potency, but my book, which has a lot of other ground to cover, is not that book.  (It is worth noting that, as it is, I went significantly over the page limit that the publisher proposed when inviting me to write the book.)
Here again Sullivan can’t seem to decide what he wants to see on the page.  On the one hand he acknowledges that we need to “[keep] in mind that it is an introduction and that we shouldn't expect an exhaustive treatment of any given topic.”  But on the other, he criticizes me in this instance for not providing a more exhaustive treatment than is called for given the specific aims of the book.  Once again I think his manifest annoyance with certain other Thomists is leading him into an uncharitable reading.  He isn’t attacking a straw man this time, but he is nitpicking.    
More interesting is Sullivan’s criticism of the structure of the book:
In my opinion there are also some structural problems. For instance, in my opinion the treatment of causality is pretty seriously defective… [Feser begins] his discussion of causality with final vs efficient causes, which is a misstep. Material and formal causality are put off until the following chapter, under the discussion of substance. The result is that the nature and force of the reasons for accepting the reality of final causality always remain somewhat obscure, because final causality is unintelligible without formal causality… The proper way to get back to final causality is to reinstate the robust notion of form; and this is, by the way, the order the causes are treated in in the standard neo-Thomist manuals I'm familiar with. In taking things backwards I think the clarity and rigor of Feser's exposition suffers.
End quote.  Note first of all that whereas elsewhere Sullivan complains that I too slavishly follow “the standard neo-Thomist manuals,” here I am to be blamed for departingfrom them.  I can’t win!
There are, in any event, reasons why I covered things in just the order I did.  It was quite deliberate.  Consider first that it is, after all, final cause and not formal cause which Aquinas regards as “the cause of causes.”  And there is a good reason for that.  Though the substantial form of a thing is the ground of its finalities, a thing’s finalities are in turn essential to understanding its substantial form.  For a thing’s substantial form is the intrinsic principle of its operations or activities.  But for the Scholastic, operations or activities are understood in terms of the ends toward which they are directed.  Moreover, substantial forms are best explained by contrast with accidental forms, and accidental forms are most easily understood in terms of the extrinsicnature of the ends with which they are associated.  Hence my frequently used example of a liana vine, which has a substantial form insofar as it is intrinsically directed toward operations like taking in water and nutrients; and of a hammock made out of liana vines, which has an accidental form insofar as the end of serving as a comfortable place to take a nap is extrinsic or imposed from without.  The distinction between substantial and accidental forms thus seems to me best explained once the notion of finality, and the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic finality, have already been hammered out.
For another thing, it seems to me that contemporary analytic philosophers have come farther in the direction of recovering the notion of final causality than they have in recovering the notion of substantial form.  The contemporary analytic literature on powers and dispositions is enormous, and much of it at least takes seriously the idea that powers are “directed toward” their manifestations in a manner that is described as “physical intentionality” or “natural intentionality.”  This is very close to the Scholastic idea of intrinsic finality, and many contemporary writers see the connection.  By contrast, while there is also talk of natures and essences in contemporary analytic philosophy, the link to Scholasticism is not as clear.  There is a greater tendency to connect this sort of talk to notions that Thomists would have serious reservations about, such as the idea of possible worlds. 
So, approaching formal causality by way of final causality rather than the other way around seemed to me the best way to go.  Of course, a reasonable person could disagree with this approach.  But it is not the simple “misstep” Sullivan says it is, and he completely fails to consider that I had reasons for doing things the way I did.
Scotism versus Thomism
Naturally, Sullivan also has specifically Scotist complaints about some of what is in the book.  Regarding my characterization of Scotism, Suarezianism, et al. relative to Thomism, he says:
To represent the thought of Scotus, Ockham, etc., as "departures from Thomism" is total bunk. It assumes that Thomism is normative and the default position without having to do any work to establish it. In my pretty wide experience it's a good bet that anyone who thinks this way has not made any serious effort to read and understand any non-Thomistic scholastics on their own terms… Gilson also had to revise his views on Scotism as a critique and departure from Thomism once he learned something about the actual sources of Scotus' views. Hint: Scotus was usually not even thinking of Aquinas at all.
Once again I’m afraid that Sullivan seems to want to have his cake and eat it too.  On the one hand he protests, against what I said in my previous reply to him, that he “specifically said that a historical treatment was unnecessary.”  Yet here he complains that I do not pay sufficient attention to whether, as a matter of historical fact, Scotus was reacting against Aquinas, specifically.  So which is it?
After all, nowhere in my book do I make any claim about what Scotus had before his mind when he formulated (say) the notion of the formal distinction.   When I talk about “departures from Thomism” I am not making a historical claim to the effect that Scotus consciously thought: “I now hereby depart from what Aquinas said.  Here goes…!”  I’m talking about conceptualrelations between the ideas in question, not historical ones.  Compare the fact that historians of philosophy have disagreed about whether Parmenides was responding to Heraclitus or Heraclitus was responding to Parmenides, or whether they were writing independently -- and that at the end of the day it really doesn’t matter substantively.  Scholastic writers often treat Parmenides and Heraclitus as representing two extremes and Aristotle as having found the sober middle ground between them.  Parmenideans and Heracliteans might not agree with this approach, but quibbling over whether one was responding to the other as a matter of historical fact is neither here nor there.  Same with the dispute between Thomists and Scotists. 
We Thomists also tend to think of Thomism as the best way of synthesizing what was of lasting value in the Aristotelian and Neo-Platonic traditions that preceded it, and that Bonaventurean, Scotist, and Suarezian approaches are inferior and have elements that tend to lead to the dissolution of what the various Scholastic schools have in common.  Again, we are not making a claim about how, historically, people in fact tended to see things.  History is always much messier than the conceptual relationships between systems of ideas are.  We are well aware that other Scholastics did not see themselves merely as either precursors or successors to Aquinas.  We know that most thinkers didn‘t regard themselves as mere guest stars or extras on The Thomas Aquinas Show.   We’re talking about what we think is in fact the relative weight of the various systems of ideas. 
Bonaventurean, Scotist, and Suarezian mileage will of course vary.  But as I have said, the aim of the book was not to settle various intra-Scholastic disputes.  The aim of the book was to present what I take to be the most powerful form of Scholasticism and pit it against contemporary analytic philosophy.  Nor, contrary to what Sullivan implies, is there anything the least arbitrary about calling the book’s position Scholastic rather than merely Thomistic.  Sullivan says that “when you separate [Thomism, Scotism, etc.] out you see that ‘scholasticism’ includes a lot of positive theological content they all share, and practically no philosophical content they all share.”  But that’s just silly.  The Scholastics are all operating within a conceptual landscape defined by essentially Platonic and Aristotelian boundaries.  The landscape is very broad and some thinkers fall far to one side of it rather than to the other; some even appear to end up falling off this or that edge of it.  But that this landscape constitutes their common framework distinguishes them from the moderns, who have all decided to step out of it.  (To be sure, some of the moderns stick a toe or even a foot back into it, but they do so from a position essentially outside the framework.) 
Hence when I characterize the position of my book as “Scholastic” and not merely “Thomistic,” I am, again, indicating precisely that I am trying to bring what all or at least most Scholastics have in common to bear on contemporary disputes in analytic metaphysics -- albeit with a strongly Thomistic emphasis and despite the fact that I agree with the Thomist position when it differs from the other Scholastic views.  I mean precisely to include the other Scholastic positions in the debate, not exclude them.  And I can certainly imagine someone like Sullivan writing a book with the exact title mine has and more or less the same organization too, but with Scotism taking the starring role and Thomism given secondary status.  While I would of course disagree with many of the details, I would not be offended about the title or the approach.  Indeed, it would be very useful if Sullivan or some other Scotist wrote such a book. 
Finally, Sullivan is very critical of my treatment of the dispute between Thomists and Scotists vis-à-vis the theory of distinctions.  He accuses me of attacking caricatures of the Scotist position and of inconsistency and begging the question in defending the Thomist view.  Yet his own response involves inconsistency, caricature, and begging of the question.  For example, he writes:
Feser says that it's hard to see how the formal distinction can avoid collapsing into either a real distinction or a virtual or logical distinction. The short answer to this is that Thomists play a shell game with the notion of real distinctions: sometimes they act as though separability is an obvious criterion and sometimes as if it isn't. The Scotist position is that a fully real distinction in general is one to which the separability criterion applies (with a very few special exceptions) , and that the formal distinction is a species of lesser real distinction to which the separability criterion does not apply. It's not a virtual or logical distinction because, to take Feser's example, animality and rationality are really non-identical prior to and aside from any consideration of the intellect. (Emphasis added.)
If Sullivan wrote this with a straight face, that can only be because that chip on his shoulder got too heavy for him to crack a smile.  If a Thomist “sometimes… act[s] as though separability is an obvious criterion and sometimes as if it isn't,” that, we are told, is a “shell game.”  But if a Scotist says that “in general… the separability criterion applies” but that there are “a very few special exceptions” and that there is a “lesser real distinction to which the separability criterion does not apply,” then that, we are assured, is nota “shell game.”  Get it?  Me neither, but then we can’t all be Subtle Doctors.
But do Thomists really play the “shell game” in question?  Well, no, they don’t.  They don’t say that “sometimes separability is an obvious criterion and sometimes it isn’t.”  It’s always an obvious criterion; if A and B are separable, then they are really distinct.  It’s just not the onlycriterion.  That’s a very different claim.  Nor is the distinction between the claims very subtle, which is perhaps why Sullivan the Scotist misses it.
Then there is the fact that the claim that “animality and rationality are really non-identical prior to and aside from any consideration of the intellect” is precisely something the Thomist would deny, in which case Sullivan can hardly appeal to it as a premise in a criticism of the Thomist account of distinctions.  Like “shell games,” begging the question is apparently OK when Scotists do it.
Sullivan goes on at length about the dispute between Thomists and Scotists concerning real, logical, and formal distinctions, and its relevance to issues like the relationship between essence and existence.  And what he has to say is hardly lesstendentious than what I have to say about these matters in my book.  He surely realizes that Thomists would simply not agree with the assumptions that lie behind his arguments, nor with his insinuation that they have no principled but only ad hoc grounds for rejecting those assumptions.  Yet Sullivan writes as if the burden of proof were on me or other Thomists to establish the superiority of our position to the Scotist one, rather than on Scotists to establish the superiority of theirs.
It’s hard to see how such a presumption in favor of the Scotist view could be justified.  It is, after all, hardly as if the Scotist position, with its famous (some would say notorious) subtlety and abstraction, were somehow more intuitive or obvious than the Thomist one.  But put that aside.  The main point is that while it would be reasonable to expect me to have pursued these matters at greater length if my book had been intended as a neutral account of intra-Scholastic debate, in fact -- as I keep saying -- that is not what the book is about.  It is, again, intended rather to bring analytic philosophy into conversation with what I take to be the strongest version of Scholasticism (while noting some of the key disputes among Scholastics along the way).
At the end of the day, Sullivan’s beef is that he just doesn’t agree with me that Thomism is the strongest version of Scholasticism.  Well, fine.  He should write his own book.  I’d buy it. 

Judging a book by what it doesn’t cover

In his encyclical Aeterni Patris , Pope Leo XIII called for a “restoration of Christian philosophy.” He was quite specific about what he had in mind:
[D]aily experience, and the judgment of the greatest men, and, to crown all, the voice of the Church, have favored the Scholastic philosophy.
Indeed, he was even more specific than that:
Among the Scholastic Doctors, the chief and master of all towers Thomas Aquinas…
We exhort you, venerable brethren, in all earnestness to restore the golden wisdom of St. Thomas, and to spread it far and wide for the defense and beauty of the Catholic faith, for the good of society, and for the advantage of all the sciences… Let carefully selected teachers endeavor to implant the doctrine of Thomas Aquinas in the minds of students, and set forth clearly his solidity and excellence over others.  Let the universities already founded or to be founded by you illustrate and defend this doctrine, and use it for the refutation of prevailing errors.Other popes have echoed the theme.  For example, Pius X, in Pascendi Dominici Gregis, wrote: “[L]et Professors remember that they cannot set St. Thomas aside, especially in metaphysical questions, without grave detriment.”

Before certain readers start hyperventilating, I should pause to note that my point is not to argue from papal authority for the superiority of Aquinas.  If you think Leo, Pius, et al. were wrong -- for example, if you think Scotus is a better guide to metaphysical questions, or if you think Scholasticism in general is wrongheaded, or if you couldn’t care less in the first place about what the popes have to say -- well, for present purposes none of that is either here or there.  My point is rather to explain how the term “Scholastic” came to have a certain connotation.  In the decades after Leo’s encyclical appeared, the Neo-Scholastic movement sought to implement his program.  One key feature of this movement was that its representatives tended to treat Thomism as normative for Scholastic thinking more generally.  Scotist and Suarezian positions were taken seriously and sometimes adopted, but the default position tended to be Thomistic.  Another key feature was that the Neo-Scholastics were keen to emphasize that Scholasticism is not a museum piece but a living tradition that offers a serious response to modern assumptions in philosophy.  Accordingly, the emphasis in Neo-Scholastic works was not on historical scholarship but rather on articulation of the structure of the Scholastic system and application to contemporary problems.
These tendencies by no means reflected a blind submission to papal authority.  The Neo-Scholastics had arguments for the view that Scholastic, and in particular Thomistic, positions were superior to those of the modern systems of thought (rationalist, empiricist, idealist, etc.) that had supplanted Scholasticism.  And they had arguments for the view that the departures from Thomism represented by writers like Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez were often harmful to the integrity of the Scholastic system, and inadvertently contributed to the dissolution of the Scholastic synthesis and rise of the modern systems.  A reasonable person can disagree with these views, but they represent a coherent and well thought out philosophical position.
It is one I happen to agree with, and my book Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction is very much written in the spirit of this approach.  It is not an exercise in antiquarianism.  It is not written for historians of philosophy, or for Latinists, or for those who are interested in the minutiae of intra-Scholastic debate over the centuries.  It is written for people interested in understanding the framework of Scholastic thinking about fundamental metaphysical questions, and how it relates to controversies in contemporary analytic philosophy.  So, if you are the sort of anal retentive academic historian of philosophy who thinks that (say) a definitive history of the early 14th century dispute over universals must be written before we can begin tentatively to think about gesturing towards a recovery of the point of view from which the question of contemporary application might someday be asked… well, my book is not for you. 
The book is also written from a decidedly Thomistic point of view.  I discuss the views of Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez where they disagree with Aquinas, because the reader should know where and why Scholastic metaphysicians differ with one another.  But the book is not about these intra-Scholastic disputes, and it does not attempt to settle them to the satisfaction of Scotists, Ockhamists, and Suarezians.  Rather, the book is about the dispute between, on the one hand, what I take to be the strongest version of Scholasticism, and on the other hand the various metaphysical views which prevail within modern philosophy, and within analytic philosophy in particular.
I am quite explicit about these aims of the book, and it is in light of those aims that the book should be judged.  Now, Michael Sullivan of the Scotist blog The Smithy (and, I think, a friend of this blog), has just posted the first in a series of posts reviewing my book.  He more or less acknowledges its specific aims, and assures us that “a book review ought to evaluate a book on the basis of its own goals, not our expectations for what a different sort of book might have been had the author cared to attempt it.”  Unfortunately, the then goes on to evaluate the book precisely on the basis of his expectations for what a different sort of book might have been had I cared to attempt it.
In particular, Sullivan is irritated that I do not have more to say about Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez, that I rely on English translations rather than Latin originals, and that I’m too beholden to relatively recent Neo-Scholastic works.  He develops his complaint at some length, though he has (so far, anyway) nothing to say about what is actually in the book, only about what is not in it.  Had I been writing a neutral historical account of all the various thinkers and arguments that have fallen under the label “Scholastic,” Sullivan’s complaints would have been reasonable.  But as Sullivan himself is well aware, that is not what I was trying to do.  And given the actual aims of the book, Sullivan’s complaints seem to me to be rather silly. 
Sullivan says that my book is not “scholarly.”  By that he means that it does not emphasize primary sources, does not cite works in the original languages, is not historically comprehensive, etc.  And that is indeed the kind of thing that characterizes a “scholarly” work of history, say.  But there is another sense in which a work might be “scholarly,” which is operative in works of philosophy that are not primarily concerned with history.  It has to do with knowing the current state of discussion, mastering the relevant literature, adhering to academic standards of argumentational rigor rather than aiming for a “pop” audience, etc.  I submit that my book, judged by its actual aims, is very much a scholarly one in that sense. 
That is a kind of scholarship I commend to Sullivan and other non-Thomist Scholastics.  Every so often at The Smithy one finds expressions of annoyance at the tendency to treat Aquinas as the Scholastic gold standard.  That’s understandable.  Scotus, Ockham, and Suarez were thinkers of genius and certainly deserve more attention than they get.
But here’s the thing.  Thomists have, for over a century and with renewed vigor in recent decades, been putting forward Scholastic arguments in the context of contemporary mainstream debates in metaphysics, natural theology, philosophy of mind, ethics, and other areas.  They have made it clear that these are arguments with contemporary relevance, not mere museum pieces.  Naturally, given that they are Thomists, their brand of Scholasticism has been Thomistic.  And naturally, they have been less concerned with history-of-philosophy spectacle-cleaning than with presenting an argument in its strongest possible form, regardless of whether this or that Scholastic presented it exactly that way.   If many people think of Aquinas and Thomism when they think of Scholasticism, that’s a big part of the reason. 
If Scotists and Suarezians really want non-Scholastics to take their own heroes as seriously as they take Aquinas, they need to do more of this sort of thing themselves.  They need to get out of the library stacks and into the debate.  They need to avoid getting so absorbed with doing “scholarship” that they forget about doing philosophy.  They need to worry less about the history of Scholasticism and more about the future of Scholasticism.  That would seem to be a more productive use of their time than complaining that Thomists haven’t been adequate publicists for Scotus and other non-Thomists. 

Review of Gray etc.

Readers of the Claremont Review of Books may want to look for my review of John Gray’s book The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths in the Spring 2014 issue.  At the moment the review is behind a pay wall, but subscribing will fix that problem.
On another matter, readers keep asking me how to get hold of Scholastic Metaphysics , which was released on April 1, somewhat ahead of schedule.  Apparently the book sold out very quickly because supply could not meet all the pre-orders and Amazon has been out of stock for some time.  I have been told that a new shipment arrived at the U.S. distributor’s warehouse a week or so ago and that the book should once again be available from Amazon this week.  So, sit tight, and many, many thanks for your patience and interest.While you’re waiting, you could always pick up a copy of my book Locke , which, as I recently learned, Prof. Joseph Pappin III very kindly reviews in Vol. 22 of the journal Studies in Burke and His Time .  Readers wanting to understand how modern philosophy moved away from what once was the Aristotelian-Scholastic mainstream will find the book of interest.  From Pappin’s review:

Edward Feser’s Locke is not only an outstanding introduction to the full range of John Locke’s philosophy, it is also a penetrating interpretive work, presented with clarity and conciseness.  One of its strengths is stated by Feser in Chapter One: “Locke straddles the medieval and post-modern worlds, the age of faith and the age of skepticism and secularism.”  Feser’s book is in large part framed by this tension he finds in Locke’s corpus.
Locke is divided into six distinct chapters, with individual chapters of considerable length devoted to the Essay Concerning Human Understanding and another on the Second Treatise of Government.  Preceding these chapters is a sustained examination of the Aristotelian-Scholastic background to Locke’s thought while setting before the reader “The Lockean Project” … Feser justifies this approach “because,” as he declares, “nothing less would serve as an appropriate introduction to the intellectual background against which Locke was reacting”…
This reviewer highly recommends Feser’s tome as an ideal introduction… [and] successful interpretation of the strengths and inherent weaknesses of the “Lockean project.”

Sexual cant from the asexual Kant

Kant never married and apparently died a virgin.  He is sometimes described as having had a low opinion of sex, on the basis of passages like this one from his Lectures on Ethics:
[S]exuality is not an inclination which one human being has for another as such, but is an inclination for the sex of another… The desire which a man has for a woman is not directed towards her because she is a human being, but because she is a woman; that she is a human being is of no concern to the man; only her sex is the object of his desires. Human nature is thus subordinated. Hence it comes that all men and women do their best to make not their human nature but their sex more alluring and direct their activities and lusts entirely towards sex. Human nature is thereby sacrificed to sex. (Louis Infield translation, p.164)“Sexuality, therefore,” Kant concludes, “exposes mankind to the danger of equality with the beasts.”  He qualifies the claim, but just barely:

Sexual love can, of course, be combined with human love and so carry with it the characteristics of the latter, but taken by itself and for itself, it is nothing more than appetite. Taken by itself it is a degradation of human nature; for as soon as a person becomes an Object of appetite for another, all motives of moral relationship cease to function, because as an Object of appetite for another a person becomes a thing… (p. 163)
I think the account of sexual desire implicit here is seriously wrong both metaphysically and phenomenologically -- that is to say, both in terms of what the natural end or telos of sexual desire actually is, and in terms of how this desire is typically felt and its end typically perceived.  Kant is correct that sexual desire is not aimed at another human being merely quahuman.  But it is wrong to say that the end is or is perceived to be merely the sexof the other as such.  Kant makes it sound as if a man’s sexual desire is “aimed” at femaleness per se, and a woman’s sexual desire “aimed” at maleness per se -- as if it could in principle equally well be satisfied by a female or male of any species.  That is definitely not the case where the natural end of human sexual desire is concerned.  (Naturally, in affirming the existence of a “natural end” I’m looking at the subject from a Thomistic natural law point of view, which I’ve developed and defended elsewhere.)  Nor is it true phenomenologically either, except in those rare individuals tempted to bestiality. 
As I argued in an earlier post and a NCBQ article, a man’s sexual desire is aimed by nature toward a womanand a woman’s sexual desire is aimed by nature toward a man.  And that is also how it is typically experienced, though of course as everywhere else in the natural order there are imperfections and aberrant cases.  What a man wants, even when his intentions are not honorable, is not “a human being” but neither is it merely “a female.”  He wants a woman, and a woman is of course simultaneously human and female.  And what a woman wants is a man -- who is of course both human and male -- and neither “a human being” nor “a male.”  Kant abstracts out “being human,” “being female,” and “being male,” and seems to think that if the object of sexual desire isn’t the first, then it can only be one of the latter.  (For Kant, it seems, we’re all like George Michael.)  But the true object of sexual desire is what you had before you abstracted these things out.
As I indicated in the earlier post, it is important to keep in mind how true this is even in most immoral sexual encounters.  Conservative moralists often speak  as if sexual immorality were essentially a matter of dehumanizing or animalizing the sexual act, but that is not quite right.  Casanova and Don Draper are womanizers, not “femalizers.”  Nor is it merely that they want females of the species Homo sapiens.  They want their sexual partners to have the reason and volition that distinguish human beings from other animals.  The womanizer wants a woman to admire and surrender to him, and only what can think and choose (as non-human animals cannot) can do that sort of thing.  You can’t seducea non-human animal.  That is not to say that there aren’t perverts who really do desire something non-human or formerly human (as in bestiality or necrophilia) but that is rare and so very far from the paradigm case that even many people otherwise unsympathetic to the natural law understanding of sex can see that there is something warped about it.
It is also just mistaken to say that “all men and women do their best to make not their human nature but their sex more alluring” and that the “Object of [sexual] appetite… becomes a thing.”  It is true that men and women trying to attract members of the opposite sex do not try to enhance what they have in common as human beings, but neither do they try to reduce themselves merely to maleness or femaleness understood as that which they have in common with non-human animals.  A man tries to enhance his masculinity and a woman her femininity.  Non-human animals are male or female, but they are not masculine or feminine.  To be masculine is to be (to that extent) an excellent specimen of a male human being, and to be feminine is to be (to that extent) an excellent specimen of a female human being.  Humanness as such is not emphasized, but neither is it abstracted out.  The man trying to attract a woman is not saying “Look at what a human being I am” but neither is he saying “Look at what a male animal I am”; he is saying “Look at what a man I am,” where a man is both human and male at once.  Similarly, a woman trying to attract a man is saying “Look at what a woman I am,” where to be a woman is to be neither merely human nor merely female but both at once.
So, while it is understandable why Kant would be suspicious of sexual desire if it really had the teleology he seems to think it does, I think he just gets the teleology wrong.  To be sure, Kant does not say that the gratification of sexual desire is inherently immoral.  He allows that it is morally permissible in marriage.  But the reasons he gives are instructive:
The sole condition on which we are free to make use of our sexual desire depends upon the right to dispose over the person as a whole... If I have the right over the whole person, I have also the right over the part and so I have the right to use that person’s organa sexualia for the satisfaction of sexual desire. But how am I to obtain these rights over the whole person? Only by giving that person the same rights over the whole of myself. This happens only in marriage… Matrimony is the only condition in which use can be made of one’s sexuality. If one devotes one’s person to another, one devotes not only sex but the whole person; the two cannot be separated. (pp. 166-67)
With sex as with everything else, morality for Kant boils down to respect for “the person.”  It is because in marriage two “persons” are united -- not a man and a woman, mind you, but “one’s person” and “another [person]” -- that the gratification of sexual desire becomes morally permissible.  (Whyis not clear.  If sexual desire as such involves treating another person as a mere animal or as a thing, how can it ever be permissible on Kantian terms to gratify it?  Why wouldn’t the ideal Kantian marriage be sexless?)
We seem to have implicit here a kind of Cartesianism.  There’s the body, which is either male or female but as such a merely animal and inhuman sort of thing; and then there’s “the person,” which is a bloodless, sexless, rational and willing agent hidden behind the body.  Menand women disappear.  It’s as if for Kant, the ideal human beings would all be like the androgynous Pat and Chris from the old Saturday Night Live “It’s Pat” sketches. 
Not (to be fair) that Kant explicitly says this or would want to say it.  And Kant himself inadvertently gives the reason why this would be a mistaken view of human nature when he writes:
The body is part of the self; in its togetherness with the self it constitutes the person; a man cannot make of his person a thing… (p. 166)
Exactly right.  But that means that since Harry’s body is part of himself and it is a man’s body, then being a man, specifically, is part of what it is to be Harry, and thus Harry’s being seen and sexually desired as a man is precisely notto be seen and desired as a thing.  Similarly, since Sally’s body is part of herself and it is a woman’s body, then being a woman, specifically, is part of what it is to be Sally, and thus Sally’s being seen and sexually desired as a woman is precisely not to be seen and desired as a thing.  Where real human beings (as opposed to angels and as opposed to SNL’s Pat) are concerned, to be a person just is to be either a man and thus male, or a woman and thus female.  It just is to be of one sex or the other.  And to desire someone sexually just is a way of desiring a kind of person, namely the human kind.  Your sex is not contingent and extrinsic to you but rather intrinsic and essential to you.  (That is why, for Aquinas, though sexual intercourse will not exist in the hereafter, sex -- being a man or being a woman -- will exist forever.)
But then, Kant’s discussion of sexual morality in the Lecturesis not clear or carefully worked out in the first place.  For example, his account of marriage makes crucial use of the notion of having mutual property rights in one another, yet just a couple of pages earlier (at p. 165) he had argued that a human being cannot properly be thought of as a kind of property, not even his own property.  Presumably he would regard the “property” talk in the passage about marriage as metaphorical, but how exactly do we cash out the metaphor in a way that will preserve the force of the argument?
Given that he very strongly condemns homosexual behavior in the Lectures, Kant would no doubt have been horrified by the notion of “same-sex marriage.”  Yet what he says about marriage could certainly be developed in a way that would allow for it.  If marriage is essentially a union of human persons, and maleness and femaleness are extraneous to being human persons (as what he says about sexual desire seems to imply, whether or not he would want to draw the conclusion), then why couldn’t a marriage exist between any two human persons? 
As I have noted before, while Kantian personalist talk has in recent decades become popular among some conservative Christian moralists, it is something of which they ought to be wary.   It is conceptually sloppy and tends toward conclusions that are (at least from the point of view of the traditional natural law theorist) either too rigorist or too lax.  Yes, human beings are persons, but so are angels.  What is distinctive about human morality is what sets us apart from the angels.  That is one reason why the traditional Aristotelian-Thomistic conception of human beings as rational animals is superior to the Kantian approach.  Our animality -- and thus our being either men or women, either male or female -- is as essential to us as our rationality, not something extraneous or tacked-on.  For the Thomist, “It’s Patrick” or “It’s Patricia.”  It ain’t “Pat.”

Linked in

Two new papers from David Oderberg: “Is Form Structure?” and “The Metaphysics of Privation.”
Donald Devine and I have been debating the merits of John Locke for years.  Don offers his latest thoughts at The Federalist in “The Real John Locke -- And Why He Matters.”
Stratford Caldecott -- Catholic writer, G. K. Chesterton Research Fellow at St. Benet’s Hall, Oxford, and Marvel Comics fan -- has cancer.  Marvel has stepped up to grant him a dying wish, and the stars of the Marvel movies have given him a touching tribute.  Fr. Z has the story, as do The Independent and the Catholic Herald .
Terry Teachout’s new biography of Duke Ellington is reviewed at The Weekly Standard.
Is resistance to “same-sex marriage” futile?  Over at National Review Online, Ryan T. Anderson argues that it is not.

Also at NRO, Thomas Hibbs watches Mad Men while reading Dante.
Straussian political philosopher Steven B. Smith is interviewed at 3:AM Magazine.  So is metaphysician John Heil.
Guitarist Jon Herington is interviewed about touring with Steely Dan and other stuff.
At The American Spectator, John Derbyshire reports on the “Toward a Science of Consciousness” conference in Arizona.  (Behind a pay wall, I’m afraid.)
If you haven’t yet seen the new Guardians of the Galaxytrailer, here it is.  Director Edgar Wright has quit the Ant-Man flick.
So whaddaya think of Wikipedia?  Spiked expresses what will perhaps forever be the main complaints.  (Whoever did my entry has made some… kind of odd choices.  Plus for some reason they still have me teaching at LMU and visiting at Bowling Green.  Weird.)

This is philosophy?

This is Philosophy is a new introduction to the subject by Prof. Steven Hales.  A reader calls my attention to the book’s companion website, which contains links to some lecture slides keyed to topics covered in the book, a dictionary of terms, exercises, and so forth.
I’ve got a little exercise of my own for the reader, which has three steps.  Here’s how it goes:
 Step 1: Read this blurb from the website:
The text’s scholarship is as noteworthy as its hipness. Hales clearly explains important philosophical ideas with a minimum of jargon and without sacrificing depth of content and he consistently gives a fair and accurate presentation of both sides of central philosophical disputes.
Step 2: Read this set of lecture slides on the cosmological argument, holding before your mind the highlighted words from the blurb while doing so.
Step 3: Try not to laugh.
Ha!  Knew you couldn’t do it!  Me neither.Yes, my friends, it’s the “Everything has a cause” Straw Man That Will Not Die.  And no, things don’t get any better in the book itself, which Amazon and Google books will let you read the relevant pages from.  Hales hits all his marks with aplomb:

1. He assures us that the argument rests on the premise that everything has a cause.
2. He says that the argument is concerned to trace the series of causes back through time to a first moment.
3. He attributes this argument to Aristotle and Aquinas.
4. Naturally, he thinks “What caused God?” is a devastating objection.
5. He also tells us that there is no reason to suppose that a first cause would be God.
6. He suggests that the Big Bang theory shows that there is no need to affirm a divine cause.
In short, it’s a complete travesty.  If you’re looking for a 1,234thpop philosophy regurgitation of all the tired caricatures of the cosmological argument rather than an account of what Aristotle, Aquinas, and Co. actually said, Hales really gives you your money’s worth.
If you’re someone to whom it isn’t already obvious how thoroughly Hales has ballsed things up, you might look at my post “So you think you understand the cosmological argument?”  If that piece is too polemical for you and you want something more politely academic, you might look at my Midwest Studies in Philosophy article “The New Atheists and the Cosmological Argument” or at chapter 3 of my book Aquinas .  (More on the cosmological argument can also be found here.)
I note that Hales also devotes considerable space to refuting what he calls “The argument from scripture.”  This is an argument to the effect that God exists because the Bible says so -- the obvious circularity of which can be pointed out in a single short sentence, though for some reason Hales goes on for pages about the subject.  I suppose this would be well worth doing in a philosophy book, except for the fact that I can’t think of a single person who has ever actually given the argument Hales attacks.  Perhaps These are Straw Men would have been a better title for his book.
I also notice that in his “Annotated Bibliography” Hales recommends Dawkins’ The God Delusion as follow-up reading.  Wrap your mind around that.  Kids, when you get done with this introductory book and you want to pursue these matters at greater depth, try Dawkins!
But hey, Hales’ book does have “hipness.”  So there’s that.